This is just a small part of what GNOME Maps can do

Jan 6, 2016 13:10 GMT  ·  By

The GNOME Maps developers continued to provide really interesting updates for the application, and now they are working on a new feature that will allow users to add POIs on OpenStreetMap.

GNOME Maps didn’t make a lot of sense when it was first introduced into the GNOME stack, and it remained a somewhat odd application that usually ships installed by default. In the past few months, more and more features have made their way into GNOME Maps, and it looks like we now have some real reasons to have it installed.

The version that was launched with GNOME 3.16 wasn’t all that interesting, but its developers continued to push changes and improvements. The fact that users will now be able to add POI (points of interest) on OpenStreetMap is a cool new feature and opens up a lot of possibilities.

More complex editing is coming

This is just the beginning for GNOME Maps, and the application will soon be able to do much more complex actions than just add some POI items.

“The last couple of weeks I've been busy implementing support for adding locations (POIs) to OpenStreetMap using GNOME Maps. A new menu item for adding a location is added to the context menu, clicking it would show the account dialog if you haven't already signed in, just as when editing an already existing location. Otherwise (or after a successful log-in), the editing dialog on a new empty object will be shown,” developer Marcus Lundblad explained.

Developers are also considering allowing users to edit the type of existing objects, but that’s still being debated. Some really nice features are coming to GNOME Maps, and we covered them in a previous article, and you can check that if you’re interested in finding out more.

All of these changes will be ready in time for the launch of GNOME 3.20, on March 23.