Marble goes Mobile, Take 2

Name:
Daniel Marth

Email Address:
danielmarth@gmx.at

Freenode IRC Nick:
marthd

IM Service and Username:
Skype: daniel.marth

Location (City, Country and/or Time Zone):
Güssing, Austria (GMT+1)

Proposal Title:
Marble goes Mobile, Take 2

Motivation for Proposal / Goal:
Smarthphones become more and more popular these days. People want to use the same programs as they do on their PCs. There is already a version of Marble for the Nokia N900 (Maemo5), but this is just the very first step and more improvements are needed in order to provide a pleasant user experience.

Implementation Details:
The user interface will be improved to fit the needs of a small smartphone display. Currently the user interface is based on QWidget, but this is only a temporary solution and should be replaced in favor of Qt Quick. Marble has already experimental support for Qt Quick since version 1.0 and during this project the existing Qt Quick bindings in Marble will be improved and extended. The Qt Components (which are currently in development) allow to create a richer and more elegant user interface which is optimized for small smartphone displays. Due to the limited power of smartphones, performance and memory usage should be optimized (e.g. more efficient tile storing). Nokia's Qt framework provides the necessary foundations to implement new features which support special mobile use cases, such as geocaching. Marble should be tested on a N900 running Meego, which is not supported yet. If there is still time left, the creation of a geocaching-plugin for Marble would be an interesting activity.

Tentative Timeline (in weekly intervals until 2 weeks after the end of GSoC):
* QML/Qt Components integration: 4 weeks
* User Interface improvements: 3 weeks
* Qt Mobility integration: 2 weeks
* Performance/Memory improvements: 2 week
* Features for mobile use cases (e.g. geocaching): 4 weeks

Do you have other obligations from late May to early August (school, work, vacation, etc.)?
Please note that we expect the Summer of Code to be a full-time, 40-hr a week occupation.
It is important to be clear and upfront about other commitments that you may have during that time.
I'm still a student and school ends on July 1st but that shouldn't be a problem. Short before the official start of GSoC I'll attend a school excursion from May 15th until May 20th. From June 6th until June 10th I'll be in California because I'm a grand prize winner of the GCI. If possible I'll get a summer job in either July or August, but I can't tell any details yet. Of course this decision will be reliant on my participation in GSoC.

About Me (let us know who you are!):
I'm 18 years old and attending a technical school which is focused on software development. Because of my interest in that topic, I taught myself things like Qt self-consistently. Programming has always been a hobby for me and I want to get a job in that area in the future. Open source software fascinates me and I enjoy participating in communities and projects addressing that topic. I participated in the GCI and completed several tasks for the KDE project, especially Marble.