[SailfishDevel] About applications presenting a map interface

Martin Kolman martin.kolman at gmail.com
Sat Sep 5 23:32:17 UTC 2015


Fri, 04 Sep 2015 00:20:18 +0300 Osmo Salomaa:
> If option (3) is least bad for you, you can take a look at the several 
> map applications already at the Jolla store, some of which are open 
> source. Each of them bundle a different legacy map component that is 
> clearly less native, less smooth and less performant than QtLocation.
I object to calling PinchMap legacy - it is a horrendous hack (an I dare 
anyone to even look to the asynchronous tile loading code modRana has in 
it's PinchMap variant) but certainly not a legacy component. :)

> The QML PinchMap [1] is probably the easiest solution. If you don't 
> need something quite ready yet, but want a modern solution, take a 
> look at Mapbox GL [2].
MapBox GL certainly looks promising - if only would they finally add the 
the QML bindings they have been promising for months...
I have actually suggested them the idea of adding QML bindings back in 
October 2014 but only got this response:


Hi Martin,

Thanks for your comments and suggestions. As I'm sure you're know, there 
are a vast number of UI toolkits, libraries, and frameworks for desktop 
and mobile. We've decided that the best use of our resources is to 
provide native Mapbox GL SDKs for iOS and Android, and offer the base 
Mapbox GL libraries for developers to integrate into other toolkits. So 
we don't have plans at this point to develop our own Qt/QtQuick 
integration. Not to say that couldn't change in the future, and of 
course we'd welcome and support any work by third party developers to 
build an integration.

Best,
John


It took them to June of this year to understand that Qt is not just one 
of "vast number of UI toolkits, libraries, and frameworks" and to 
finally start working on Qt bindings. And even after three months the 
only thing we have
are some rudimentary QWidget bindings and no QML bindings in 
sight...which is quite a shame! The map rendering widget is really cool, 
but it would be even cooler if people could actually use it in real 
applications!
Not everyone writes their own GUI toolkit...
>
> Best would be if you could convince Jolla to allow QtLocation. I 
> suspect their stability worries are exaggerated, especially compared 
> to the lack of stability worries of those legacy components.
I am afraid I would not bet on this happening any soon - considering how 
long it has took to clear much more trivial components & all the other 
Harbour API requests[0] rotting on together...
The soon to be released with Qt 5.5 technology preview version also 
probably depends on newer Qt, so that would be another hurdle to 
overcome considering we are still stuck on 5.2 with not even
a roadmap for updating to a newer Qt version.

  [0] 
https://together.jolla.com/questions/scope:all/sort:activity-desc/tags:harbour-api-request/page:1/query:harbour-api-request/


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