Thanks Marco for this extremely well-researched article about Marble! As a Marble developer I'd still like to add two minor things:
- A quick description on how to add user-maps is available here:
http://userbase.kde.org/Marble/WizardMap - The reason for the good speed has nothing to do with the amount of detail that is shown. Actually the speed stays very much the same if you browse maps like OpenStreetMap or Google Earth satellite imagery. We rather care about speed because the very same source code used for the desktop version of Marble also runs on mobile phones. And while the current version runs via software-rendering we even have an OpenGL view in the works which will provide optimal performance where OpenGL is properly supported.
