Now that Google nor longer updates Google Earth, I’ve been imagining an open source thick client replacement using OSM data combined with some data from Google Maps and MS Bing. (Those would mainly provide overhead imagery and street level views.) Anyone interested? I’d probably develop using C# and .NET as that’s what I know. If it’s desired to support platforms other than Windows 11, I’d suggest using Avalonia for the UI as it’s portable, something WPF can’t claim. Avalonia even supports Android and iOS, though I’d recommend a dedicated client as specialized UIs could be provided for each platform.
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If I go ahead and create project on GitHub and SourceForge, I’d appreciate it if some developers let me know they want to join. If it were to become an official OSM project, it could be called OSM-Desktop, but without their support, we might need another name.
QGIS has some relevant functionality, perhaps plugin will suffice?
It’s a map application? Seems to be more for creating map based presentations.
What is this software supposed to do? Display various maps and aerial images?
What will be the advantage over all the apps (online and offline) that already exist?
Well, as I said, I wanted to replace Google Earth’s desktop client. I don’t know much about what other apps use OSM data. What I was envisioning could cache data for offline use. But it could also obtain data from all sources on its own. The main way I’ve used OSM is the website. But that uses pre-rendered tiles rather downloading the raw data and rendering them locally. It also requires a browser and doesn’t have a offline ability. I do know of applications like JOSM, but my impression is they’re mainly an editor.
My vision for the app would be able to use non-OSM sources as mentioned. The main such sources I was thinking of were Google and MS Bing. However, I did want to wrap them and OSM retrieval in a generic API so the main app could treat them as layers and add new sources later if needed.
I don’t see any need for data other than photographic imagery and street-level views to be obtained from outside OSM. The main exception would be if we had a way to detect missing placemarks that those sources listed, but OSM lacked. But I can’t see a good way to verify OSM was missing a place found in another source.
KDE Marble does just that using OSM data.
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Unfortunately, KDE apps don’t work well on Windows. 
There are two problems: Theme selection doesn’t work and scaling fails. Both WPF and Avalonia do scale nicely. This is more than just the size of the font. All icons need to scale too. Plus, my laptop has a touch screen. Does Marble work with touchscreens? Windows does translate some taps and gestures to mouse messages. But something like zoom gestures don’t get translated.
None the less, I’ll look more at Marble.
Again, QGIS works in this way.
Except it didn’t look like a general map viewer.
Well, some KDE apps do handle Windows dark mode correctly if installed from winget. That was a surprise. But Marble seems to be an exception. Also, Marble doesn’t like touchscreens. My other means on this PC of interacting with apps is the touchpad. I don’t have a mouse connected and the PC normally is in my lap. No place for a mouse.
Marble definitely doesn’t handle touchscreen gestures.
I did find and install a couple winget packages for QGIS. QGIS.QField was supposed to work with touch screens, but turned out to definitely be strictly projects. It wanted me to immediately create a project. No option to just explore. OSGeo.QGIS installed a lot including a command line tool. But none of those apps let you browse. Both applications were uninstalled.
I do want to support all KML features including network links. Unlike the real Google Earth, I like the idea of syncing options between devices so all can access the same saved KML data.
QGIS is probably not what you are looking for (it has a very classical GIS-desktop client UI that is not for the faint of heart), though in principal it has the functionality (and a 1000 other things).
That said, if you (or your users) are not in the EU/EEA using google maps services with OSM and other data sources is likely violating their ToS (obviously you could leave that decision to your users).
Personally I would think the effort would be better spent fixing whatever you believe is broken with Marble given it is going to be a lot of work to get to similar functionality.
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^ this. Why reinvent the wheel when you already have something that does the job. Improving KDE Marble would also benefit all other users of the application.
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Unfortunately, that’s not something I can code for. C#.NET is what I know best with some ability to use Java Swing. However, I consider both C# and WPF (or Avalonia) to be superior.
What do you think about going cross-platform with Qt Quick? The map viewer that’s part of QtLocation works well, and there’s also a QML wrapper for MapLibre Native.
Maybe. I looked into Qt in the past. It does help there’s a .NET wrapper.
There’s also Gnome Maps, it’s js apparently Maps – Apps for GNOME
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I can see the benefit of creating something from scratch - you get to learn about parts of the OSM ecosystem that are already implemented (and hence you don’t need to learn about) in other software.
Also, there isn’t much that was “developed for Windows” in the OSM world (an exception perhaps was Maperitive), so it’d be useful to point other Windows people at.
However, I suspect you’d be doing quite a lot of this on your own - I get the impression that there aren’t that many OSM developers who have anything to do with Windows.
I’d also stay clear of “OSM Desktop” as a name as people would surely think that it was an “official” OSM thing.
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JOSM and other Java, Python, Javascript… based tools work on Windows.
Otherwise install WSL and VcXsvr, use Linux tools, that’s it ;-).
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