GNOME Releases Maps, Geoclue2

GNOME has two new components for the upcoming GNOME 3.10 release: Maps and Geoclue2. These two GNOME packages saw their first official releases this week.

Geoclue2 was announced on Wednesday as a rewrite of Geoclue. Geoclue2 is intended to support GPS receivers, 3G modems, WiFi-based positioning, and IP address geolocation in order to provide geolocation support. Over the original Geoclue, the Geoclue2 component provides a single D-Bus service to abstract the different geolocation back-ends and also gives the end-user controls over what applications can access their location data.

GNOME Maps meanwhile is a new map application for GNOME 3. GNOME Maps should be around beta quality by the GNOME 3.10 release in September. More of the plans for Maps are expressed on the GNOME Wiki.

This week there were also other new GNOME package releases for the GNOME 3.9.5 development milestone. GNOME 3.10 final is expected for release on 25 September.