Christmas Maps 2023

 

It's that time of the year again, near the winter solstice (or the summer dito in the southerm hemisphere), so I guess it's time for the yearly wrap-up blog post. And yeah, Santa Claus lives in Rovaniemi, Finland. Despite some misinformed claims about the North Pole… 😎

There's been some good progress during 2023 for Maps and libshumate. This was also the year I actually attended my first GUADEC in-person. This was a really nice experience, meeting with a lot of people from the broader GNOME community. Though I've met many at FOSDEMs over the years.

When it comes to the last progress in Maps, after the last GNOME 45 stable release. With the help from the design team, I have yet another time (in 45 we moved the zoom buttons out of the headerbar, and added a rotation indicator/reset button). Now the zoom controls are moved to the lower part, to give better balance. They will also respect the dark/light theme setting. But will really shine once we get a dark map style.

Also, as a little „julegave” to our Norwegian neighbours, Maps now supports public transit routing using OpenTripPlanner v2 with GraphQL, currently enabled for Norway's national Entur API provider.

The first screenshot also shows the new subway icon by Jakub Steiner, which adds a more distinctive look compared to other trains.

 Felipe Kinoshita has also ported the setup dialog for doing SSO sign-in to OpenStreetMap for POI editing to use new libadwaita widgets.

 

 

Over in libshumate there's also been a lot of impressive improvements to the new vector map renderer implementation.

Among other things James has implemented is libshumate-specific debug information exposed via the GTK inspector, so that you can display a debug overlay and get tile and object bounding box lines showing.

The new GNOME-styled map stylesheet we are working on has also seen improvements.

I added support for ferry lines and gondola lines.

James has also been working on implementing localized highway shields by leveraging the OSM Americana project.

Also showing points-of-interests using GNOME-style icons in the map style. The design team has drawn up a bunch of new nice icons for different place types.

With that I will wish happy hollidays (of your choice) and a happy new year on behalf of the GNOME Maps Team 🎄🎅🍾