GNOME 20 is almost upon us, and it's going to be a really impressive release, especially since many of its components are getting important upgrades, like GNOME Maps, for example.

When the first edition of GNOME Maps landed just a couple of years ago, it was really hard to picture its place in the stack. It's an application that doesn't have any kind of competition, which might be a good indication that it's needed.

GNOME Maps remained pretty simple for much of its life, but things started to change a few months ago, and more features started to land. Since this application takes advantage of the OpenStreetMap database, it makes sense that users could interact with this resource on a deeper level. So now it's possible to edit the map straight from the GNOME Maps.

GNOME Maps becomes even more interesting

The new GNOME 20 is scheduled to land by the end of March, and developers have been instructed to prepare for the feature freeze. After this point in the development, cycle developer will have to focus only on bug fixes.

“Now we also show a link to the place's official website (if one is tagged in OSM, of course) and likewise for the phone number (theoretically, the phone number should turn into a clickable tel: URI link if you have an app installed that has registered a mime handler for that, but I didn't find have one, neither Empathy, Ekiga, or Skype seems to do it,” developer Marcus Lundblad explains.

The ability to edit the OSM maps is cool, and since this is more or less the only application of its kind in the Linux ecosystem, we expect to see more improvements made to it in the coming months.

Also, GNOME Maps seems to be present in many distributions by default, so it's going to get a lot of fans.