Marble Portable 0.10.1 has been released. Marble is a Virtual Globe and World Atlas that you can use to learn more about Earth: You can pan and zoom around and you can look up places and roads. A mouse click on a place label will provide the respective Wikipedia article. It's packaged in PortableApps.com Format so it can easily integrate with the PortableApps.com Suite. And it's open source and completely free.
PortableApps.com Platform 2.0 Beta 5 users who already have this app installed, simply click 'Check for Updates' in your PA.c Menu to update to the new version.
Features
Of course it's also possible to measure distances between locations or watch the current cloud cover. Marble offers different thematic maps: A classroom-style topographic map, a satellite view, street map, earth at night and temperature and precipitation maps. All maps include a custom map key, so it can also be used as an educational tool for use in class-rooms. For educational purposes you can also change date and time and watch how the starry sky and the twilight zone on the map change.
In opposite to other virtual globes Marble also features multiple projections: Choose between a Flat Map ("Plate carré"), Mercator or the Globe.
The best of all: Marble is Free Software / Open Source Software and promotes the usage of free maps.
PortableApps.com Installer / PortableApps.com Format
Marble Portable is packaged in a PortableApps.com Installer so it will automatically detect an existing PortableApps.com installation when your drive is plugged in. It supports upgrades by installing right over an existing copy, preserving all settings. And it's in PortableApps.com Format, so it automatically works with the PortableApps.com Suite including the Menu and Backup Utility.
Download
Marble Portable is available for immediate download from the Marble Portable homepage. Get it today!
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Comments
incorrect download link
Download link leads to Gramps Portable use
http://sourceforge.net/projects/portableapps/files/Marble%20Portable/Mar...
instead.
Fixed.
Fixed.
You forgot the "New: " on the
You forgot the "New: " on the front page again.
That's three!
EDIT:
On the applications page (both main and Education), it's listed as Gramps Portable.
Is doesn't have the complete breadcrumb navigation on its app page (I don't really know how you handle that).
Fixed
I've fixed all of those.
It's not multilingual
On the downloading button (https://portableapps.com/apps/education/marble_portable) the program is marked as multilingual but clicking on the button downloads only English version. Are other languages available?
Fixed
No, it is English only.
multilingual
The next version "Marble 1.0" (End of January) will be available in multiple languages though.
Excellent
Please let us know if we can do more to help package and promote Marble, if you'd like to be more involved or take over the packaging and if you'd like to link to it from your homepage as well.
Marble is part of the KDE (Education) project
I think it should be noted explicitly. KDE deserves their credit for it.
Team
The "Marble Team" links to the page (on KDE's servers) that lists all the actual developers involved in the project. I believe this is everyone who has contributed to the project itself. While KDE provides the underlying hosting and distribution infrastructure as well as some of the toolkit, we do not credit hosts, distributors or toolkit providers in our notes. We are also not using Marble KDE, we are using Marble Qt, which means we are not using the underlying KDE infrastructure either (because it is not portable and requires huge packages installed into Windows). Similarly, the copyright in the about window is listed as "The Marble Project", not KDE or KDE Education Project.
Credits
This is fine and you are entirely correct. Most of the people credited are part of the KDE community however. And KDE has provided us with invaluable support. So crediting KDE as well would be well justified
extra data files copy
Hi there,
marble seems to copy cached data to %appdata%\.marble on starting up. When closing marble, data is copied back to inst dir and removed from %appdata%. As cached files are small but many, this takes too much time for 200mb of data.
regards,
fred
yes
Thats something I noticed too.
EDIT
It can be quite long (30 sec on my hdd). But deleting it every run isnt an option imho as it would completely remove the possibility to add additional maps or download parts for offline use.
Map Cache
Marble has got a setting that allows for adjusting the Hard Disc cache:
Settings -> Configure Marble -> Cache & Proxy -> Cache / Hard disc
The default is "300 MB" which can safely be reduced to a few megabytes.
Likewise the physical memory setting can be increased depending on the amount of available RAM.
You can change this Hard disc cache setting and possibly create new default settings for your platform. This should solve the issue.
Caches need to cache
Thanks for your answer. Yes sure, if there is no data, no data will be copied at program start and end. But I think shrinking the cache size to a few MB makes not much sense. Looking at marble.reg and MarblePortableSettings.ini shows no path setting for the cache.
So maybe the marble developers could add a path parameter for the cache, so there is no need to save the local cache files from the computer running the program, and just keep the cache on the start medium.
regards,
fred
data path
Hi,
the KDE site shows info about redefining the cache path here: http://edu.kde.org/marble/obtain.php in chapter 3. Unfortunately I did not manage to get it to work using --marbleDataPath, -marbleDataPath, /marbleDataPath and -marbleDataPath= with a copied version of the data dir, using marble.exe from MarblePortable\App\Marble.
It is not clearly stated on that page that it works on linux only. But I guess that might be true. That is sad, it would be nice to stay in the originating drive, but %APPDATA%\.marble is created in stead.
regards,
fred