Suggest content for next MapLibre Newsletter

[wipfli]

If you would like to add something to the next MapLibre Newsletter, feel free to post a section here in this issue and then we will incorporate it in the next Newsletter.

[nyurik]

Martin Tile Server v0.13 is out, adding support for tile cache. Users can control how much memory to use for caching Postgres query results, as well as MBTiles and PMTiles access. Note that compression results are not yet cached (see #1112), and neither are font and sprites.

P.S. I think we should start this issue and link to it on every newsletter - this way people will know where to post things.

[nyurik]

A big discussion about on-boarding Maputnik is at maplibre/maplibre#352

Maputnik is now part of MapLibre!

[acalcutt]

a new maplibre-native node version has been release, node-v5.3.1, which adds support for index-of and slice expressions, webp decoding support. This follows node-v5.3.0 which added support for node 20 and Ubuntu 22.04

Not sure this is newsletter worthy but I did have people asking for these features in node over the year.

[HarelM]

Version 4 of maplibre web has a release candidate with tons of improvements and should be released shortly, we are waiting for some feedback before we release it.
Sky spec was approved and should hopefully be incorporated in a future version, the original PR was updated.
Globe branch opened to allow PRs related to globe view.
A proposal to facilitate spec extension was made to the spec.

[wipfli]

Anything you would like to add to the Feb newsletter @HarelM @louwers ?

[HarelM]

Version 4.0.0, 4.0.1 and 4.0.2 were released and we are back with releasing versions more often after we finalized all the breaking changes in version 4.
We had an interesting discussion about geometry-type in the monthly meeting and we are looking for more feedback from the community around how to move forward:
maplibre/maplibre-style-spec#536
Sergei Bachinin was added as a contributor to maplibre-gl-js.

[louwers]

Yes, I will write it tomorrow (Thursday).

[louwers]

MapLibre Native

Core

• Support for multiple sprite sources is now available in the main branch and will be part of the next platform releases. Thanks to @geolives for their contribution.

iOS

• After some trial and error, the release process for iOS is now fully automated. When the VERSION file and CHANGELOG.md are updated as part of a PR, the release workflow will automatically run. By getting changes in the hands of end-users quicker, we hope to encourage contributions for the iOS platform.
• The legacy MGLStyleLayer allowed using custom OpenGL ES code and shaders. A similar custom layer has been revived with the MapLibre Native iOS 6.1 release with MLNCustomStyleLayer, but now of course now Metal needs to be used.
• New documentation for iOS is available. It uses the DocC documentation generator from Apple.

Android

• The pre-release of MapLibre Native Android 11.0.0 is out. Since the library underwent significant changes to the rendering architecture, we are gathering feedback before making a final release. Once the 11.0.0 release is out we will have a more regular release cadence again for MapLibre Native Android.
• For those interested, download statistics for MapLibre Native Android can be found below.

[HarelM]

Globe first PR was merged to a dedicated branch to foster collaboration.
Maplibre gl inspect was on boarded.
Versions 4.1.0 and 4.1.1 were released.
geometry-type was decided on and schedule for the next breaking change version.

[louwers]

• The MapLibre Native for Android 11.0.0 pre-release) has been out for almost a month now. We thank everyone for their feedback so far! Please give it a spin, and report any issues you encounter. The latest pre-release can be found on Maven Central. The final release is set for the 28th of March if no critical issues are reported.

• We have additional benchmarks (using Google's Benchmark library) that are running on CI now. Keep an eye out for the results that show up on PRs. Contributors are invited to add additional benchmarks for performance critical code.

• Tim Sylvester added a PR to track what dependencies are used by expressions (#2113).

• Marc Wilson fixed an implementation issue with the location indicator on Android, which was causing threads to be constantly created and destroyed (#2182).

• A #maplibre-swift channel was created on Slack for discussion about a possible Swift-based iOS platform.

• Due to the switch to OpenGL ES 3.0 last year, builds for macOS from the main branch were temporarily not possible. Now that MapLibre Native has a Metal backend, macOS support can return on main. This was delayed a few times, but this month rendering for macOS was made possible again, by brining sample AppKit app back (#2205). Next GLFW will be made to run on macOS (useful for development purposes), and later Qt and Node.js are to return again macOS with Metal support. To everyone interested in using MapLibre Native on macOS, thanks for your patience!

[louwers]

Maybe another point:

• We have a new release policy or statement on releases from the maintainer concerning iOS and Android releases.

[louwers]

MapLibre Native

Metal-cpp comes with its own smart pointers. We were using them inappropriately in a few places, resulting in a memory leak. Resolved by #2254 and #2257.

We now go through the entire iOS test app in an UI test to make sure nothing crashes as a smoke test (#2258). We also run that UI test with an undefined-behavior sanitizer on CI (#2280).

Some uniform buffer objects were moved to the global level, others to the layer level, resulting in fewer binds (#2266 and #2247 and #2292).

Allow changing User-Agent on iOS #2293. This was the first pull request from @hactar. 💪

MapLibre Native for Node.js 5.4.0 was released.

A (wide vector) shader was successfully transplanted from another mapping toolkit (#2183). We want to make it possible to extend MapLibre Native. As seen in the PR, we're not quite at the point where you can do this without changing internals, but it's becoming easier.

MapLibre Native is being deployed in larger settings and several crashes have been reported this month. We now include debug symbols for iOS and Android in every release. If you encounter a crash, you can symbolicate the crash report to more easily identify where the issue occurred.

The long awaited Android 11.0.0 release is around the corner! Last-minute blocking issues can be reported in the pre-release thread. Several issues have been addressed this month (e.g. #2296). We have a milestone with currently one to-be-resolved issue before we will push out the Android 11.0.0 release. Thanks to everyone that helped with testing!

[HarelM]

Web

Versions 4.1.2 and 4.1.3 were released this month.
We have recently merged a text fit feature by Microsoft that will be available in the next minor release that should allow keeping the aspect ratio of an image in some cases (Shields are obviously the main motivation here).
Globe branch is progressing nicely with the addition of fill-extrusion, hill-shade and lines.
Atmosphere is in discussion in terms of spec, and has an initial implementation that look really awesome!

Style Spec

The style spec docs were rewritten to use the awesome Material for MkDocs, which allows search and super easy maintenance.

While the spec is not changing rapidly as we invest a lot of effort to keep it future ready on one hand and backward compatible on the other, making sure the docs are helpful is one of the most important aspects. This is vital so the community will be able to use it, and enjoy it.
We are looking for more expression examples in order to enrich the docs. This is probably the most complicated part of the spec, and we believe examples are very important to understand how things work.

The sky spec discussion has started looking at the atmosphere definitions as part of it, and there is a projection discussion for the globe.

A new type of source was proposed and approved: contour! This is the first time in a very long time a new type of source was approved! Very exciting!!

Feel free to join the discussions about the future of MapLibre!

[wipfli]

From @boldtrn maplibre/maplibre-navigation-ios#39 (reply in thread)

We are currently reviving maplibre-navigation-ios. After we have improved maplibre-navigation-android recently, we are currently doing the same for iOS. We have updated dependencies like maplibre-native to version 6 with Metal support and use SPM instead of CocoaPods for dependency management. We have added hooks to make customizing some of the navigation functions possible. Kurviger is currently BEAT testing their app with maplibre-navigation-ios, if you would like to give it a spin, you can try the app for free here - please note, only the navigation is using maplibre-navigation-ios. In the future we also want to make it easier to customize the out of the box navigation UI and to move the Android and iOS navigation libraries closer together. Would you like to join the effort? PRs and contributions are welcome.

[louwers]

• maybe some updates on the new Flutter maintainers

Newsletter May 2024 MapLibre Native

MapLibre Native used or being rolled out in some major deployments, including those by AWS and Meta. These large-scale deployments can expose rare, hard-to-reproduce 'long-tail' crashes. We are committed to the stability of the library and welcome bug reports for these types of crashes. To investigate these issues, we require a symbolicated crash report, which can be generated using the debug symbols provided with the library for iOS and Android. More information can be found on the GitHub wiki (iOS and Android).

MapLibre Native Android 11.0.0 was released. The documentation was updated with the new package prefix.

This month, several iOS patch releases were made as well as a pre-release for Android (e.g. #2442, #2395, #2379). More stability improvements are underway.

Stefan Karschti, one of the developers that implemented Metal support for MapLibre Native, has left the Metal team (a.k.a. MapLibre Native Team). Stefan, thank you for your many contributions! We are happy that you want to continue being a member of the MapLibre community!

One way to ensure MapLibre Native and MapLibre GL JS remain interoperable is to make sure we have the share the same render tests. Pulling the render tests in a shared repository would complicate pull requests too much. Instead, we wrote a script that we periodically run to check which render tests are missing in each repo. The result is a render test parity status report with corresponding tracking issue.

Some guides have been added to the iOS Documentation demonstrating how to use the library with SwiftUI. People who are familiar with using MapLibre Native on iOS, are invited to make a PR to add more guides to the DocC-based documentation site.

Are you using MapLibre Native? Please leave a comment on the discussion thread on GitHub.

[HarelM]

Web

We have released four (!) versions this month: 4.2.0, 4.3.0, 4.3.1, 4.3.2.
We finally added support for the distance expression that was missing in terms of parity between web and native, thus making web a superset of native when it comes to expression support - meaning that all the styles that work for native should work for web as well and look similar. Thanks to @louwers we now can properly track this with the parity script. We also added to the style spec docs a reference to issues that prevent parity to allow you to see where it is standing and help out.

As part of the globe effort there was a need to fix the collision boxes bugs. Jakub, who is making a great progress with the globe code, had been able to port these fixes to the main version, making the collision boxes experience a lot better.

The globe is in its final stretch, most of the issues have been fixed and most of map features and style are supported.
There are still work to be done but you can admire how nice it looks now:

There are some minor changes with rendering we expect to introduce in the next version related to brackets and new lines so keep an eye for those.

We've fixed most of the issues with movement when 3D terrain is on so now the panning and pinching is a lot smoother.

Overall, this month was amazing in terms of contribution from the community, and I think the library is steadily gaining momentum, so we would like to thank the community for upstreaming their work!

[nyurik]

Efforts on the next generation tile format (MLT) are progressing rapidly, with Microsoft contracting Stamen for an initial proof of concept. The work is being done in the newly created maplibre-tile-spec repository, thanks to @mactrem's extensive research. MLT tiles already achieve up to 6x size reduction compared to MVT tiles for large tiles. Planned improvements include zero-copy direct-to-GPU pre-tessellated geometries, support for more complex nested types and lists, and linear referencing with m-values. The proof of concept will focus on tile size benchmarks and JavaScript decoding.

---

The above can be edited a bit for content and styling

[ebrelsford]

@nyurik A few suggestions:

• Can we mention that Stamen is assisting with this work?
• Maybe it would be helpful to point people to the slack channel to follow along?
• It might be worth managing expectations, the proof of concept target is to benchmark parsing MVTs and MLTs in JS to get a sense of the client side impact of switching.

[mactrem]

@nyurik i would also suggest, since it is frequently discussed,to add that Mlt has support for a more complex type system such as nested types or lists as well as linear referencing and m-values

[wipfli]

Thanks for the feedback, I will try to incorporate those. If I miss something, there will always be a chance to mention more in the June newsletter...

[nyurik]

🎉 Long awaited Martin tile server v0.14 has been released!

• AWS Lambda support
• Options to set preferred response encodings (e.g. if browser supports gzip & brotli, can set which should be returned)
• mbtiles can now create binary-diffing between tiles, making diffs much smaller
• numerous bug fixes, docs, and other improvements

https://github.com/maplibre/martin/releases/tag/v0.14.0

[HarelM]

Web

Two major version were released: 4.4.0 and 4.5.0.
Some of the highlights of these version are the addition of a new unminified production build and an initial sky implementation that includes sky color, horizon color and fog color:

This sky PR was waiting for a long time for some love and care and with the help of Jakub and Vivian we were finally able to push it through, thanks guys!

Atmosphere was added to the globe branch to make the globe more realistic.

Style spec

Sky spec was updated to allow moving forward with the sky implementation and atmosphere, the sky spec is still experimental though.

[louwers]

MapLibre Native

This month the MapLibre Native (Rendering) Team, previously known as the Metal team, kicked off the R&D for a Vulkan backend.

Vulkan is a next-generation graphics API developed by the Khronos Group, the same entity behind OpenGL (ES). While OpenGL ES has served us well, and will continue to do so for the forseeable future, it was developed a long time ago and it is beginning to show its age. We are running into some of its limitations when trying to realize further performance gains.

While a Vulkan backend will likely not give us an automatic performance boost, it does offer a lot more control. We know that the automotive industry is following this development with interest. It turns out that in-car systems tend to use resource-constrained customized SOCs where Vulkan offers exactly the kind of tuning and observability that is helpful. Of course, phones, desktops and other devices that support Vulkan, where MapLibre Native is already commonly used, also stand to benefit.

Adrian Cojocaru joined the MapLibre Native (Rendering) Team and the MapLibre community this month. A warm welcome to Adrian! He is a graphics engineer with a background in the games industry and is bolstering the Vulkan expertise of the team. He has hit the ground running this month and already shared a screenshot with a functional fill layer that uses Vulkan.

If you want to stay up-to-date, join the discussion or even participate in the development of the Vulkan backend, join us on GitHub, the monthly TSC meetings and/or on Slack.

MapLibre Android 11.0.1 was released.

MapLibre Native iOS 6.5.0 was released.

Building an app using MapLibre Native with just the API documentation and snippets of code scattered over the internet or in for example the test apps, is not an easy task. We are working to consolidate existing examples and write new ones for our documentation. We created milestones to track progress on this (see iOS Examples and Android Examples). If you have interesting usage patterns to share, you are invited to create an issue or make a pull request.

Events

• FOSS4G EU, 1-7 July, Tartu (Estonia)
• State of the Map Europe, 18-21 July, Łódź (Poland)
• FOSS4G BE+NL, 25-27 September 2024, Baarle (Belgium & the Netherlands)

[ebrelsford]

maplibre-tile-spec (MLT)

Stamen is wrapping up work on the proof of concept MLT JavaScript decoder. The JavaScript decoder is at parity with the Java decoder. See the repo for an experimental JS decoder package and initial benchmarks (against MVT parsing). You can also see an experiment rendering Bing Maps-based MLTs with MapLibre GL JS:

[louwers]

Adrian has made a Vulkan Draft PR now to track progress, you can use that image instead and link to the PR. maplibre/maplibre-native#2564

[hactar]

MapLibre Navigation iOS (https://github.com/maplibre/maplibre-navigation-ios) has its first 4.0.0 release. MapLibre Navigation iOS now no longer needs you to start navigation in a sheet that appears above your existing map. Instead, navigation can be started in an existing map view, bringing MapLibre Navigation iOS up to par with other known map apps.

Original concept by me (@hactar), reimplemented by @Patrick-Kladek. This was sponsored and open sourced by https://hudhud.sa/en - so if they could be credited in the newsletter for this, this would go a long way in helping us continue to open source our work ❤️. You're welcome to use the gifs below if you'd like to visually demonstrate it in the newsletter.

Old Behavior

New Behavior

[HarelM]

Web

The main focus of this month was to push forward the globe effort, where the main focus now is on globe controls, gestures, and refactoring the transform class to be different between globe and mercator view - this is the final stretch for the globe and we are aiming to release it by the end of this year. I would like to repeat my gratitude to Jakub for his amazing work here on the globe implementation.
While the changes in globe are not considered breaking changes the direction right now is to release it under version 5 to avoid unexpected breaking changes in plugins and other external libraries that might expect certain behavior from internal implementation such as the transform class.

[louwers]

MapLibre Native

• The initial Vulkan backend implementation is almost ready to merge! In one month it went from a proof-of-concept to passing all render tests. We don't have any performance numbers at this point, and it is probably too early for those anyway. To fully exploit the capabilities of Vulkan and use it to tune performance we may need to make some architectural challenges to the renderer. We also still need to figure out how to integrate it with Android and how to distribute it for that platform. Of course, OpenGL ES will still be supported as well. That said, impressive and promising progress was made this month.
• Leveraging Qt for WebAssembly, we managed to create a WebGL1 build of MapLibre Native with a functional demo. More info on this demo can found here. This is an early stage, and we're working in multiple directions (overview here), so better iterations and builds that doesn't depend on Qt (it's used for HTTP requests and an event loop), will follow. Note that Qt has a more strict license than MapLibre Native.
• We now run the C++ Unit Tests on Android as part of CI.
• Some new articles have been added to the new iOS documentation, including information on the snapshotter, customizing fonts, Info.plist keys, user interactions, adding multiple images and offline capabilities.
• Compose Multiplatform is a cross-platform UI software development kit from Jetbrains (somewhat similar to Flutter, but using Kotlin instead of Dart). There is some interest from the community to develop a MapLibre Native library for Compose Multiplatform (not to be confused for Jetpack Compose, for which libraries already exist). Please see the issue for a discussion.
• MapLibre Android 11.1.0 was released.
• MapLibre iOS 6.5.2 was released.
• Some improvements were made to the included Dockerfile and accompanying instructions to make Linux builds of MapLibre Native.
• A PR showing a proof-of-concept that intergrates Rust build tools into the CMake build config was opened this month. The PR swaps out cppcolorparser with a similar Rust library, just to see if a Rust dependency can be added while still building and running. It does build, and it does run.

[louwers]

MapLibre Native

• An initial intergration of the Vulkan backend with Android is expected to land soon (#2711). We will be releasing an 'Early Access' version of MapLibre Android which will contain only Vulkan support next month (September 2024). This version is not intended to be used in production, but a way to get the Vulkan based renderer in the hands of the community to get feedback. If you are interested to help testing Vulkan on Android please leave a commend in this GitHub thread and we will notify you once the release is out.
• We added back a CMake configuration for Metal builds on macOS. Thanks to this, the Node.js platform is now using the main branch again instead of the opengl-2 branch. A pre-release for MapLibre Node.js 6.0.0 with Metal support on macOS is out, with the full release immanent.
• This is a Public Service Announcement for everyone using MapLibre iOS with Annotations. Some users reported synchronization issues when panning the map. The issue is only present on devices with ProMotion (120Hz) displays and can be fixed by updating the Info.plist for your app (see Apple documentation).
• We started using C++20 this month.
• We forked mapbox-gestures-android and published it as a new package maplibre-gestures-android.
• All features of the MapLibre Style Spec that are supported by MapLibre GL JS but not (yet) by MapLibre Native now have corresponding tracking issues.
• We are using the latest version of the style spec that we share with MapLibre GL JS again. Of course we need to apply a few patches for yet unsupported features.
• MapLibre Android 11.2.0 was released
• MapLibre iOS 6.5.4 was released.
• At the time of writing, MapLibre Native is 10 GitHub stars away from reaching 1000! ⭐

[HarelM]

Web

Three versions were released this month: 4.5.1, 4.5.2 and 4.6.0.
Among the highlight of these versions are a lot of small bug fixes, better CJKV characters handling and better handing of the camera when terrain is enabld.
Globe branch now supports custom layer interface and trasform was broken down there.
When globe branch will be merged, which should happen in the next month or two we will start preparing version 5 with its breaking changes as can be seen here.

Maputnik

Maputnik, our official style editor, just got a major new ability to be traslated to multiple languages. It already support English, Japanese, Chinese and Hebrew! If you'd like to contribute a translation we would appreciate it a lot!

Maplibre Geocoder

Maplibre geocoder, our small search component for maplibre-gl-js got a facelift with the migration to typescript, jest and typedoc

[birkskyum]

Just so i don't forget about it - the much improved python support gl js has through the new plotly release.

[ianthetechie]

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.

[louwers]

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-pre0 as a version (or the latest Vulkan version from Maven Central).

• Support for textFitWidth and textFitHeight properties 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 Native iOS 6.6.0 and 6.7.0 were released.

• 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.

[HarelM]

Web

In this month three version were released: 4.7.0, 4.7.1 and 5.0.0-pre.1.
The prerelease of version 5 is meant to get some feedback on the newly added globe feature!
We are also planning some breaking changes as part of this version which you can find here, most of them are not disruptive:

• Breaking changes MapLibre GL JS v5 maplibre-gl-js#3834

Apart from the exiting 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 here, 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:

• Add API support for adjusting camera roll angle, extend pitch angle range maplibre-gl-js#4717 (comment)

[louwers]

MapLibre Native

• Development of the Vulkan backend continued this month. We also ran another benchmark on AWS Device Farm, using even more device types this time. One conclusion you may draw from the results is that Vulkan will offer a solid performance boost on modern devices. We're still validating these results. Stay tuned for an Android official release following later this year!
• Kaushal Kumar Singh rewrote the Android build config from Groovy to the more modern Kotlin in #2902.
• Support for text-variable-anchor-offset has been merged (#2921). This feature is one of the features that Microsoft championed to be added to MapLibre GL JS, and now ported to MapLibre Native. We're happy with this contribution and are excited about Microsoft adopting MapLibre Native.
• MapLibre iOS 6.7.1 and 6.8.0 were released.
• MapLibre Android 11.5.1 and 11.5.2 were released.
• We also made two releases for MapLibre Android v10 with some backports.

[josxha]

Flutter MapLibre GL

We’re conducting a brief survey to gather feedback on MapLibre Flutter. The survey takes only about 2 minutes to complete and will help to identify strengths and areas for improvement. If you've worked with MapLibre on Flutter, your input is highly appreciated.

You can participate here: https://forms.gle/UTB6KjVFtmYv2RzU8

[HarelM]

Web

We have released versions 5.0.0-pre.2, 5.0.0-pre.3 and 5.0.0-pre.4 this month.
One interesting feature that was recently added was the support for pitch larger than 90 degrees.
Here's an interesting situation that should be possible now:

An interesting read on how this works can be found here.
We have introduced some breaking changes in these versions as was planned for version 5, to make sure to take a look at the changelog for more details.
There are still open issues with globe and other improvement we plan to add as part of this major release.
See the initial post in the following issue to see the current status:

• Breaking changes MapLibre GL JS v5 maplibre-gl-js#3834

Overall we are progressing well and ironing out the globe feature.

[ibesora]

I have merged a fix for raster layers when using globe and terrain here but I think that a sentence saying we are ironing out the globe feature would be enough

[louwers]

Events:

• FOSS4G 2025 Belem
• FOSSGIS 2025 Münster (German)

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Maybe we can put a link to this thread to ask people to contribute content for the next newsletter.

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Maybe we can also put times & links to the TSC meetings in November.