14 DAY TRIAL // The GNOME Project is about to come up with the first Beta build of the upcoming major release of the open source desktop environment for GNU/Linux operating systems, GNOME 3.20, so they're updating most of the core apps and components.
GNOME Maps is one of those applications, and it has been updated earlier today, February 16, 2016, to version 3.19.90 (a.k.a. 3.20 Beta 1). It thus brings a significant number of new features, among which we can mention support for editing opening hours on OpenStreetMap, as well as support for adding locations to OpenStreetMap via a new context menu.
Furthermore, the first Beta release of GNOME Maps 3.20 introduces an expandable area, website, phone number, as well as ele altitude and Internet access tags to map bubbles, for which there's now less information provided by default, improves the travel animations, and implements support for GPX and KML shape files.
Users will also be able to toggle the visibility of a shape layer in GNOME Maps 3.20 thanks to the implementation of an icon. Additionally, there are now a scale ruler to the bottom left corner of the main window and support for printing routes with instructions.
GNOME Maps 3.20 Beta 1 is ready for testing now
As usual with any update of a GNOME component, many of the language translations have been updated. Among them, we can mention Russian, Polish, French, Brazilian Portuguese, Finnish, Bulgarian, Kazakh, Catalan, Serbian, Latvian, German, Chinese (Taiwan), Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, and Hungarian.
If you want to take the first Beta build of the upcoming GNOME Maps 3.20 software for a test drive right now on your Linux kernel-based operating system, you can download the sources via our website. The final release will be distributed as part of the GNOME 3.20 desktop environment this spring. More details in the attached changelog.