Randa Meetings 2015 – What I plan to do

It is time for one more Randa Meetings this year, and over 50 KDE developers are going to participate in it along with me as well. The Randa Meetings is a codesprint sponsored by KDE and organized by Mario Fux, in which KDE developers from all across the globe are invited, and get to sit under the same roof and work together to collaborate on different ideas, coming up with some awesome feature implementations within a time span of about a week. These meetings generally focus on a common topic every year. Last year (2014) it was focused mainly on porting of various KDE applications to the KF5 framework. Similarly, this year we have a common focus as well, and it is aimed at bringing more of KDE to the mobile platform as much as possible. Now, since I am a Marble developer, let me tell you in brief what are my plans for Randa Meetings this year.

Marble is a virtual globe software, released for use in Desktops for now, but we’re working on “Marble Maps” for Android currently, which brings the openstreetmap + navigation/routing parts of Marble to Android. Although this Android app is still in its beta version for now and is going through a lot of testing at the moment, it will be openly available in the Play Store for being installed by everyone very soon. Along with that, we also plan to release an app called “Marble Globe” for Android later, which will focus more on different map themes, different planets, satellites and so on. For Marble Globe we think that it would be very interesting to include the “interactive tours” feature there prominently. So there could be a tour that shows landing sites on the moon. And another one that introduces certain interesting spots of a historical map. And so on. We would need declarative/qml support for tours to do that, and probably some other extensions as well that plain KML tours do not support out of the box. So we are interested in exploring these stuff, and are going to discuss these topics in Randa. Apart from that I am going to polish the existing feature in the desktop version as well.

I am really excited to meet Dennis and Torsten once again this year in Randa, along with the rest of the Marble team. Hope to have a lot of fun, loads of food, and a whole lot of hacking! 🙂 Although, all this can only be possible if you can provide us your support in this. So, please make sure to donate to the Randa fundraising to encourage the time and energy spent by all the KDE developers in this meeting, if you are an user or supporter of KDE in any way. Your every small contribution will be as precious as the rest! 🙂

Thanks a lot to Mario for organizing this amazing event. And I hope to have another awesome week in Randa this year. Cheers! 🙂