I always wanted to help Marble, but I am guilty because until now I can’t afford any time to play with it. All these years, I used to compile bleeding-edge Marble from time and time, use it, and basically that is it. Although since a long time ago I promised Torsten that I was willing to help Marble, actually only right after Gran Canaria Desktop Summit finally I devoted some time to study its code. The three of us, Torsten, Andrew and I also had a short but fascinating discussion during the summit.
Now, I still don’t manage to contribute anything to Marble yet, but I already have something in my pipeline. You will likely hear from me in the coming weeks, so stay tuned.
Since I reckon I enter the wonderful territory of mapping world, I thought, well, let’s familiarize myself a bit with the technology. I took a look at the interesting experimental Google Maps API v3 (which BTW does not require an API key). Using QtWebKit, I wrote a simple 300-lines example that shows a magnifying glass over the map (see the screencast). Of course, the area under is the zoomed version of the map.
Since I am flirting with Qt for S60 these days, I thought about bringing that example to the phone. However, instead of relying on Google Maps, I decided to leave the dark side and jumped to use OpenStreetMap instead. The result is effectively an example of how to render the tiles from OpenStreetMap using Qt, which also runs on S60. It does even have the night-mode feature.
Video, you asked? Thanks to Alessandro, here is the 52-second videocast that demonstrates it (or watch on YouTube), running on Nokia 5800: