the marble (map) replacement dilemma

[Lubomir I. Ivanov]

On 11 July 2017 at 21:12, Lubomir I. Ivanov <neolit123 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 11 July 2017 at 20:58, Linus Torvalds <torvalds at linux-foundation.org> wrote:
>> On Tue, Jul 11, 2017 at 10:48 AM, Lubomir I. Ivanov <neolit123 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>> so Marble seems to have the best of both worlds for now - google tiles
>>> and offline support.
>>
>> Yeah, but Marble has been a big painpoint too. So practicalities of
>> actually implementing this and maintaining it should be pretty high.
>>
>> One thing that would be good - and that Marble doesn't do all that
>> well - is to have better integration with the outside world. For
>> example, I've occasionally wanted a "escape to real google maps" just
>> for things like location sharing (and you mentioned streetview earlier
>> - not an issue when you're on a reef in palau, but it *is* a potential
>> issue when you're looking at the parking lot of a shore-dive).
>>
>> So Marble has its good sides, but it has certainly its own share of
>> painpoints too.
>>
>
> Qt Location does not support street view, so i guess that if we decide
> to go with the Qt Location solution we need to enable opening street
> view inside a new browser window, which runs google maps and requires
> internet access - e.g. when clicked a marker on the Qt Location map we
> can show a button "street view for this location".
>

actually the above is not that easy to do, because google's street
view will first of all need to have ground imagery for a location.
if it doesn't, it won't auto-search for the nearest spot with ground
imagery (this can also confuse the user) and instead it will just show
a black screen - e.g. here is what happens for the Palau island for a
correctly formed URL:
https://www.google.com/maps?q&layer=c&cbll=8.093611,134.718583&cbp=11,0,0,0,0

the controls are gone, but if one zooms out with the mouse wheel it
will return to the satellite view.

so it's probably best to just support a button such as "open google
maps for this location" and the google maps interface will indicate if
street view is supported for a location.

also as a side note, i don't have any contacts @ google but it would
be great if we can get a confirmation if there is some sort of a trick
to make the google maps API work fully offline. from my tests it just
seems that they "embedded" online mode as a requirement.

lubomir
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