MapLibre Newsletter - September 2024
We’re delighted to begin the September newsletter with a heartfelt THANK YOU to Microsoft for their unwavering support as a sponsor of MapLibre in 2024!
MapLibre GL JS
In this month three versions were released: 4.7.0, 4.7.1 and 5.0.0-pre.1.
The pre-release of version 5 is meant to get some feedback on the newly added globe feature!
Feel free to try out our v5.0.0-pre.1 globe demo.
We are also planning some breaking changes as part of this version which you can find below, most of them are not disruptive:
Apart from the exciting news about the globe finally making its way to the main branch there are also some experiments to allow controlling the roll angle of the map to facilitate for some aviation use cases.
More about it can be found in the linked issue below, there are bounties related to this effort as well if you are interested in developing this, or if your company needs this feature you can chip-in for the costs:
MapLibre Native
The most significant development this month was the MapLibre Native Android pre-release that uses Vulkan for rendering. We did some benchmarks and the results look promising. Especially newer devices seem to benefit from this modern graphics API, although we are still validating these results and exploring opportunities to take advantage of Vulkan’s capabilities. Since the Vulkan backend is still in development, now is the best time to try it out and to let us know any regressions you encounter (either as an issue or in the pre-release thread). You can test it by using
11.3.0-vulkan-pre0as a version (or the latest Vulkan version from Maven Central).Support for
textFitWidthandtextFitHeightproperties landed in #2780 this month. Support for specifying padding for icons on all sides separately landed in #2845. Both features are used in Bing Maps, and were implemented by Microsoft engineers (among which Alexey Kon). We are thankful for these contributions that work towards feature parity with MapLibre GL JS.MapLibre Native Android 11.3.0, 11.4.0 and 11.5.0 were released. This last release inadvertently included a small API change, which will mostly be resolved again by #2880. A pesky bug in the emulator was plaguing MapLibre Native Android ever since 11.0.0, but we added a workaround in the latest release, so that working with the emulator should be viable again.
MapLibre Node.js 6.0.0 was released which brings support for Metal on macOS, and uses the new drawable renderer architecture.
Support for PMTiles may come to MapLibre Native soon! There is an open PR (#2882) from Tiago Costa with a request to try it out.
SwiftUI DSL
MapLibre has a new hosted project: the SwiftUI DSL for MapLibre native! Originally started by Ian Wagner from Stadia Maps, the goal of the project is to give MapLibre developers on iOS an experience that rivals the latest MapKit for SwiftUI APIs.
Jacob Fielding (Rallista), Patrick Wolowicz and Patrick Kladek (HudHud) shared the same vision, and have each contributed significantly to the ongoing development over the last year. This is a great example of the collaboration that MapLibre seeks to enable across the industry, and the authors are excited to have the project officially hosted under the MapLibre organization.
If you’d like to help shape the future of MapLibre in SwiftUI, join us in the #maplibre-swiftui-compose-playground channel on Slack.
Meetings and Events
The upcoming monthly meetings will be held as usual on the second Wednesday of the month, which falls on October 9th, 2024. These calls are open to everyone, and we encourage you to join us and say hello!
- MapLibre Navigation: October 9th, 2024, 6:00–7:00 PM CEST
- MapLibre Native: October 9th, 2024, 7:00–8:00 PM CEST
- MapLibre GL JS: October 9th, 2024, 8:00–9:00 PM CEST
Zoom links for these meetings can be found in the MapLibre Slack channel. If you’re not already a member, you can easily join by getting an automated invite at https://slack.openstreetmap.us/.