Summer Maps

Since it's been a while since the last post, I thought I should share a little update about some going ons with Maps.

There's now a new night mode, utilizing Mapbox' dark street tile set:

Another thing that has been requested from time to time is showing labels on the satellite mode (“hybrid” aerial). Originally the plan was more along the line of rendering vector tile data on the client-side and have this rendered as a separate layer on top of the regular “vanilla” aerial tile set. But since vector tile support has not materialized yet, another idea has been to take advantage of Mapbox' hybrid raster tiles (”satellite-streets” as they call them). So I decided to implement that, to finally have this feature:

 So, when selecting the aerial view, a checkbox appears allowing to switch on the hybrid mode.

Another thing I have missed for a while was having some sort of regression testing, e.g. some form of unit tests. I decided to roll a custom quite simplistic solution consisting of a small bit of Meson “code” to dynamically build launch scripts invoking GJS on each of a set of .js files and have the Meson test clause execute them, as can be seen here: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-maps/-/tree/master/tests.
It currently only have a few test cases, but it's a start, I guess :-)

Furthermore I took some time to make the rendering of various places where numbers and times are shown to use the locale-depending formatting functionallity in ES (JavaScript) to get rid of some remaining places that still used hard-coded %d-like format strings, resulting in always using western-style digits, as can be seen in the following after this, using a Persian (فارسی) locale:

But, maybe we should keep the most most exiting thing til last… a little over a year ago I started a new project (libshumate) with the intention of trying to build a GTK 4 implementation of a libchamplain-like API for rendering map tiles (and markers and such). Lately Corentin Noël (tintou) took up the ball and has managed to get up to a state where it's working enough to actual display stuff (and scroll and zoom around):

This is the simple “launcher” demo from within the project, actually displaying a map in a GTK 4 world.
And since everything is GTK widget, you can use the GTK Inspector to look around at the internals for testing/debugging:

And “everything is a widget”, like the actual tiles, so you can for example toggle off visibility of a single map tile, since it's just a regular GTK widget, like so:

I'm very impressed with Corentin's work!
It's very exiting, I think it's at a point where it should probably be possible to do WiP work using in Maps (but for now probably with only barebones rendering of actual map view working).