Maps and GNOME 42

 

The release of GNOME 42 (and the Maps release accomplishing it) is due in a little over a week.

I have already covered some of the more visible updates for Maps 42.0 in the last update, such as the development profile (allowing to run directly from GNOME Builder, or install “nightly” Flatpak builds, and be able to run them in parallel with a stable release (distinguished by it's icon overlay and headerbar styling).

 Also we have the support for handling the maps: URI scheme, allowing to open search queries from other programs. This feature will already be utilized by GNOME Contacts for opening locations of contacts in your address book when they have a physical address set.

Some of the last changes involves utilizing the “tabular numbers” Pango font feature attribute, to get the time labels to align up vertically (even when the system font has variable-width digits) when rendering public transit itineraries.

  Also, we have revised screenshots prepared by Sofie Herold, linked in the “appdata“ metadata to show in software centers like GNOME Software.

Another small attention to detail that I included pretty late, is that now the state of showing the scale (which can be toggled with the ctrl+s shortcut) is now stored in gsettings and remembered between runs (rather than always showing when you start next time, if you choose to hide it).

Unfortunalty, I totally forgot that adding new gsettings schema keys also means adding new strings for translation (the descriptions), so I accidentally broke the “string freeze” break (which started after the 42.beta release). So I had to retroactively ask for an exception.

Sorry about the inconvienience!

And, until next time!