Saturday 20 June 2009

Update and Exciting Features

Right so I thought it was about time to give a bit of an update on what I have been working on so far for my GSoC project. I have done some really interesting stuff with a lot of ground yet to cover so I'll try to keep it brief ( and I hope to update you all more frequently ).

If you have a look at my last post you can see the big goals that I have created for myself, which is a definite positive as I believe you can never aim high enough! The first of these goals is what i called the Annotation Rendering Framework, which has proved to be a challenge. The Idea of the rendering framework was to provide similar functionality to the QGraphicsView, QGraphicsScene and QGraphicsItem classes in the Qt Gui Module. And believe me, thats a hard act to follow! The main feature from the Qt classes that I wanted to recreate is the ability to "Click and Drag" items around the interface of marble, which is made difficult by the fact that marble is not a 2D surface and hit tests get a little bit more complicated.

Thankfully I have the opportunity to stand on the shoulders of giants to get all of this working. The Marble developers have implemented a lot of the necessary functionality to get my stuff off the ground an its my job to extend this and integrate it all in a useful way. So without further ado I have a small video to present you with showing a little bit of my work.



The next step is to get nice little pop-up showing the details of each annotation, be it text, video or audio. This hopefully shouldn't take very long as I have already done a few experiments to do with Geo-Located QWidgets so watch this space!