14 DAY TRIAL // GNOME Foundation member Marcus Lundblad is announcing today, February 15, the upcoming availability of new transit routing and reverse routes functionality for the GNOME Maps application.
The new features could land as soon as the GNOME 3.24 desktop environment is out, which will happen in about five weeks from the moment of writing this article, on March 22, 2017, but early adopters can take it for a test drive right now if they clone the latest Git master repository of GNOME Maps.
"So, at FOSDEM a bit over a week ago, me, Jonas Danielsson, Mattias Bengtsson, and Andreas Nilsson talked about plans for landing the transit routing feature and we started doing some patch reviewing over some beers on Saturday evening," said Marcus Lundblad in his new blog post.
However, you'll have to use the OTP_BASE_URL environment variable or adjust the service file as described by the developer in a previous blog post, until the integration of OpenTripPlanner open-source and cross-platform multi-modal trip planner lands in GNOME Maps.
Reverse routes could be coming to GNOME Maps 3.24 too
Besides implementing transit routing, Marcus Lundblad also plans on adding reverse routes functionality to GNOME Maps 3.24 in the form of a new button that would allow users to reverse what they just searched in the application. "One user had a use-case of going into town to meet up with friends and finding a suitable route home later in the evening," explains Lundblad.
As the GNOME developers are currently preparing to unleash the first Beta build of the upcoming GNOME 3.24 desktop environment, the GNOME Maps app also received a Beta release, which you can download right now from our website and compile on your favorite GNU/Linux distributions, but it doesn't look like it contains the new features. However, please note that this is a pre-release version, not suitable for daily use.
