GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 752253
Improve About dialog
Last modified: 2017-11-22 17:12:17 UTC
Hello, I am just a user, and as such did't find the following information to be accessable somewhere in the application: (a) Who provides the maps? Please do not only leave this to the watermark in the image of the street or satellite map, but state it clearly in a HELP or ABOUT menu. (b) To which date refers the shown street or satellite map? Please comment this somewhere easy readable outside of the shon image. (c) To whom am I tracable by my map request, who receives my request with metadata about my location (IP, MAC, etc...) and at which step in the pipeline this metadata becomes invisble to a map provider or other third party? Who actually is the second party? Please state also this clearly in a HELP or ABOUT menu. I really like your gnome-maps application from what I saw and tested today, but lack of this information somewhere visible inside the app, and EVEN on the "https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Maps" page NOTHING about it, finally neither having found it by Google on the internet, scares! Hope this short user review helps you and Gnome and everybody. Sorry if this is the wrong place for a user feedback, I neither found another place where I could address my request to. Thanks!
Hi! Thanks for registering on the GNOME Bugzilla and writing this! Much appreciated! About (b) I do not think we readily have that information available atm, (a) we get the maps from MapQuest (via libchamplain, https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/libchamplain, which is the MapWidget we use) and I do not think we get any status on when the tiles was last rendered. From the openstreetmap MapQuest wiki I got this "The map data is updated approximately every 15 minutes" - http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/MapQuest#How_often_is_the_data_updated.3F (c) Maps connect, via HTTPS to: nominatim.openstreetmaps.org - for geocoding, forward and reverse mqcdn.com - for mapquest tiles graphhopper.com - for route planning And I am unsure, atm, where the geoclue library goes to find your location. That is however only done if you have enabled location service in the GNOME privacy panel. Thanks for your feedback! I think we want to add information about what services we use, and for what somewhere. Possible in the About dialog. The date of Map update I do not think is feasible atm, and should in that case be a bug against libchamplain. Who provides the Maps. Maybe, Maybe the "Watermark" could be made more prominent or we could add license and source some other place as well. I am marking this as a gnome-love bug. To make it a nice entry point to get a first patch in to GNOME. I am willing to mentor any one that wants to give this a shot. Thanks again.
Hey.Im interested in working on this bug, how should I start?
I mean how do I start building about an About Dialog Box?
Created attachment 316494 [details] [review] Updated About Dialog Box:
I updated the about dialog box displaying the data you've mentioned.I'm uploading a png too to show you how it looks. Any suggestions/feedback?
Created attachment 316495 [details] Updated About Dialog Box with information about technologies used
Review of attachment 316494 [details] [review]: Hi! Thanks for the patch! I think we can do better than this! Both in amount of information and in layout. Maybe we could ask hour designer Andreas for help here. Do we have any prior art? Any about windows in GNOME3 that look really good? Jonas
I'll check it out and let you know
I checked a few about windows out.Honestly,they all look the same. If we could get a designers help here, we can put some information up in a seperate tab,kinda like a help overlay.
(In reply to Jonas Danielsson from comment #1) > Hi! > > Thanks for registering on the GNOME Bugzilla and writing this! Much > appreciated! > > About (b) I do not think we readily have that information available atm, (a) > we get the maps from MapQuest (via libchamplain, > https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/libchamplain, which is the MapWidget we use) > and I do not think we get any status on when the tiles was last rendered. > From the openstreetmap MapQuest wiki I got this "The map data is updated > approximately every 15 minutes" - > http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/MapQuest#How_often_is_the_data_updated.3F > > (c) > > Maps connect, via HTTPS to: > > nominatim.openstreetmaps.org - for geocoding, forward and reverse > mqcdn.com - for mapquest tiles > graphhopper.com - for route planning > > And I am unsure, atm, where the geoclue library goes to find your location. > That is however only done if you have enabled location service in the GNOME > privacy panel. > For the WiFi-based location service, it gets the data from Mozilla´s location service. > > Thanks for your feedback! I think we want to add information about what > services we use, and for what somewhere. Possible in the About dialog. The > date of Map update I do not think is feasible atm, and should in that case > be a bug against libchamplain. > > Who provides the Maps. Maybe, Maybe the "Watermark" could be made more > prominent or we could add license and source some other place as well. > > I am marking this as a gnome-love bug. To make it a nice entry point to get > a first patch in to GNOME. I am willing to mentor any one that wants to give > this a shot. > > Thanks again.
We also use the third party geojson-vt (https://github.com/mapbox/geojson-vt) library. Ought that License be mentioned somewhere in the app? As Karanbir mentioned, not too many GNOME apps seem to include third party license information....
The About dialog really should credit the data providers and services.
Created attachment 342799 [details] [review] Updated About page #752253 Added a line indicating that the App is powered by OpenStreetMap and GraphHopper along with an update to the Copyright year to 2017 as suggested.
Created attachment 342800 [details] Screenshot
Review of attachment 342799 [details] [review]: ::: src/mainWindow.js @@ +440,3 @@ /* Translators: This is the program name. */ program_name: _("Maps"), + comments: _("A map application for GNOME\n Powered by OpenStreetMap and GraphHooper"), I'm not sure I like the "Powered by" expression. Also we have the tile generation (where we don't use services provided by OSM, currently we use Mapbox's tile service). Furthermore we have the Mozilla location service (which we use via Geoclue), but I don't know how much we should mention in the about box. Any other opinions?
(In reply to Marcus Lundblad from comment #15) > Review of attachment 342799 [details] [review] [review]: > > ::: src/mainWindow.js > @@ +440,3 @@ > /* Translators: This is the program name. */ > program_name: _("Maps"), > + comments: _("A map application for GNOME\n Powered by > OpenStreetMap and GraphHooper"), > > I'm not sure I like the "Powered by" expression. I had thought of using "Powered by" since it is mentioned in Google's ToS for Google Maps for developers. Although, I skimmed through the ToS of MapBox and they don't require any such thing other than on the map itself. (I'm guessing here) > Also we have the tile generation (where we don't use services provided by > OSM, currently we use Mapbox's tile service). > Furthermore we have the Mozilla location service (which we use via Geoclue), > but I don't know how much we should mention in the about box. > Any other opinions? One other possibility is to add something like has been done by Polari. (https://github.com/GNOME/polari/blob/ca31a31074d46206dcc2cb05a8e5290389dfa36e/src/application.js#L593) It uses a label ("Learn more about Polari") for the website instead of simply displaying "website" like Maps does. We already mention a lot in https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Maps and we could do something similar. Also, if required, we can add an extra paragraph mentioning other technologies we might have not currently listed there.
I'm also thinking we should credit the tile provider (currently Mapbox). One idea might to extend the service definition file with a provider name and URL and display it (if available).
Regarding this idea with crediting the tile provider, this is something we discussed during the video conf meeting with Mapbox. My idea is to add tileProviderName and tileProviderURL as additional properties of the service definition file, and if these are available display this as addition information in the about dialog. Anyone wanting to take on this, a way to test out adding new stuff to the service file is to copy the one in the checkout (data/maps-service.json) to somewhere, edit this file and run Maps with the enviroment variable MAPS_SERVICE set, something like: MAPS_SERVICE=~/my-maps-service.json <command to run maps>
Created attachment 364079 [details] [review] maps-service: Add tile provider info for fallback
Created attachment 364080 [details] [review] mainWindow: Show OSM and tile provider credits Always show OpenStreetMap credits in the About dialog. Show tile provider credits dynamically based on definition from the service file. This is done in a somewhat hackish way, since currently GtkAboutDialog doesn't natively support markup in the copyright string, solution borrowed from Weather.
Created attachment 364146 [details] [review] mainWindow: Show OSM and tile provider credits Always show OpenStreetMap credits in the About dialog. Show tile provider credits dynamically based on definition from the service file. This is done in a somewhat hackish way, since currently GtkAboutDialog doesn't natively support markup in the copyright string, solution borrowed from Weather.
Attachment 364079 [details] pushed as 5609c59 - maps-service: Add tile provider info for fallback Attachment 364146 [details] pushed as a3c7609 - mainWindow: Show OSM and tile provider credits