Hi everyone,

A new version of MapComplete has been deployed. It has a lot of exciting new themes and features, which I’d like to highlight in this diary entry.

New themes

The Flemish touristical agency (Toerisme Vlaanderen) has asked me to create a tool to help them to map charging stations, restaurants, café’s, …

This has resulted in quite some fun new themes:

• The theme with charging stations has improved tremendously and now asks which plug types are available, how much power these plugs output, …
• One with pubs and cafés
• One with restaurants and fast food
• One with publicly accessible towers with a panoramic view
• One with binoculars

At last, the theme I’ve quickly made as demo with hackerspaces and makerspaces is online as well.

Other improvements

At the same time, I’ve been doing lots of work on improving performance. A lot has changed under the hood, resulting in a way more robust and fast experience. On high zoom levels, the OSM-API is used directly, bypassing overpass all together. If overpass-api.de is down, failover to other instances is now builtin. At last, caching is a bit more aggressive and if the data on your machine is recent, no new data is loaded at all.

Earlier releases had some important features to, which I’d like to highlight as they can be important for theme builders:

• A layer can configure filters
• A layer can demand to have ‘precise input’, showing an extra draggable map (with e.g. aerial photography) when a new point is added to the map.
• A new point can be snapped to an already existing road, e.g. when adding a bollard
• A layer can define that a point can be (soft) deleted
• The new Mapillary-API has been integrated
• Some themes have a download-button enabled to download as GeoJson or as CSV

I need your help!

As usual, your contribution is invaluable as well! An easy way to contribute to MapComplete is by translating parts to your language. This can easily be done on Weblate and takes only a few minutes to get started.

If you want to make your own map theme on MapComplete, that is possible to. If you know OSM well, you can set up your own theme pretty quickly too. All documentation can be found here. If you have a cool theme, I’m very happy to merge them!

At last, I’m working on a small theme that shows what something is named after based on wikidata. However, I’m still searching for a decent icon for this.