Upgrade to Android Maps API v2

[onebusaway]

Upgrade to Android Maps API v2

[paulcwatts]

OneBusAway's share of 2.1 uses is actually even smaller than that, 1.55%. So I have no problem with dropping support for it.

The other issue is potentially also supporting Kindle, which is something that Amazon would like me to do. It would be "relatively" easy to support it because Amazon's maps library is API compatible with the v1 Google Maps library, but I don't know how easy it would be for the v2 library.

That's another item to research, how far we want to support Android Maps V2, and how much work we want to do to support multiple maps libraries.

[barbeau]

I've updated from Android Maps API v1 to v2 in one of my own apps, and the API is completely different. I essentially rewrote the parts that interacted with the map. That being said, I was able to accomplish what I originally implemented in v1 with far less code in v2, plus add other cool new features. So, if we want to support Amazon Maps API , we should plan on using the existing Android Maps API v1 implementation in OBA Android as a base to do this. Once we upgrade to v2, it will be harder to move to Amazon Maps API.

We do have a fairly clean abstraction of the map via the MapModeController, which should help in transition to v2.

The only other logical Maps API that we may want to support that comes to mind is the BlackBerry platform, since the Android Maps API isn't available on Blackberry devices. Looks like Android runtime support on BlackBerry doesn't include native Java APIs for Maps though, and we'd have to settle for throwing the user out to the web browser via Intents and URL parameters:
http://developer.blackberry.com/android/apisupport/apisupport_mapping_support.html

Doesn't seems like OBA on Blackberry would be easy to support without a significant overhaul to the OBA application.

[Edit 6-14-2013]

One additional use case for a different Maps API is for Android users with custom ROMs that may or may not have the gapps suite installed. Users of these devices may choose to replace the Google Play store with a non-Google market option such as F-Droid (see #60) or Opera Mobile Store. To completely remove the dependency of OneBusAway Android on the gapps suite we would need to replace the Google Maps API v1 with OSMDroid or something similar. OSMDroid, like Amazon Maps API, has 1-to-1 parity with Google Maps API v1, and therefore any modified version of OBA Android for OSMDroid should be also be based on the Google Maps API v1 code.

[barbeau]

@paulcwatts Could you grab an Android Maps API v2 key, and whitelist it via Google APIs console for both the OBA Android debug and release cert fingerprints? Instructions for this process are here:
https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/android/start#the_google_maps_api_key

[vuldin]

I'd like to mention that I'm affected by the scenario mentioned in barbeu's comment as of the 6/14 edit. I'm currently using android without any google apps installed (relying on f-droid and APKs from the web). It would be great to have this app be functional on my device again. In the meantime though, I'm using the website and it gets the job done.

[barbeau]

On the issue of Maps API v2 and ABS - they do work together, and I've been able to use them together in my GPSTest app (inside a tab). We've also used the normal support library (not ABS though) with Maps API v2 in OpenTripPlanner for Android. Hopefully between code from these two projects we'll be able get it working smoothly in OBA Android at some point.

[barbeau]

On the issue of redrawing stop icons based on map bearing - On Friday (Sept 20th) Google released an update to Maps API v2 that supports new marker rotation and flat properties.

Here's Google description of the new features:

Give your markers a sense of direction
We’ve added a marker rotation property, to allow you to rotate a marker around it’s anchor point. The new flat property allows you make the marker lie flat on the map surface, rather than popping out to face the camera. These two new properties are especially useful for indicating compass directions when the map is rotated or tilted.

From this, its sounds like we could either have the arrow indicator appear on top of the stop icon (i.e., billboard as it is today), or we could have it drawn flat on the map itself (i.e., perpendicular to the bus stop icon). Either way, these new properties should make it much easier to implement the direction arrow with the bus stop icon.

Full article on the Map API v2 updates is here.

[barbeau]

Gradle config for Maps API v2 - http://stackoverflow.com/a/17243377/937715

[barbeau]

A heads up that I'm currently working on this.

[barbeau]

Just opened a WIP PR here, complete with an APK download, if anyone wants to try out an initial implementation of this.

[barbeau]

As an FYI to anyone who stumbles on this ticket and it planning on launching a forked version of the OBA Android app from the current master branch - you actually won't be able to launch a forked version of OBA Android based on the current master branch that uses Maps API v1, since Google is no longer handing out Maps API v1 keys (which you'll need when signing the app with your own production certificate for distribution via Google Play). When this ticket is closed, it means that the Maps API v2 update (which I've been working on as part of the UI-redesign (#155)) has been merged to the master branch. At this point, you'd be able to get new API keys for Maps API v2. I would, however, encourage you to join our effort on being able to re-branding the app without forking the project (#172), instead of forking the project.

[barbeau]

This is complete as part of the work in #177, and will be closed when that branch is merged to master.

[barbeau]

Now that we have a develop branch, I'm going to close a few issues (like this one) that are fixed in that branch, to help reduce clutter and avoid someone accidentally working on something that's already been fixed.