GNOME Maps is one of the many components of the GNOME stack, and it looks like the upcoming 3.20 version will get some pretty cool features.

Not all the packages get big improvements when they move from one version to another. In fact, for many packages in the GNOME stack, not a lot happens. GNOME Maps is not one of those apps, and it's becoming more useful with each new release.

We had a hard time figuring out what the role of GNOME Maps is when they started to implement it by default in various distros, Fedora being the most prominent of the bunch. This is likely just something out of the ordinary since the other similar apps are not available. From the looks of it, GNOME Maps is starting to get some pretty cools options, and we also think of features that could land, sooner or later.

GNOME Maps is getting better

Developers have explained some of the features that are going to land, and they chose this moment because the project is going to hit the UI freeze milestone pretty soon and no new modifications will be made past this point, with the exception of bug fixes.

"We have had support to open a location with other applications for a while. New in 3.20 will be Open with the browser. That will send you to the OpenStreetMap page for the location in question. Maps in 3.20 will be able to handle the 'geo' URI scheme. That means that if you follow the link in the previous sentence and go to the wiki page and click on a geo: URI, your browser will suggest that you open the URI with Maps," GNOME Maps maintainer Jonas wrote.

GNOME Maps is also going to support GeoJSON files, and users will be able to export the current view to a PNG file format so that it's no longer necessary to use other tools for screenshots.

One of the coolest features that are coming to GNOME Maps is also the ability to edit OpenStreetMap straight from the application, which sounds like a great idea.

GNOME 3.20 is expected to arrive on March 23, 2016.