14 DAY TRIAL // The GNOME developers behind the Maps application distributed as part of the GNOME Stack have announced today the availability of an important release of the project since it lost access to the MapQuest service.
As reported by us two weeks ago, GNOME Maps lost its free map tile service, MapQuest. Why? Simply because the free online web mapping service owned by AOL decided that it was time to disabled access to their free feed.
Since then, projects like GNOME Maps that relied on the MapQuest service for fetching tiles have had no other chance but to move to an alternative, which is pretty hard to find these days, at least according to the developers behind the open source project.
On July 30, 2016, the GNOME Maps 3.20.2 stable release was made available for download, promising functional maps again, thanks to the implementation of a community API (Application Programming Interface) key from Mapbox.
"Mapbox is a company with a commitment to Open source. And provides infrastructure that will allow us to do more with Maps. We are accessing the Mapbox API through a GNOME proxy that will allow us to easier switch our tile provider/URI in the future," say the devs.
GNOME Maps 3.21.4 is available as well
Since the GNOME Maps 3.20.1 update, the GNOME Maps 3.20.2 release also fixes the escaping of "tel:" URIs, adapts the colors of instruction during printing of routes, and updates various language translations, such as for Turkish, Indonesian, Polish, Portuguese, and Norwegian Bokmål.
Now that the GNOME 3.21.4 development release of the upcoming GNOME 3.22 desktop environment, due for release on September 21, 2016, has been made available for public testing, the GNOME Maps devs have also introduced today the GNOME Maps 3.21.4 milestone. Download GNOME Maps 3.20.2 and 3.21.4 right now via our website.