Saturday, February 13, 2016

Maps shaping up for 3.20

So, we're soon approaching the UI freeze for GNOME 3.20. It's looking quite good when it comes to OpenStreetMap editing in Maps (among other things).

But first I thought I was going to show-case another improvement, namely the expanded place bubbles (show information about places you search for on the map).


This is what a place bubble will look like in 3.20 when you first open it, only the most basic information is visible, the name of the place, what it is (conveyed by the icon) and the street address. However if you click the ”more information button” (the dots), more stuff is revealed. Thanks Jonas for this!


Now we also show a link to the place's official website (if one is tagged in OSM, ofcourse) and likewise for the phone number (theoretically the phone number should turn into a clickable tel: URI link if you have an app installed that has registered a mime handler for that, but I didn't find have one, neither Empathy, Ekiga, or Skype seems to do it).


These fields are also possible to edit on OSM now, and if you copy a tel: URL from i.e. a web page, it would automagicall reformat it into the raw telephone number. Also note that the title of the editing dialog has been adjusted to better communicate the fact the changes are actually uploaded to the public OpenSteetMap database, and not stored locally or something like that. This was after user feedback we got after showing an earlier iteration.


If you click on the ”Add to OpenStreetMap” context menu item when not currently being zoomed in (right now to any of the two most zoomed-in levels), you get this notification with the option to zoom in to an appropriate level, centered on the position where you clicked.


Here we can see the POI type selection dialog, and this shows the types using the Swedish translation, so it probably looks like yibberish for a lot :-), but the reason I showed this is two-fold, first it shows how we get readily-translated names by parsing the data used by the iD web-based editor (thanks to Ole Laursen for that suggestion, by the way). Secondly, it shows a usage for another feature, namely how you can search for a value if happen to know the OSM tag used for that.

As you can see in the screenshot above, the ”hostel” tag value gets expanded to the title using the translation. Also, beneeth the search entry you can see the list of recently used types, selecting one of these will immediatly select that type and go back to the editing mode.


Here's how it looks when adding a new place, also this dialog title was adjusted to better reflect that stuff is added to the public OpenStreetMap database.

Before I forget, I should also mention the awesome work done by our Outreach participants.
Amisha Singla has been working on support for printing routes (with instructions) and Hashem Nasarat working on support for loading cust geojson map layers.

So, there's quite a lot of new features here. To those who regularily claim that ”GNOME just removes features in every new release” I would mention that Maps has grown by probably around 5000 LoC just for the OSM editing functionallity.

21 comments:

  1. Hi, your blog is set to Swedish but you only write in English. Maybe you’d want to change that?

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    1. Good point!
      I actually thought that setting only affected the admin interface :-)

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  2. It looks great! Looking forward testing it when 3.20 finally releases.

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  3. With the default place bubble showing only the name, icon, and street address, it would be useful to have street address as a default field when adding a new point (addr:housenumber, addr:postcode, addr: street).

    In order to make contribution to OSM easier for beginners and experts, it would be useful to present default fields based on the selected point type. For example a user wants to add a restaurant, the osm fields for cuisine, opening_hours and takeaway could be displayed. JOSM provides this type of functionality in what it calls presets.

    Another useful feature would be to have a help question mark next to each field which would link to the OSM wiki page about the keyword, so people could easily have access to additional information on its usage and formatting.

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    1. The preset idea is nice, I had thought about something like this.
      When it comes to things like cuisine, it can be a bit tricky as we'd rather not just have the "raw" tag value, but would in that case like it to be presented in a translated form for the user to select from.
      When it comes to help, there is some work going on for that (we will likely supply a link to the wiki as well as a text that we add ourselves, to be able to supply good translations for our users).

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    2. Yes it would be useful to have a predefined lists for various fields that a user can select from, but there would be problems if the cuisine field was filled with data not included in the predefined list, as it was entered in from a different OSM editor. JOSM solves this problem by having a combo box of predefined entries and the ability for a user to set something not in the list.

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    3. JOSM's has preset.xml (https://josm.openstreetmap.de/wiki/TaggingPresets ) or alternatively the "ID" editor has presets json: https://github.com/openstreetmap/iD/tree/master/data/presets Both are translated, but they're both potentially quite complicated. Could be neat to re-use them here, but it might make the interface here more complex.

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  4. Hello,
    Thank you for the updates on Maps :) Has the GNOME team managed to add offline tiles while not using raster
    images? SVG offline maps with meta data would be very nice! It says it's in the roadmap for 3.20 but can't find a bug report tracking it.

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    1. Jonas Danielsson has been working on it.
      It's still quite experimental. It will likely use vector-based tiles using Mapzen vector tile format.
      This has, among other things, the advantage that we can have a custom map rendering that is controlled by a stylesheet using the MapCSS styling language.

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    2. Would definitely be useful to be able to see OSM when i'm offline if it was rendered through vector means. I use OSMAnd on my android phone which provides this functionality.

      http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Rendering#Libraries

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  5. Hi, your blog is set to Swedish but you only write in English. Maybe you’d want to change that? http://www.skrotbilsafhentning.dk/

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    1. I changed it to English, but maybe it only affects new posts?
      BTW, that commercial is Danish :-)

      Delete
  6. bueno la parte de edición, pero se podra descargar datos geográficos?porque eso si estaría genial

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  7. Can't wait to try it, thanks for the share

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  8. ”GNOME just removes features in every new release”

    I used to think that, but you people have really started to prove me wrong for some time now. I'm really happy, as these applications really look good and work great! I will no doubt use Gnome as my next desktop when I get a new computer. So thanks for all your hard work! :)

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  9. Not sure if this is still valid, but when i was testing 3.18.2 and after activating location services, i could click on the 'Go to current location' button multiple times, and each time a new 'Position not found' notice would appear and overlap the previous notice.

    While testing i thought a good new feature would be to be able to set a home position, so that when i open the app the next time, it is at the location so i dont have to drill down into the map each time.

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  10. In order to make contribution to OSM easier for beginners and experts, it would be useful to present default fields based on the selected point type. For example a user wants to add a restaurant, the osm fields for cuisine, opening_hours and takeaway could be displayed. JOSM provides this type of functionality in what it calls presets.
    http://skrotpriser.com/

    ReplyDelete