Choosing a town moved the camera and then left the reader to work out which of
the settlements now on screen was the one they asked for. A town has no precise
position, so the map now marks its centre: a white disc under a coloured dot,
drawn as a style layer so the native renderer keeps it pinned through every pan
and zoom. The radar frames are inserted below it, because a band of rain must
not paint over the one thing that says which town this is.
A searched municipality becomes a PointTarget rather than being thrown away as
"the whole region". It is marked, the recentre button returns to it, and the
chip names it - but it is never persisted, so looking something up no longer
costs the user the place their app opens on. That was a real defect: searching
went through select(FreeTarget), which wrote null over the stored preference.
Following the device was broken outright. MapLibre reports a camera animation
the app started exactly as it reports the user grabbing the map, so engaging
follow and then animating to the position cancelled the follow it had just
started; the resulting FreeTarget then re-framed the whole region. Follow now
moves the camera first and switches tracking on second, and FreeTarget no longer
moves the camera as a reaction to the state changing - framing the region is an
action, so panning away while following keeps the view the user panned to.
Verified on the emulator with a fix in Turin: a searched town is marked and
saveable, the app reopens on it with the marker in place, following centres on
the blue dot, and panning stops the chase without yanking the map away.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Puts the controls that change what the map is looking at over the map itself,
where they act, and gives them something to search.
Search is one field, not two. A string either parses as coordinates or it does
not, and the answer is obvious from the text, so making the user declare up
front which kind of thing they are looking for would be asking them to do the
program's job. Coordinates accept decimal and degrees-minutes-seconds, comma or
space separated, with hemisphere letters — including the Italian O for ovest,
because someone reading an Italian map will type it and silently reading it as
east would put them the wrong side of Greenwich.
The 1180 Piedmont municipalities are bundled rather than geocoded online. The
app is region-scoped, so a list of one region's towns is small enough to ship
(100 KB) and beats a geocoder on every axis that matters: instant, offline, no
API key, no rate limit, and it cannot return a result somewhere the app has no
radar for. Matching folds accents, so "aglie" finds "Agliè", and prefix matches
outrank substring ones — typing "tor" should surface Torino, not the first
alphabetical name that happens to contain those letters.
tool/generate_places.py derives the list from Istat boundary shapefiles
(CC BY 4.0). Two properties of that file cost time and are now written down:
the geometry is UTM 32N rather than degrees, and the DBF is UTF-8 despite one
bilingual Friulian record that makes strict cp1252 fail. A terminal renders
utf-8 and latin-1 output identically, so the encoding cannot be settled by
looking at printed text — it took dumping codepoints. A guard in the generator
and a test against the shipped asset both check for mojibake now, and the guard
caught a real mistake the moment it was written.
The target selector switches between following the device, a saved place, and
the whole region, and the selection doubles as what the app reopens on: "the
place I marked" and "what I see when I open the app" are one idea to the person
using it. Dragging the map while it is following stops the camera chasing them
but leaves that preference alone, because looking somewhere else now is not the
same as changing their mind about next launch.
The position marker and the following are MapLibre's own, driven by
onCameraTrackingDismissed, so there is no second location stream to keep in step
with the map.
A test asserts that all 1180 municipalities fall inside the region bounds, which
is what actually validates the UTM-to-degrees conversion end to end.
Verified on the emulator: the dropdown lists follow, region and both saved
places; "aglie" finds Agliè; "44.3841 7.5426" offers the coordinate jump and
lands on Cuneo at town-reading zoom; selecting follow moves the map to the
device position with the blue dot on it and changes the recentre button to
match.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Alby96andClaude Opus 5