Marble 0.3

Marble is an early beta preview of the Marble Widget application which is targeted for KDE 4.
You need to install both packages: "marble" and "marble-data" to run Marble.
Marble is a generic geographical map widget that is meant to be used by KDE4 applications. It shows the earth as a sphere but doesnt make use of any hardware acceleration (No OpenGL). So although it might look similar to professional applications like Google Earth or Nasa World Wind its rather meant to be a small light weight multi purpose widget. To improve speed I decided to compile the Kubuntu packages with SSE support (-msse).
Main features:
- Marble uses a minimal free dataset that can be used offline. Currently the total amount of data that is meant to be shipped is about 5 MB.
- Marble doesnt use OpenGL or 3D hardware acceleration. It just uses Arthur as a painting backend. Extending it later on to support OpenGL as well shouldnt be hard however I dont consider that the primary focus. Depending on your hardware and the maps being displayed framerate is approximately 5-20 fps.
- Marble uses vector as well as bitmap data: Currently it uses the very old MWDB II data combined with ETOPO 2, which I will update to current SRTM soon.
- Marble displays the world map as a 3D sphere, because its more fun to use and less subject to distortion (So with regard to that its just like NASA WorldWind, Earth3D and Google Earth)
- Marble should start up almost instantly. Currently it "cold" starts fully within 2-5 seconds. On each subsequent start it takes about one second.
- Uses KML-Import to display places (Google Earths open format to store placemarks)
- Cities Down to 12000 inhabitants that you can click on using the mouse. Highest Mountains of each continent. Automatic Placemark label placement.
- Different Map Themes, Layers
- Dynamic Coordinate Grid
- Measure Tool
- Basic Wikipedia integration