Marble (software)

Marble

Screenshot of Marble showing Europe
Developer(s)	KDE
Initial release	November 2006 (2006-11)
Preview release	1.3.0  (January 25, 2012) [±]
Written in	C++ Qt
Operating system	Cross-platform
Available in	multiple languages
Type	Virtual globe, Route planning software
License	GNU LGPL
Website	edu.kde.org/marble/

Marble is a virtual globe that allows the user to choose among the Earth, the Moon, Venus, Mars and other planets. It is free software under the terms of the GNU LGPL, developed by KDE and the free-software / open-source communities for use on personal computers running a Qt4-compatible operating system.

Marble is intended to be very flexible; beyond its cross-platform design, the core components can easily be integrated into other programs. It is designed to run without the need for hardware acceleration, but it can be extended to use OpenGL. An important user-experience objective being that the application start fairly quickly, it ships with a minimal but useful off-line dataset (5-10MB).

Contributors have added support for on-line mapping sources such as OpenStreetMap and the ability to interpret KML files. Marble also provides route planning capabilities. A navigation mode called MarbleToGo was developed as part of Google Summer of Code 2010.

Geothek is a fork of Marble adding a statistics module, pixel maps, and a 3D view. It is developed and used by Austrian publisher Ed. Hölzel as software for classroom Atlas.

External links

• Marble homepage
• Geothek homepage