Marble is an atlas and virtual globe desktop program. It provides views of Earth – and a few other planets – with a lot of useful information.
Use the left hand side sliding menu to zoom and pan and navigate to locations by searching for them. Have a look at the Legend to see how the maps present their information. Population density, capitals, terrains, places of interest, boundaries, water bodies, elevation and others are indicated. Different Map Views are available and are not restricted to Earth – Moon, Mercury and Venus are some of other available – and others can be downloaded as well. Other maps views include the flat and Mercator views and others like Earth at night and average temperature and precipitation for July and December.
When a location is found it can be assigned to home and a placemark placed on it. The Current Location menu has options to save, track and zoom on home or current locations. The Routing menu will attempt to give directions to navigate between two locations and draw the path on the map too.
Use the File menu to create an image of a map or export the visible globe or map to an image file. Edit menu has two options to copy an image of a map – to paste elsewhere – and to copy the coordinates of a location to the clipboard.
The View menu adds additional layers of info over a map. Enable any of photos, weather or earthquake modes to see more info on any location. Bookmark a home location or any other via the Bookmarks menu. Right click on a location to see its Wikipedia entry using Marble’s internal browser.
The program’s Settings has configuration options for distance unit, map quality, navigation type, proxy and cache settings for connections Marble requires to the internet and routing methods. The latter attempts to draw directions between two locations with car, bicycle or pedestrian routes. Other routing methods can be added.
Marble is an educational tool that is also fun to use and discover. It is available for multiple platforms.