Thursday, June 28, 2018

Summer with Maps

It´s been a while since I wrote a blog post last time… and even though we´ve had summer weather here (more or less) since quite some while, it seems appropriate with a little “start of summer” summer post. Since last time time I´ve amended a pretty long-standing issue we´ve had when running under a Wayland compositor (at least with the Mutter compositor, as used by gnome-shell) that makes the revealer widgets we´ve had for showing notifications not working in this case, as the map view is using the Clutter scene graph library and overlaying GTK+ widgets on that is not working under Wayland. Since Clutter is deprecated and this issue won´t be fixed and re-writing the map view library using some other backend (also making it working under the upcoming GTK+ 4) is a rather big undertaking, I´ve went ahead with a few workarounds to get rid of the overlayed widgets.

Notifications used for showing i.e. the need to zoom in to add OpenStreetMap POIs and for informing that location services is turned off (and this has been an issue at least on Fedora, where user location is by default disabled for privacy reasons) have been replaced with modal dialogs (not as elegant, but better than not showing up at all)




The notifications showing when routing fails for some reason have been replaced with showing messages in place of the result list.


Furthermore the total number of “via points” for routing has been limited to 10. This has been done partly because GraphHopper imposes a limit of 30, and also the UI doesn´t really cope well with too many locations anyway.

And with that Maps wishes you all a continued happy summer (or winter if you´re on the sothern hemisphere) 😎