Dear all, it has been a while, but some stuff has been going on in the SMASH community. And we now have a new release. So let's have a look at what is new.
We farewell the play store
It is a while we have additional work to do and are loosing usability in SMASH due to the restrictions imposed by the google store. The most impacting has sure been the fact to not be able to access the phone memory freely. And asking google permission to do so didn't work out, since it seems that only file browsers applications and antivirus need to access the memory freely.
With the help of the F-Droid community (special thanks to IzzySoft, Linsu and Licaon-kter) we have been able to make our second appearance on the f-Droid store. And that is now enough to completely migrate there. So we made a last release of SMASH for the store today, but it will be the last one. Please from now on come and get SMASH from the F-Droid store, where the real open source apps live.
Flutter map
We finally made an upgrade of flutter_map, the map widget library used. This took so long, because the architecture of the library had changed and took some rework inside SMASH.
And now on to the new features:
Geometries inside forms
One nice addition that we have to thank Luca Delucchi and the Digiagriapp for is the possibility to insert inside of complex notes.
URL based forms combos
It is now possible to insert in forms URLs to substitute long item lists in comboboxes (dropdown lists). This allows forms to be smaller in case of large amounts of items and also to be more dynamic.
Gejson layer support
Geojson is now one of the supported formats in read and write mode (together with geopackage and postgis). It can be used in combination with sld styling as for the other vector formats.
More efficient toolbar
The toolbar has been redone with more usability in mind.
Editing is done on a sidebar now:
and in the settings it is possible to remove unused buttons:
leads to:
Other tiny things that might be worth telling
- now the default behavior of tile maps is to zoom beyond the max zoom level by scaling (no more white emptiness)
- the current log panel has now 3 sizes for better overlay on map
- the info tool is now a box selection tool and as such way more usable
- online sources have been reworked to have the possibility to add and remove from the default. Also the default maps have been reviewed to ensure they are working
- feature info now also presents the length and area of the geometry as derived value
- we did many many bugfixes
One last thing to add. SMASH 1.8 already presents the possibility to import layers from the new GSS server. This is still in testing mode and ongoing work with the Region Piemonte and not yet disseminated as such. Just to give an idea, it will be possible to generate database tables on the server based on form definitions and download the tables as layers from the GSS and sync them two-ways. Also it will allow for point, line and polygon geometries. All in all it will be an alternative way to take notes, still using the form system and having a way to synchronize data to teh central server instance. But well, this will probably be the next story to tell, once testing is done.
Enjoy!!
