WhirlyGlobe-Maply 2.3 Beta 2

It's finally time to release WhirlyGlobe-Maply 2.3 into the wild.  I've been using it for some time and, sure, you could have always switched to the develop branch, but hey, release!

Courtesy Gravitystorm

Thanks go out to the contributors on this version.  This one's seen the biggest set of contributions from people other than me.

Let's get to it.

Where to Get WhirlyGlobe-Maply 2.3

For the source distribution, head over to github, clone the repository and switch to the develop_2_3 branch.  Be sure to update your submodules.

You can also download the binary distribution.

Documentation for 2.3 can be found here.

What's new In WhirlyGlobe-Maply 2.3

It's a huge list of new features.  I'll be working my way through blog posts for the next several weeks.  For now, here's the short version grouped for my own amusement.

Housekeeping

Here's the stuff that doesn't fit well into another theme.

• 64 bit device support.
• Xcode 5.1 is supported.
• OpenGL ES 3.0 is supported.
• Tessellation bugs are now fixed.
• EAC/ETC2 texture compression was added.
• High resolution jiggliness was fixed in images, vectors, annotations and screen objects
• Resources submodule is smaller
• Background CPU usage is much lower for paging layers.
• Screen shapshots are now possible
• MaplyTexture was added for explicit texture management
• Animation is available through the startChanges/endChanges methods.

Maps / Maply

How about features that are useful in flat maps?  This version saw a lot of improvements to the Maply side of things.  It's quite the credible map toolkit now. 

• Wrapping across the date line, for data display, selection, gestures, and overlay.
• Vector tile support
• Mapnik vector tile support
• Seriously, go check this one out
• New gestures for 2D
• Screen importance logic is short circuited (e.g. faster) for 2D

Gestures & Feedback

This version saw a host of new gestures, particularly for 2D and improvements in the feedback methods for delegates.

• Heading control
• North up panning in the globe
• Double tap, two finger tap, tap hold and drag.
• Location animation control via delegate.
• Feedback with the didStartMoving/didStopMoving/willStoopMoving methods
• Screen to geo and geo to screen calculations
• Viewing bounds calculations for setting height to show a set of features
• MaplyAnnotation added.
• These are nice annotations based on the SMCalloutView library

Quadtree Paging Layers

The paging layers, both for general features and for imagery saw a ton of changes.  These are the things that handle vector tile and image based paging.

• Single and multi-level loading.
• This means you don't have to always load from level 0
• Animation in quad image layer and the multiplex loader.  Think weather.
• Changing color, enabling/disabling, reset/reload, changing tile sources.
• Switched to AFNetworking, handles lots of requests better.
• Broke the remote source from the tile info.
• WMS improvements
• Background overhead is much lower.

Wrapup

This was a big release.  Hard to believe I'm also working on 3.0 for Android.  At some point those will be merged, but there's no real hurry for the iOS users.

I'd like to do more documentation for this version.  I've got someone working on getting started examples for a globe and map.  We'll see if those help.

Anyway, 2.3 is pretty well tested.  I'll put it out there for a week or so to see what turns up and then make it official.

Next up, more blog posts describing what's in it.