Integrate MapKit

[zkarj]

I don't know where this fits. I want it in Publisher, but can also see it fitting in either Designer (it's infinitely scalable vector content) or Photo (the final output is rendered pixels). That is, I'd like to be able to add a map to my document as easily as I can add a text frame or shape.

On macOS and iPadOS the obvious choice would be to integrate MapKit. That would seem to leave out Windows users unless an alternate could be found, or perhaps integrating with MapKit JS.

I'm using an app called Ahoy Map Maker from the Mac App Store which creates output close to what I want but is a bit limited. The real trouble I am having is working out the scale between Ahoy and Affinity. It would be really, really great if I could add the map natively and adjust scale and position to suit. I also need annotations but Designer is very capable on that front, so all it would need is a means of anchoring objects to a geographic point on the map.

Aside from all the web-embed options, there is one prior example of this type of capability that I know of. iMovie lets you add animated maps as footage.

[yonni.i]

Great idea, would be incredibly useful when producing documentation on how to find a particular location.

[eab]

Is this a feature request for being able to incorporate Map views inside Affinity Publisher? In due course, I use the macOS version of Maps, prepare the best possible map viewing, perform a screenshot, import it into Affinity Designer to add any additional informations (like logos, arrows, visual directions, etc.). then I crop it into the suitable map I want yo use in my Affinity Publisher project. This is quite a straightforward workflow with maximum flexibility for current and future alterations.Best of luck in the meantime!

[zkarj]

@eab the advantage of Ahoy Map Maker is I can zoom in to place markers very easily and accurately. The trouble I then have is one of scale. Zooming the map in Apple Maps (or Ahoy) completely changes the level of detail presented and this can have a large effect on the final result, including the prominence of text in the map. It also requires careful selection of the map area in conjunction with resolution in the final document. I've been using Pixelmator Pro's ML Super-resolution to triple the pixel resolution of my maps so I have some leeway to rescale in Designer/Publisher.

After all of this, and dropping the map into Publisher, I often find it doesn't look right, so I have to decide what to change, then go back and reprocess from Ahoy, and reposition the markers in Designer. It's a cumbersome process.

This led me to think about this request. What if a "map" was an object in Affinity, with all of the inherent "mapness" of scale (map zoom level), rotation, and cropping (visible area) you get in Apple Maps, plus all the power of placing other Affinity objects on the geospatial coordinates. With this capability, the process of adding a map would be:

a) entirely in Affinity,

b) in the context of its final layout (be that Designer or Publisher), and

c) easily tweakable to make it look just right.

[zkarj]

Also, grabbing maps as screen captures has an inherent problem — you are limited by your screen size. Some of my maps are covering an A4 portrait page. A 5K iMac screen is not tall enough to capture a 300ppi map this tall, so an extra step is required such as the Pixelmator Pro step described above. Affinity could render the map from MapKit at whatever the final resolution is on output.

[zkarj]

31 minutes ago, ErrkaPetti said:

Or, why not captures zoomed part of the map and the stitch the result into Affinity Photo to an big map?

Certainly that's a possibility, but I'm trying to make the process easier.

There are probably other tricks that could be employed to get exactly what one wants, but for me the key point in this request is that it would be easiest to get the map looking just so, perceptually, and also to get the best output, if it was a native Affinity object. The only other way I would consider an improvement on what's possible now would be if something like Ahoy Map Maker did everything I want — flexible annotation and output options — but that would require it (or alternative) to build a lot of what Affinity already has in spades, and even then would have to be rendered before including in an Affinity document.

I think of it like this. You know how you might be going through your document just before final production and you'll stop and look closely at an image and decide maybe you'll just tweak the colour a little, or perhaps alter the crop slightly, or maybe you'll spot something else that's just not quite right? What do you do? You spend a few seconds with Affinity tools fixing the problem. I want that for my maps. I might decide that the zoom level looks wrong against the facing page content, or I should have included more of that park on the bottom edge for balance, or I spot that I've chopped off half a letter of a place label so want to nudge it across or tweak the zoom ever so slightly.

[zkarj]

I should add, that in my search for tools, I did find some that output large resolution maps, so if anyone wants/needs to go that way, they exist. But that doesn't solve my problem, it just moves it.