
Mepo is a fast, simple, and hackable OSM map viewer for desktop & mobile
Linux devices (like the PinePhone, Librem 5, pmOS devices etc.) and both
environment's various user interfaces (Wayland & X inclusive). Mepo
works both offline and online, features a minimalist both touch/mouse
and keyboard compatible interface, and offers a UNIX-philosophy
inspired underlying design, exposing a powerful command language called
Mepolang capable of being
scripted to provide things like custom bounding-box search scripts,
bookmarks, and more.
#Features
- Fast & usable in resource-constrained environments:
- Mepo launches quickly and runs quickly on the PinePhone and other
resource-constrained devices.
- Mepo renders using SDL which keeps things fast and lightweight;
also as a bonus: portable.
- Built in a non GC'd language (Zig) with an aim toward careful
memory usage and allocations/deallocations
- UNIX-philosophy inspired design - scriptability via mepolang:
- Mepo's UI is built to do one thing well: download & render maps.
Extra functionality is enabled via its command language / API (Mepolang).
- Reduces overall application logic complexity, handing over to
shell-scripting integral features like map bounding-box searches,
location search lookup, bookmarking, dropping pins, routing,
rebinding keys, and more.
- Uses single abstraction (central pin API via Mepolang) for indicating
and placing user-defined coordinates graphically on the map (e.g. same
mechanism used generically between POI searches, bookmarks, routing, etc.)
- Existing OSM tools for search & routing like the Nominatim,
Overpass, and
GraphHopper APIs are integrated through
bundled shell scripts;
customize to your heart's content or write your own scripts for
custom integrations.
- Bundled scripts utilize menuing and user input functionality via
zenity rather then
implementing application-specific input logic.
- Offline operation as a first-class feature:
- Downloading of maps for later offline use can be done non-interactively
through a command-line flag.
- Users can download based on a bounding-box or a user-specified radius
from a specific point for multiple zoom levels.
- Offline usage is a primary usecase and should be treated as such, we
can't assume a user is always online.
- Supports touch AND keyboard-oriented operation:
- A map application must of course be usable with a mouse / touch,
but the keyboard as a tool for map navigation has been overlooked in
in map applications.
- Provides vi-like (& customizable) keybindings out-of-the-box.
- Should be usable in touch-oriented environments like the PinePhone and
similar where a physical keyboard isn't present.
- Compatible across multiple Linux mobile environments including: Phosh,
Plasma Mobile, Sxmo, and Swmo. Being written in SDL ensures good support
and portability to other future environments as well.
#Documentation Website
Mepo has a documentation website which lives at: mepo.milesalan.com
#Roadmap to 1.0 release
- Milestone 1: Overall Stability (Complete: 10/31/2021, tag: 0.1)
- Done:
- Improve current stability of the application and resolve intermittent
crashes related to tile downloading.
- Implement tile downloading retry logic and handle case where user is
offline gracefully
- Error check invalid PNG tile data received from tile servers & loaded
from filesystem.
- Rework consistency of allocator passing (e.g. remove ad hoc allocators,
ensure all allocations based on using top-level allocator via arena
allocation).
- Rework blitting logic to be more intelligent about not drawing off-screen
entities & pins.
- Implement LIFO for downloading queue: viewport tiles should always take
priority before long-queued off-screen tiles.
- Refactor error handling logic & use utility function rather than zig
dbg.
- Implement togglable text debug message overlay to provide user feedback
right in UI when operations like shell pipe fail.
- Add togglable help text overlay to show current results of bind_key
(keybindings table) mapping in UI.
- Fix bug where negative latitude values fail to round-trip between
lat-to-y / y-to-lat conversion functions.
- Implement debug mode preference or similar to control verbosity of
debugging STDERR messages.
- Resolve existing memory leaks in the application.
- Provide an initial tag for package maintainers (0.1).
- Milestone 2: Offline Mode & Non-Interactive Downloading
(Complete: 12/06/2021, tag: 0.2)
- Done:
- Add error handling logic to existing bounding-box based Mepolang download
command to ensure valid bounding-box provided by user.
- Rework main application / boot logic to enable fully non-interactive mode
(free of SDL/Video context) to allow for CLI-based downloading of tiles.
- Remove SDL delay from TileCache downloading logic / properly wait on file
descriptors instead using curl_multi_wait.
- Add a shell script to allow downloading either interactively or
non-interactively based on Nominatim search query result so you can say
download an entire city for example.
- Parameterize max number of concurrent downloads as a setting accessible
via prefset.
- Add configuration parameter to set an offline mode; when set to true
all tile downloading logic should no-operation for the privacy and
bandwidth conscience.
- Rework UI logic to adjust downloading bar to not overlap with pin details
overlay.
- Create Mepolang command to selectively clear download cache so
tiles can be updated if outdated. (Note: decided to implemented expiry
seconds preference instead)
- Add radius-based download command allowing user to download tiles based on
coordinate with a given radius (km distance) for specified zoom-levels.
- Add distance to lat-lon conversion functions to assist in above (along
with unit tests) and to later be used for measuring distance between
pins in ordered groups.
- Milestone 3: Powerful, Robust Pin API (Complete: 01/30/2022, tag: 0.3)
- Done:
- Correct pin-selection mode cycling to properly respect delta values.
- Allow ability to associate metadata with pins.
- Fix existing pin bugs (e.g. title not showing properly & brittleness).
- Allow pin groups to be either ordered or unordered, ordered pin groups
show in UI with connecting lines (thus enabling lightweight navigation).
- Implement distinction between structural pins and informational pins for
ordered pin groups wherein structural pins are the nodes in a way and
informational pins can be used for navigational cues.
- Add script to add pins based on Nominatim bounding box results in
addition to the existing Overpass pin script.
- Implement bind_click Mepolang API command to run arbitrary Mepolang
on clicking specific button (left, right click) 1-n times. Will enable
more sophisticated scripts (e.g. such as click to define points in
custom route / ordered pin group) in future.
- Add support for click pin to activate.
- Add pin groups and extend API as such so user can visually distinguish
groups; for example one pin group may be bookmarks, another for a search,
another for current location.
- Implement command for removing specific pins based on handle.
- Add ability to cycle through pins based on both: viewport visible pins
and all pins.
- Add script to convert XML Relation & Way from OSM API into ordered
pin group(s) for testing purposes. Also should help for transit-specific
and other overlays etc. (Implemented as overpass relation lookup instead
as XML response doesn't have coordinates for each node entry - effect is
same)
- Milestone 4: Wayland & Mobile Support (Complete: 3/22/2022, tag: 0.4)
- Done:
- Improve support for pinch-to-zoom using SDL multitouch gesture API to be
more reliable and test on PinePhone & mobile devices.
- Rework pinch-to-zoom to not be hardcoded but to instead use new Mepolang
command (bind_gesture).
- Add support for rotate gesture via SDL multitouch gesture API and expose
as part of bind_gesture command.
- Currently scripts for location search, bounding-box search,
and similar use dmenu (X-based); integrate wofi, bemenu, or a similar
tool for Wayland. Dynamically determine which menuing system to use
in scripts.
- Allow binding left hand/right hand side of pin overlay via new
(bind_button) command and set to pin_cycle by default. Thus enabling
touch-based pin-cycling for navigation. (Implemented buttons as
arbitrary used-defined bar on bottom right corner)
- Build out context-menu to be used in mobile-context allowing functionality
triggered on desktop via keybindings for search etc. to be simply triggered
on mobile.
- Add to default Mepolang configuration trigger to open context-menu either
via bind_gesture or bind_click.
- Perform testing and make fixes as necessary on most common UIs on
postmarketOS. Primarily test and ensure compatibility with Phosh
(mobile Wayland), Swmo (mobile Wayland), Sxmo (mobile X), Sway
(desktop Wayland), and i3 (desktop X) as these 5 environments encompass
large userbases and represent the 4 different combinations of
mobile/desktop & X/Wayland that should all have first-class support.
- Rework SDL defaults (window expose, winch, default sizing etc.) to ensure
greatest cross-compatibility between environments.
- Milestone 5: UI Niceties (Complete: 8/15/2022, tag: 0.5)
- Done:
- Add visual per-tile-downloading progress-indicators.
- Add support for pasting / copying current coordinates from the system
clipboard and ensure compatibility in both Wayland & X.
- Rework main application event loop to handle STDIN file descriptor in
parallel to current SDL events processing. So commandline of application
can thus be used non-interactively / scripted. Also helpful for debugging.
- Gracefully handle switching tile sources (e.g. purge cache & reload).
Should be able to switch between OSM/bikemaps/stamen etc. without
glitches.
- Add routing script based on GraphHopper, OpenRouteService, or similar
to parse GeoJSON LineString API response into an ordered pin group. Thus
allowing for point-to-point navigation.
- Implement save state / restore state Mepolang API command that dumps
current state to file (as Mepolang) / and can restore via loading file.
- Make shell pipe non-blocking (e.g. don't freeze UI while waiting for
result) or otherwise implement timeout so that runaway scripts don't
freeze application.
- Refine existing Overpass search script (provide better recommendations
illustrating OSM tag-based flexibility).
- Add example bookmarking script based on pin API.
- Improve bottom status bar display to show bandwidth usage / download of
tiles, disk, and memory usage.
- Finalize Mepolang 1.0 API and add error checking so things don't crash
when accessing invalid union tag etc (improve robustness of mepolang
parser).
- Integrate gpsd into a script to update user's current location pin and
fallback to geoclue2 as needed.
- Autoupdate user current location either through introducing
bind_interval command or continously running async_shellpipe script.
- Milestone 6: Documentation & Packaging (Complete: 9/29/2022, tag: 1.0)
- Done:
- Add manpage documenting Mepolang commands and basic usage.
- Add markdown-based documentation to explain mepolang commands, usage
in parity with man page.
- Add prefs documentation to manpage
- Modify internals of prefset / preferences table to automatically generate
documentation directly from code / structs.
- Modify internals of Mepolang to include documentation directly in
structs so that Mepolang API documentation can be automatically generated
as a webpage for end-users.
- Document existing scripts used for search, routing, etc. and add notes
about how these scripts could be used offline by running Nominatim,
Overpass, GraphHopper, etc. locally.
- Document examples on how to write custom scripts interfacing with
mepolang.
- Create Alpine package and add to pmOS postmarketos-ui-* frontends.
(Note: depends on zig which is in testing , so cannot be directly
added at the moment and is more of a pmOS admin decision)
- Work with maintainers of mobile Linux (& PinePhone) UIs to get
Mepo integrated properly.
- Tag 1.0 release.
- Package-split current
scripts/
directory to allow separate packages
for mepo and mepo-scripts. The former only will contain the base
application (Zig) executable; the latter will contain auxiliary scripts.
- Milestone 7: Documentation Website (Complete: 9/30/2022)
- Done:
- Development of a documentation website
- Docs section: highlighting the various end-user documentation guides &
tutorials (such as the installation guide, userguide, scripting guide,
mepolang documentation etc.).
- Contribute section: information on how to contribute,
links to repository, bug tracker, mailing list, IRC, and details on
how to get involved.
- Videos section: to demonstrate both end-user functionality (such as with
the video created for 0.4),
and additionally this section could host new screencasts showing how to
hack on mepo (e.g. examples of showing editing mepolang configuration
and showing the end result; rather then just 'end-user' functionality
as was the target with the 0.4 demo video).
- Screencasts for userconfig/scripts
- General QA pass on entire website typos/links/etc
- Milestone 8: Additional Mobile Enviroments Compatibility - PlaMo & Lomiri (Complete: 9/29/2022)
- Done:
- Add support for PlaMo (investigate bemenu compatbility, if unavailable something.
like zenity or another window-based input method may be used). Note: integrated
via zenity
- Investigate & possibly add Flatpak compatability as this will likely
be the simplest packaging route for Ubuntu Touch etc. Note: Flatpak created
and added to Flathub.
- Add support for Lomiri (Note: cut support due to incompatbilites with Mir, see mailing list note
for more details)
#Funding
NLnet has kindly awarded a grant to support Mepo's
development efforts as part of the NGI0 Discovery Fund under grant
agreement No 825322. This funding will enable the financial support
for implementing of the roadmap to reach 1.0 as seen above. We are
very thankful to NLnet for accepting our application and making this
development possible!
#Icon
The app icon used in Phosh and by the .desktop
file was designed by
iccqton.
#Contributing
Mepo is surely welcome to contributors who have experience or interest
in mobile Linux, OSM, and/or Zig.