14 DAY TRIAL // GNOME Maps developer Marcus Lundblad talks in his latest blog post about some of the major new features coming to the GNOME Maps application as part of the soon-to-be-released GNOME 3.22 desktop environment.
In less than a week from today, every news outlet will talk about the GNOME 3.22 desktop for GNU/Linux distributions, which promises, as expected, to be the most advanced and feature-full release ever announced. Of course, GNOME 3.22 will update all of its core components and applications, including Maps.
As you might know, GNOME Maps had a major issue a couple of months ago, as it lost access to its map tile service, MapQuest, which disabled their free feed, but things were back to normal in a few weeks from the unexpected incident. This means that support for a new map tile service, namely Mapbox, will be the number one feature.
"The most noteworthy change will, of course, be the new tile provider, replacing the discontinued MapQuest tiles, courtesy of Mapbox," says Marcus Lundblad. "And for the future, we will also have the ability to switch tile sources without patching release versions, as Maps now fetches a service definition file."
Public transit routing will be missing from GNOME Maps 3.22
Among other new features that will land in the GNOME Maps 3.22 release is support for rendering the map continuously around the globe, thanks to the awesome functionality implemented in the libchamlain library by Romanian developer Marius Stanciu. The continued map rendering feature will be available at longitude 180°. The POI definitions for OpenStreetMap editing will also be updated.
But what will not land in GNOME Maps 3.22 this fall, unfortunately, is support for public transit routing, a long-anticipated feature that has been postponed for the next major release of the GNOME desktop environment, GNOME 3.24, which should launch sometime in April 2017. For now, you can download GNOME Maps 3.22 RC and take it for a test drive.