Google Code-in, Marble and I

Tomorrow, Google Code-in will end. I spent nearly all of my month by participating to it and it has been one of my great experiences. Thanks to the contest, I’ve learnt a lot of things, met with people from different projects and communities and became a KDE developer.

At the moment, I have completed 21 tasks and 20 of them is Marble’s, my favorite virtual globe. I have created two online service plugins, a map creation wizard and DGML tag writers for it. And in case you wonder, my other task was a Plasma task, I’ve created three activity templates and improved an existing one.

The online service plugins which I have created are earthquake and OpenDesktop community plugins. Earthquake plugin shows recent earthquakes and their magnitudes on the globe. Each magnitude range is shown in different colors.

Earthquake Plugin in Action

Earthquake Plugin in action

And OpenDesktop Community plugin shows OpenDesktop community members’ avatars on the map.

OpenDesktop plugin showing users

The wizard which I mentioned helps users to create new maps easily. It can create three kinds of maps,

  1. Static image map (a bitmap of whole world)
  2. Static URL map (maps like OpenStreetMap and Google Maps)
  3. WMS maps (maps of Web Map Service providers)
Step 1

Step 1: Map provider selection

Wizard Step 2

Step 2: Map provider's details

Step 3

Step 3: Your map's information (name, desc. etc.)

Being part of Marble community was a great adventure for me; getting help from people when I stuck, showing off my work, commiting my code to KDE’s SVN repositories and more.

If you want to get involved and contribute, visit Marble’s webpage. You can get involved with coding, documentation, artwork and promotion of Marble.

Lots of helping hands have contributed to Marble... join us!

Special thanks to Torsten Rahn, Dennis Nienhüser, Thibaut Gridel and Bernhard Beschow I couldn’t do anything without your help.