MapLibre Newsletter - August 2023
Highlights
Governing Board Elections
We want to thank each and every of our 92 (49 new!) Voting Members for their vote and are looking forward to a next great year with our vibrant community. The result of the election will be published separately next week.
MapLibre Native
Drawable
The new modularized renderer has been reviewed. This happened in three stages: first the architectural changes were reviewed (new concepts), then these were tied into the exiting rendering loop in a another PR and finally a PR that contained all updates layers that update Drawables. There are some Q&A meeting notes available for the last PR for those interested.
The next step is to check in the now reviewed topic/drawable branch into main. This will likely happen before the end of August, and requires fixing the last remaining rendering inconsistencies. The code of the legacy renderer is left in place. Using a build config the new Drawable renderer can be activated. At this point we will make pre-releases for at least Android and iOS and invite the community to test out these pre-releases in their real world apps and projects.
After we are confident that the new renderer is stable, another PR will be created that enables the drawable renderer by default. At some point in the future the code of the legacy renderer can be removed altogether.
Metal
The architectural changes part of the modularized renderer are paying off, since the Metal team is now implementing the Metal renderer at an impressive pace, with barely any changes needed to the now platform agnostic layers. Keep an eye on the incoming PRs and the project board to stay updated on the progress.
Video from Alex Cristici showing the Heatmap layer rendered with Metal
General
- The C++ Unit Tests are now running on a real iOS device as part of the PR checks.
- CodeQL code scanning has been enabled for C++ code. This mitigation strategy has been added to the security policy and a tag was created to keep track of potential security improvements.
iOS
Ian Wagner showed a demo using SwiftUI to declaratively control MapLibre Native. He is very interested in your feedback. Check out the repository and the short demo below.
Android
Fynn Godau has outlined a detailed plan to revamp and modernize the annotations API on Android. He will use a feature branch until the changes are complete. Keep an eye on his PRs. Reviews and comments welcome.
MapLibre GL JS
text-variable-anchor-offset
We’ve added a new style spec property and implementation called text-variable-anchor-offset which is very exciting! Check out our demo here. This has been the initial design proposal.
General
We’ve improved the docs by removing some internal classes.
Events
FOSS4G NL
We would like to remind you of what we have mentioned in our newsletter in July: Bart Louwers will be holding a talk at FOSS4G NL in Middelburg September 14th, 2023.
State of the Map Europe
MapLibre will be represented by Bart Louwers and Luke Seelenbinder at State of the Map Europe in Antwerp November 10-12th, 2023.
FOSS4G (Seoul)
For late November, Jashanpreet Singh plans to hold a talk on the state of Maplibre at FOSS4G in Seoul.
Come by and get to know us in person.