Contents

1 New Release 1.1.0

2 Two Branches

3 Future

4 Help Wanted!

1 New Release 1.1.0

RoadMap finally has a new public release! It's been nearly two years since 1.0.12 was released. Though the next release was delayed by developer turnover, and lack of time, there have been a lot of improvements going on -- they just haven't made it into a tarball until now, with the release of 1.1.0.

Major new developments in 1.1.0 include;

• The ability to import, export, edit, and follow on-screen routes, the automatic saving of traversed track data, and various facilities for storing waypoints, and other landmarks and points of interest, all in the open GPX format.
• On-screen labeling of streets and landmarks.
• Much more flexibility in the user interface, including fully customizable menus, toolbar, and active on-screen objects. The user can configure all of these, or even none: an initial command menu can be obtained simply from a long-click on the screen if so desired, in order to free as much of the screen for maps as possible.
• New support for Canadian maps, and for display of state and provincial boundaries, and railroads.
• Anti-aliased map drawing, courtesy of the AGG library.
• 3D perspective map rendering.
• A more flexible database format.

There's more detail in the changelog.

2 Two Branches

In that same two-year time period, another branch of the project managed by Ehud Shabtai (hosted in CVS as "roadmap_editor") has added the ability to create and edit maps, and to upload the results to a central postgres database. Since the maps as created can contain the meta-data needed for successful auto-navigation, that feature has been added to the roadmap_editor branch as well. The roadmap_editor branch also contains some experimental UI features, better internationalization support, more sound support, and other useful stuff. This codebase is being used very successfully in the FreeMap Israel project.

http://www.freemap.co.il

(Sadly for many of us, google doesn't yet translate Hebrew.)

Ehud estimates that they have mapped 75% of Israeli roads, all through user contributions.

3 Future

But that leaves RoadMap with two codebases, somewhat (but not completely) incompatible with each other at many levels. (The worst incompatibility right now is that the map databases are of different formats, making it hard to easily switch from one codebase to the other.) Clearly the long-term ideal would be to merge the two branches, and some progress has been made, on a feature-by-feature basis. Indeed, many of the features listed above originated on the "editor" branch. A full merge implies a lot -- probably too much to expect in the short term. But every feature that gets migrated in one direction or the other is a step in the right direction.

4 Help Wanted!

If you know something about GIS and want to help with the conversion of new map sources, or know a lot about Win32 and want to finish the WinCE or Win32 ports, or are just a good coder who wants better open-source mapping capabilities, please join the list and we'll figure out how you can help!