Friday, October 4, 2013

WhirlyGlobe-Maply 2.2 Beta3

The WhirlyGlobe-Maply 2.2 beta #3 is live on the master branch on github.  You can work with the precompiled distribution as well.

Yeah, I'm repeating myself.

What's New

Mostly bug fixes, but there is some new functionality of note.

  • Elevation Support - It's in there, hooked up at the Component level so go wild.  The test app also has a nice data set.  Look in the Washington state area.  Upper left in the U! S! A! for those of you overseas.
  • Basemap animation - I'm still messing with it.  Be warned.  Sure looks cool.
  • Multi-texture support - In at a low level.  Not much to see here yet, but hints of things to come.
  • Image paging layers changed quite a lot.
    • Each one gets its own thread.  This lets them be incredibly anti-social.
    • They work in a metered mode where they're tracking frame boundaries.  This reduces latency to the renderer.  Think: render, switch, render, switch, and so on.
    • Reload will now appear to switch instantly if all the tiles are local and it doesn't take too long.  This is nice for things like weather layers.
    • There's a mode to wait for all outstanding loads before switching to new geometry.  This looks great for local tile sets when loading is fast.  I'm ambivalent about how it looks for remote tile sets.  You've go the knobs, go twiddle.
  • QuadImageTilesLayer - I've consolidated all the image paging functionality at the top level in a single layer.  You can now mess with fairly advanced settings to your hearts' content.  The defaults are fine for most uses.
  • Xcode5 / iOS7 Support - It was mostly there before.  Now it's all pretty much there.  If it doesn't work then maybe it's you.  Ever consider that?
  • The death of -all_load - The Objective-C categories used to cause no end of trouble linking.  Now they don't.
  • Maply Fixes - Flat map 2D mode is working better and a user was kind enough to add rotation.
  • Documentation.  Lots and lots and lots of documentation.  Boy am I ever sick of writing documentation.
The image paging caused a bit of heartburn and I considered holding off to 2.3.  But damn, it's sweet, so I went ahead anyway.  The elevation support seems solid, but there are some obvious things it could do.  Animation is still a bit wonky.

The Future

This is it for big changes in the beta.  I've got a few more bugs I'm eyeballing.  I'm sure others will turn up, but I think beta3 is pretty stable.

Next up is 2.3, which should be fairly minor.  I'm thinking vector map updates, more on the animation, and whatever else I get paid for.  The big architectural changes are on hold until 3.0.

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