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Leaflet 0.7 Released — with IE11 touch support, upscaling tiles and tons of other improvements and bugfixes! Meanwhile, I’ve joined the MapBox team full-time…
After another 5 months of active development with lots of contributors involved, I’m happy to announce the release of Leaflet 0.7 stable.
This is a bugfix-heavy release — as Leaflet becomes more and more stable feature-wise, the focus shifts towards stability, usability and API improvements over new features. I’ve also been holding back some of the planned deep refactorings (which I’ll talk about later in the post) until 0.7 is released, so that the heavy risky stuff is done at the beginning of the release cycle, leaving plenty of room to catch bugs and incompatible changes that can unintentionally break existing apps.
In other news, I joined the MapBox team full-time. This is extremely exciting for me, as this was my dream job for quite a while — MapBox have changed the world of interactive mapping forever with all their amazing work, having some of the greatest geomapping engineers and designers of the world working together, pushing the boundaries of what’s possible and inspiring others every day.
For Leaflet, this can only mean very good things — much more time on Leaflet development, more enthusiasm, more play, more crazy experiments with maps (like this one), and lots of learning. I’m now one of the happiest map geeks ever. Stay tuned for tons of awesome!
You can check out the detailed changelog of what’s already done over the recent months for 0.7 (about 90 improvements and bugfixes), but I’d like to mention some highlights:
leaflet.css
file.document
(for a “grabbing” hand) caused noticeable performance hit on some browsers (Chrome in particular).minZoom
from it but restricting panning across lower zoom levels, along with some tricks to make it play better with panning inertia or offset zooming, etc.There are several big undertakings in refactoring Leaflet that I’d want to switch to immediately after releasing 0.7 — I’ve been holding them off for too long, and they’ll be extremely beneficial for plugin and Leaflet-based API authors. Some of them are already in progress.
While it’s an ambitious plan and it may take more than one stable release, finishing all those refactorings will mean that Leaflet is getting ready for a 1.0 release.
Another direction I’d like to focus on after releasing 0.7 is website and documentation improvements. First, Leaflet is begging for more step-by-step tutorials (with more advanced features like custom layers, custom controls, etc.), and I’d love to do a docs/tutorials sprint some time in future. Second, the presentation could be significantly improved — adding a prominent visual showcase or app gallery, making Leaflet users more prominent with some logos and quotes/testimonials, and updating the layout/design for a more stylish, clean look, etc.
Hope that gives a good glimpse of the stuff to expect from Leafet in near future, and don’t hesitate to ask any questions in comments — I’ll be happy to answer!
Grab the CDN links or downloads for the new release on the download page as always. Be sure to try it out on your apps and report any regressions so that we can patch them up immediately. And lets make some nice Twitter buzz about the release as usual!
To all the people wo’ve been involved in Leaflet contributions, bug reports, mailing list, Twitter buzz, making awesome apps and spreading the word about Leaflet — thank you! You are the most awesome community ever.
Cheers,
Vladimir.