Sharing locations in Maps

[Marcus Lundblad <ml update uu se>]

Hi all!

I wanted to discuss some things around sharing. Currently in Maps we
have a dialog to share locations with a fixed set of apps, Weather,
Clocks, and the default browser. There are a couple of problems with
this. First, detecting if Weather and Clocks are available currently
not possible in Flatpaks (maybe there is a "portal" to detect such
things, and also launch apps). Secondly these interact kinda poorly.
For example sharing a location with Clocks will permanently add that
location in Clocks with the name of the place (such as the name of a
shop). The option for the browser (which opens the location on the
openstreetmap.org site is somewhat more useful.

I recall there being some discussions before about a "sharing portal"
(sharing a location might then share that as the object's URL on OSM).
Is something like this already in place? (allowing sharing links with
i.e. e-mail clients).

A sorta "stop-gap" solution I was thinking about might be to have a
dialog with read-only text entry filled with the URL allowing to copy-
paste this (I think Google Maps have something similar, using a
shortened URL).

A companion feature for this could be to allow opening such URLs (and
add Maps as a handler for HTTP(S) URIs). But maybe that would be
considered bad praxis (not sure if it's possible to ensure that it
would always have lower priority that any proper browsers). Ideally it
would have cool to be able to add URI handlers for certain URL
patterns. I brought up this at some point on IRC. But this would
probably need quite some changes in how mime-handling is done.

For the Clocks and Weather sharing, one option might be to show local
time, or time difference and local weather (this would probably need an
on/off switch for privacy reasons) directly in the "place bubbles". Or
maybe skip this, assuming the user could just look up these things
manually in the respective apps if wanted.

Any thoughts?

//Marcus