Christmas Maps

It´s been ages since I last shared any Maps news, so it´s probably about time…
Some things have happened since the stable 3.30.0 release in September.

First off we have a new application icon, courtesy of Jakub Steiner using the icon style for the upcoming GNOME 3.32

Furthermore the application menu has moved into the new “hamburger menu ” in the title bar, in-line with changes being carried out across the board for GNOME applications, since the adoption of the desktop top bar menu for application-wide action was never really adopted in any significance by third-party applications.

Lately James Westman have made various valuable contributions, among others a better experience on first launch (should be no more gray areas “north of the north pole” in these situations), getting rid of some deprecation warnings when running with newer GJS versions, and also a bug fix with some parts from our C-based glue library for loading addresses from the contact book not being exposed as introspectable (and thus not being visible from JavaScript code) which strangely somehow was still working on older GJS. So I also made an additional bug-fix for the 3.30 series (3.30.3) with this fix.

Another feature James has been working on is replacing our old thumbnails that was being used in the menu for selecting the map style. This has been using static graphics captured from our previous map tile provider (MapQuest) which are not only not in-line with the currenly used tile style but may also be in a legal grey-zone. So one idea I floated was to dynamically use content from the current map view for the thumbnails.

James made some experimenting with this in WIP branch:

 
We have not decided quite yet from a design perspective if we should go with this approach, but I think it looks and feels pretty sleek. One slight downside is that it generates some additional tile accesses, but I think it´s acceptable.

So thank you very much James!

That´s that for now, and all have happy holidays!

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) 😎

Maps, Gitlab, and Meson

It's been a couple of weeks now since GNOME 3.28 was realeased. I´ve already written some about the new features in Maps for 3.28. But already now there´s some exiting news looking forward. The first is not related to code or features of Maps itself. But the project has been migrated to GNOME´s Gitlab instance (along with other projects now that mass-migration of the remaining projects from Cgit and Bugzilla is going on). I think this will simplify newcomer contributions and bug reporting quite a bit. Also the code review interface for the merge requests looks pretty nice.

The other big news is that Maps is now built using Meson. Even though the amount of compiled code (the private C library we use for interfacing with things like libxml2 and libfolks, which doesn´t natively support GIR bindings) is quite small, I still think build times are noticeably quicker now. I decided to remove support for building using Autotools right away, since we had some shell:ish magic going with installing our icons where shell sub process ran cut to parse file names into path destinations based on splitting on underscore characters. So I took the opportunity to clean this up and move the icons into suitable directory structures directly in the repo. I didn´t think it was worth the effort to “back-port” this the Autotools build system, so from now on master can now only be built with Meson (ofcourse on the stable “gnome_3_28” branch building is done the old way using Autotools).

Unfortunately we where out of tile access from Mapbox for little over a week recently, but a couple of weeks ago the GNOME Foundation board has voted to set aside a budget for tiles, so things should be good now.

And also since it´s boring writing blog posts without any screenshots, and in three weeks I´m going to San Fransico with work. I loaded transit data from MUNI in my OpenTripPlanner server instance and did some cable car “browsing”, notice the nice little icons (made by Andreas Nilsson):

Entering the “home stretch” for GNOME 3.28

Earlier this week I´ve released GNOME Maps 3.27.90 (even though I just read an e-mail about the deadline for the release tarballs had been postponed for one week just after uploading the tarball).

This weekend I (like some 8000 others) participated in an exciting FOSDEM with lots of interesting talks and the week before that I gave presentation of GNOME Maps, and in particular the public transit functionality for TrafikLab (the sort of “developer community” driven by the Swedish organization Samtrafiken AB, who coordinates and aggregates data from all public transit operators, both commercial/private and regional/public ones.

One of the larger features landed in 3.27.90, which isnt´t visible on the surface is that Maps now uses some new language features introduced to JS in the ES6 standard, namely classes and ”arrow functions”.

So, when it comes to classes, as known from traditional OO languages such as Java or C++, earlier one would typically use prototypes to model object classes, but as of ES6 the language has support for a more traditional classes and with a method syntax. GJS also gained a new way to declare GObject classes.

So when earlier declaring an extending class would look something like this:

var MyListBoxRow = new Lang.Class({
    Name: 'MyListRow',
    Extends: Gtk.ListBoxRow,
    Template: 'resource:///<app-id>/ui/my-list-box-row.ui',

    ...
    myMethod: function(args) {

    }
});


this now becomes:

 
var MyListBoxRow = GObject.registerClass({
   Template: 'resource:///<app-id>/ui/my-list-box-row.ui'
} ,class MyListBoxRow extends Gtk.ListBoxRow {

  ...
  myMethod(args) {

  }
});

and in cases where we don´t need to inherit from GObject (such as when not declaring any signals, i.e. for utility data-bearing classes) we can skip the registering part and it becomes just a simple ES6 class:

var SomeClass = class {
   ...
   someMethod(args) {

   }
}

We still need the assign using “var” to export those outside the module in question, but when we gain ES7 support in GJS we should be able to utilize the “export” keyword here instead. Another simplication that should arrive with ES7 is that we´d be able to use a decorator pattern in place of GObject.registerClass so that it would become something like:

@GObject.registerClass 
class MyListRow extends Gtk.ListBoxRow

Techinically this could be done today using a transpiler step (using something like Babel) in the build system. These decorators will pretty much be higher-order functions. But I choose not to do this at this point, since we still use GNU Autotools as our build system and eventually we should switch to Meson.

The second change involves using the “arrow operator” to bind this to anonymous functions (in async callbacks). So instead of something like:

asyncFunctionCall(onObject, (function(arg) {
     doStuffWith(arg);
}).bind(this);

this becomes:

asyncFunctionCall(onObject, (arg) => doStuffWith(arg));

These changes results in a reduction of 284 lines of code, which isn´t too bad for a change that doesn´t actually involving removing or really rewriting any code.

Thanks go to Philip Chimento (and Endless) for bringing these improvements for GJS!

Some other changes since the last release is some visual fixes and tooltips for some of the buttons in routing sidebar contributed by Vibhanshu Vaibhav and a fix for a keyboard navigation bug (that I introduces when changing the behavior of the search entry to always activate when starting to type with no other entry active) contributed by Tomasz Miąsko. Thank you!