Marble improvements

During the last week I worked in Mönchen- gladbach to earn some money for my daily life ;)

One of my co-workers, most of you known him as tackat aka 'The Marble fame', bugged me every evening to help him improving Marble, so yesterday and the day before I stayed at the office till 23:00 o'clock and helped him to get Marble into a good shape for KDE 4.

The first change was refactoring it into a KPart, so now you can embed it into any other application you like. The second change was a rewrite of the storage backend for map tiles and webpages from wikipedia. Now a cache is used for the webpages, so you can read the city descriptions in an offline version.

The third improvement was a cleanup of the TinyWebBrowser, which is used to browse the city information webpages from wikipedia. 3 days ago it just showed an ugly version of the HTML site. Now it displays images, handles stylesheets and takes care of UTF-8 encoded documents.

As you can see in the screenshot it looks much better now ;)

@pinotree I hope this compensates my absence from Okular hacking :)

ODF sprint and Okular

Finally I managed to get a blog account and register it on planet.kde.org, so now I'm part of the blogger community as well :)

This time I'll talk about the ODF meeting in Berlin two weeks ago. The KOffice developer invited me as representative for Okular, KDE's unified document viewer.

Our goal of the meeting was to define a way how to share the ODF loading and rendering code of KOffice with an Okular plugin, so that Okular can view any ODF document with the same quality as KOffice. The plan is to use the Flakes API for loading and rendering. However, to make use of this API it must be part of a separated library, which won't happen befor KDE 4.0.

To summarize the meeting in short: We have a clear roadmap now how to integrate advanced ODF support into Okular, but it will still take a while ;)

Nevertheless the meeting gave me the time to start writing a HOWTO about implementing Okular plugins. You can find it here and should give it a read if you plan to extend Okular's support for new fancy document formats. The HOWTO is not finished yet, but it explains how to implement a basic plugin. For an advanced plugin you should take a look at the source code of the existing plugins.