… and have them being shown in OpenStreetMap with Marble by just the press of the Enter key. You should be able to do so with the upcoming KDE Apps 4.8, due to the just merged commits.
Recently I was offered the geographic coordinates of a place used for a meeting, because none of the involved people was too familiar with the area. “Sure” I said, sitting in front of my computer, “I will just use Marble, pass them on”. And then failed in finding a way to have Marble take these coordinates and locate them on the map for me.
Given that all things looked to be in place and to just need some connecting (and slight fixing, as I found), for any possible next time I will now be able to just open the Plasma Runner, enter the coordinates…
… and then have the place shown to me in OpenStreetMap with Marble by the press of just one more key:
And so will you 🙂
Should work with degrees given as pure decimal values, as decimal and minutes, and as decimal, minutes and seconds (small bummer: needs fixing for non-western style languages, hopefully done in time for 4.8).
But I also start to have some geographic bookmarks in Marble, adding support for them was just a few more lines. So now just drop some part of the bookmark title or description to the Plasma Runner …
… and then have Marble show you the area again:
When I initially tried to tell Marble the coordinates I basically missed that I could have entered the coordinates in the “Navigation” panel on the right into the “Search” field. Maybe I even tried, but then the old coordinates string parser is quite restrictive in what he accepts, so maybe I had some wrong space char in my input. That is fixed now.
While looking at the Marble code I also learned that besides coordinates, places/building names, and (postal) addresses one can also enter IP addresses into the “Search” field, to have the assumed location of that IP address shown in the map. Surely not often needed, but handy if.
And if you have another idea what could be translated into a geographic position, you just need to write a dedicated Marble Runner plugin.
For KDE Apps 4.9 again I plan to have finished the support of those Marble Runners directly in the Plasma Runner, so one can search for places or addresses right there. Yes, including locations of IP addresses 🙂
Attracted by virtual constructs 
just kool(TM)
Nice! I’ve had to look up a coordinate in Marble a couple times, I did it the low-tech way by just moving around with my mouse and watching the status bar until I was happy with the coordinate. 😉 Thankfully, you were less willing to play cat and mouse (or mouse and coordinate 😉 ) and more willing to do actual coding than me. 😉
a very cool feature would be, if i can search for cities,countrys, streets, PIOs directy via Marble runner. I’m thinking that you can set in marble/marble runner, which streets should be bound to marble runner (select some cities for having a cached streetlist). This should be possibile to use it without internettraffic, to be fast 🙂 Maybe put these data in nepomuck
Yes, indeed a nice and surely useful idea, especially coupled with downloading the map data for an area.
Please add this idea as wish item to bugs.kde.org for Marble, so it does not get lost.
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