This morning I’ve made a an announcement on Twitter about Maperitive finally being released. You can download it from here.

I’d like to stress that work on Maperitive is far from finished. This release is just the first one I felt confident enough to send to the public, both in terms of stability and in terms of functionality it offers.
I’ll be posting more on how to use it, but let’s first take a look on what it currently provides and what it lacks.

The Good

OK, first some of the stuff I think you’ll find interesting:

  • New rendering rules system: it’s more powerful, more flexible and (I think) easier to write.
  • Linux, Mac: due to improvements in Mono and also due to the new code, Maperitive now seems to be working on Linux and Mac without any major problems.
  • Scripting: everything Maperitive offers is available through scripting commands. This makes automating stuff much easier.
  • Auto-updating: I’ve devoted a lot of effort on making Maperitive update itself automatically when a new version is available. There are some glitches on Mac, however.
  • Querying: you can now use the same query “language” used in rendering rules to look for stuff on the maps.
  • Relief contours: they’re back! Since I started working on Maperitive, I simply didn’t have any time to fix contours generation on Kosmos.

And last, but the most important: Maperitive right now is more of a framework than a finished product. What does this mean? The main reason I started rewriting Kosmos code was to make it easier to add new features. This has now been achieved, to a large extent. What comes next is actually adding these features.

The Bad

Now the bad parts:

  • GUI: as you will see, it’s pretty vacant :) . A few months ago I decided not to spend too much effort on making Maperitive look like Kosmos. That would have taken me at least a couple of months of more work before I could actually release anything. But that doesn’t mean the user interface will not improve in the near future!
  • Features: Maperitive does not offer everything Kosmos did. Again, the number one task for me right now is to add all Kosmos stuff to Maperitive.

The Ugly

Yes, it’s GUI again :) . Linux and Mac users will have to suffer a pretty ugly interface. I guess this is the price of cheap portability: Maperitive currently runs on different platforms with virtually the same code base (again, thanks to Mono guys). If you notice any big issues, please write (you can use send-feedback command in Maperitive to write to me directly).

Off to write some code.