Steps is a small app I started a few years ago with the sole goal of having a desktop browser for the stash of .mgm files that an app called MGMaps created on my Nokia N95, just about the time the modern smartphone was being brought to the world.

Through the years the app changed names a couple of time and slowly grew a handful of features. One I’m particularly proud of is the Paths tool, briefly demoed in the video below:

Early on, my friends liked the app because it meant having offline maps, something useful with our limited access to the Internet. Nevertheless, with time, the app learned to consume online raster maps sources like Google Maps and OpenStreetMap. As of September 2016, the UI (the lack of it, actually) is blocking access to online sources, but I’m planning to restore it soon.

Not so long ago I included the capability of reading MBTiles, which make it more convenient to share collections of maps around. And I’ve packaged it as a standalone .deb package usable in Debian, Ubuntu, Mint (that I’ve tested) and probably more Debian derivatives. More about the packaging in another post.

You can get the code here. And there are binaries here.