Christmas / Winter / End-of-the-year Holidays Maps 2024 Yearly Wrap-up

In line with traditions, it's time for the yearly end-of-the year Maps blog post!

There's been some quite nice happenings this year when it comes to Maps (and the underlaying libshumate, our map widget library).

Vector Map Enabled by Default

The biggest change, by large that's happened in 2024 is that we finally did the switch to client-side rendered vector tiles with all the benefits this brings us:

• A “GNOME-themed” map style
• Properly support dark mode
• Localized labels for places (countries, towns, and so on…)
• POI icons can now be directly clicked on the map, bringing up information of place
  

 

More Use of Modern libadwaita Widgets

Works has continued replacing the old deprecated GtkDialog instances, instead using libadwaita's new dialogs, which also has the benefit of being adaptive for small screen sizes. Right now the only remaining instance of the old dialog type is the sharing “Send to” dialog.

Since the 47 release, the OSM POI editing dialog has received a refreshed look-and-feel based on Adwaita widgets, designed by Brage Fuglseth, and initial draft implementation by Felipe Kinoshita.

More Visual Improvements

Also since the September release, some more UI refinements have been made.

The action of starring a place now has an accopanying animation to help give a visual clue of the change.

The headerbar icon for showing the menu listing stored favorites now uses the same icon as GNOME Web (Epiphany), the “books on a libray shelf“ icon.

Spinner widgets (for showing progress) has been updated to the new Adwaita variant with a refreshed design.

And the toggle buttons for selecting routing mode (walk, bike, car, transit) now uses the new Adwaita ToggleGroup icon buttons.

Public Transit Routing Using Transitous

I have mentioned the Transitous previously and since 47.0 Maps uses Transitous to provide public transit directions for regions that weren't already covered by our existing plugins and their provided regions.

During the last few months works has progressed on an updated version of MOTIS (the backend used by Transious) that will give better performance, among otheres.

Maps will also soon transition to the new API when Transitous switches over to it.

And speaking of Transitous and MOTIS.

At FOSDEM 2025 me, Felix Gündling, and Jonah Brüchert will give a presentation of MOTIS, Transitous, and the integration into Maps.

https://fosdem.org/2025/schedule/event/fosdem-2025-4105-gnome-maps-meets-transitous-meets-motis/

 

And until next time, happy holidays!