Maps at FOSDEM

I went to FOSDEM again this year, my fourth year running. I go with a great group of friends and it is starting to become quite the tradition.

Maps meeting

FOSDEM lines up pretty well with the GNOME release cycle, in that after the conference we have about a month of time to get the last stuff in before the next 6 month development cycle comes to an end. With that in mind we had a quite quick and informal Maps meeting on what the immediate priorities where for the release and what we wanted to do after that.

Transit routing

We want to merge Marcus transit-routing branch this cycle. This will not add anything if there is no OpenTripPlaner server available. But our plan is to be able to add one to our service file so this can be turned on if we get some sponsorship or in any other way manage to solve the infrastructure needs. This will also be a way of disabling the functionality if we lose infrastructure, such as with our MapQuest tiles previously.

Geocoding / search as you type

We now have a Mapbox account. We could use the Mapbox geocoding API instead of Nominatim that we currently use. And with that we could achieve search-as-you-type functionality. The timing is right for a switch like this, since Collabora recently landed  a patch bomb on geocode-glib to make it handle custom backends through an interface. So we could write a Mapbox interface in Maps.

I did some prototyping with this during some FOSDEM talks and the (buggy) result can be seen in the video below.

An issue with using Mapbox geocoding service that I do not yet know if we can solve is that there does not appear to be a link between the id you get for a resulting place and the OpenStreetMap id. This makes it really hard for us to support editing the nodes you find.

Tile styles

Also since we have a Mapbox account it would be possible for us to make our own styles. For instance an hi-contrast style, a custom print style or a general GNOME style. This is a daunting task. But if anyone feel up for it, please let us know.

Mapbox GL Native

Thiago Santos from Mapbox held a talk about Mapbox GL Native which is a hardware-accelerated map rendering engine. It is written in C++-14 and has recently been ported to QT. Thiago talked about what is needed to port Mapbox GL Native to new platforms, and specifically called out GTK+ and GNOME Maps. Saying that it should be possible to make Mapbox GL Native work with our infrastructures.

Mapbox have written a blogpost outlining what needs to be true about a platform for Mapbox GL Native to be ported to it. Porting Mapbox GL Native to GLib land might be a nice GSoC or Outreachy project for GNOME/GTK+.