New in GNOME 40: Map Details!
17 November 2020

I’ve contributed to quite a few GNOME apps over the years, but Maps is the one I keep going back to. It’s a pretty easy codebase, and I’m a huge map nerd.

I’ve been wanting to give the place popover an overhaul for a while now. Here’s what it looks like in 3.38:

UI bubble showing information about the Eiffel Tower The same UI bubble, but with more information shown

There were a few design issues I wanted to address:

The New Design

Here’s what it looks like now:

UI bubble showing information about the Mechanical Museum

Much better, in my opinion! Thanks to Allan Day for his mockups, which took my initial, rough idea and made it actually look nice.

Other Improvements

Some things specific to Contacts and Current Location bubbles also got redesigned:

Previous UI bubble showing information about John Smith Redesigned UI bubble showing information about John Smith

Previous UI bubble indicating the current location Redesigned UI bubble indicating the current location

Conclusion

This is one of my biggest contributions to date, and I’m thrilled about how it turned out! Many thanks to Marcus Lundblad, Maps’ maintainer, for assisting me with and reviewing this enormous merge request.

In a future merge request, I plan to make the place bubbles adaptive, so they can work on mobile devices. Hopefully this will also make it in time for GNOME 40, which is scheduled to release next March (2021).

You can also support my work on Patreon.


Next

Coding Custom Widgets with GTK 3 and GJS

GTK provides a lot of useful widgets, but it inevitably can’t cover every possible use case. What if, for example, you need an image widget that resizes itself based on the available width, and clips its corners to fit in a popover? Fortunately, GTK makes it easy to create your own widgets that do whatever you want.