This re­lease builds atop the strong base es­tab­lished just a few weeks ago with the pub­lic re­lease of Ver­sion 3. Here, we shift fo­cus from re­struc­tur­ing the ap­p’s in­ter­nals to­wards adding sev­eral long-awaited fea­tures.

Map­ping atop 3D ter­rain

We have added a new 3D ter­rain mode, al­low­ing stun­ning new ca­pa­bil­i­ties for multi-view map­ping. This sys­tem is based on Map­box’s fan­tas­tic new Maps SDK. This func­tion­al­ity was sim­ple to add and per­forms amaz­ingly well — Map­box en­gi­neers de­serve huge con­grat­u­la­tions for mak­ing this pos­si­ble. Right now, the only avail­able DEM is Map­box’s terrain-dem-v1 tile­set, but this may change in the fu­ture.

User in­ter­face ro­ta­tion

Since its in­cep­tion, Map­board GIS has only been us­able in land­scape mode, due to the com­plex­ity of build­ing an au­to­mat­i­cally-rescal­ing user in­ter­face. This lim­i­ta­tion has fi­nally been re­moved. The side­bar is now a float­ing panel, and the app can be freely ro­tated.

Map move­ment while edit­ing

When edit­ing with a sty­lus, it is of­ten use­ful to repo­si­tion the map be­tween ed­its. How­ever, touch types have proven dif­fi­cult to sep­a­rate. We’ve fi­nally re­moved this lim­i­ta­tion, al­low­ing eas­ier map move­ment in all edit­ing modes.

Tile over­lay im­prove­ments

• A bug with load­ing map over­lays were fixed, lead­ing to a more pre­dictable ex­pe­ri­ence when basemaps are loaded.
• More layer vis­i­bil­ity set­tings were made per­sis­tent
• New warn­ing mes­sages were added for in­valid MBTiles datasets and those miss­ing overviews.
• The zoom range over which un­der­scaled map over­lays show up has been in­creased.

User in­ter­face im­prove­ments

We made a ton of small im­prove­ments to the user in­ter­face:

• En­sure the com­pass is never hid­den be­hind the side­bar
• Re­arrange some set­tings for clar­ity
• Make some forms more space-ef­fi­cient
• Make snap panel vis­i­ble in Re­shape mode
• Hide Re­shape tool for poly­gon edit­ing
• Add a scale­bar
• Add an ex­per­i­men­tal globe mode
• Im­prove map load­ing in­di­ca­tors
• Fix a small er­ror in re­ported map scale
• Dis­able map pitch when 3D mode is dis­abled

Edit­ing bug fixes

We fixed many small bugs with edit­ing fea­tures:

• Fix snap­ping be­hav­ior for mul­ti­part lines
• Im­proved Topo­log­i­cal erase tool to more cor­rectly find in­ter­sec­tions; par­tial fix for rep­e­ti­tion of lines.
• Fix re­shap­ing of mul­ti­part fea­tures
• Fixes for larger datasets in Spa­tialite:
  • Much quicker in­ter­nal im­ple­men­ta­tion for snap­ping
  • Au­to­mat­i­cally split large fea­tures by num­ber of ver­tices for ef­fi­ciency
• Im­prove con­tin­u­ous up­date mode for topol­ogy (al­though this still has a few no­table bugs).
• Im­prove­ments to in­ter­nal thread­ing model

Now that the hard work of up­grad­ing the fun­da­men­tals is done, we’re ex­cited to be mov­ing for­ward at a faster clip!