Emerillon Map Viewer

So, today I was reading about the Gnome 3.0 Usability Hackfest when I found this cool application, Emerillon Map Viewer. As the name suggests, it is a map viewer which features OpenStreetMaps based maps: the street map, the cycling and the transportation map. It provides you a really simple UI and is easy to manage. Its probably going to be a part of the new Gnome 3.0.

The Emerillon project was announced on 6th Oct last year and since then it has progressed pretty well. It is still in development mode, no stable version has been released yet, although Emerillon 0.1.1(a development package) was released on 9th Jan 2010 and is available for download on the website.

Install Emerillon

Since it is still in testing phase, packages are not available in the main repos. But the development packages are available. If you want  to try out the development version then refer this howto.

Emerillon Screenshots

Emerillon doesn't have as many features as google earth application for linux but it sure is a great step towards a Linux Map Viewer. Here are some of the screenshots.

This one is the cyclic map view.

There are 4 plugins available with this version. Go to Edit-> Preferences and you can activate them to show the coordinates, search the GeoNames database and remember placemarks.

One of the good and probably bad points about Emerillon is that the markings of places for each country are in their native language, as you can see below. I am probaby unable to figure out a way to get the info in English but if this is the feature then it might not always be useful for everyone. This one is the street view of Cairo, Egypt.

This one is the terrain view after querying for "delhi".