Cutting Room Floor

What didn't make it into version 7.1

Shannon Turner

Jan 7, 2025 — 3 min read

(In case you missed it, version 7.1 is releasing on Wednesday, January 15th! Read about all the updates coming soon or watch the teaser video)

Originally, I wanted Metro Map Maker version 7.1 to be very small – just a couple of new line styles. But as I was developing these, I couldn't resist adding some quality of life improvements like more keyboard shortcuts, the Eyedropper tool, and the Move Station button.

And London station styles have been requested for so long, and I said I'd do another station style in this release, so I had to do that, too.

You can see how this would quickly get out of hand.

So even though I'd intended v7.1 to be something small that I could release very quickly (small, frequent updates would be nice, right?), I ended up with a pretty big release after all.

In fact, I wanted to add some other features too – but I ended up having to cut these because I wasn't happy enough with how they turned out, and I didn't want to hold up the version 7.1 continuing to refine them.

Here's what didn't make the cut this time:

Right click to scroll. This was requested by Ben, and I thought it was a great idea – but I couldn't get the scrolling as smooth as I'd like.
Improved touch support for mobile. Making Metro Map Maker work better on mobile devices isn't as easy as I think it should be, and although I got it working decently, it's very difficult and time-consuming to test.
Slow performance on some Firefox browsers. Firefox has a performance bug in how it renders HTML canvases, and unfortunately Metro Map Maker is noticeably slow as of version 7.

I'm planning to report this bug to the Firefox team, and am working on a workaround to sidestep this problem, but I'd want to test the workaround extensively and didn't want to delay the release.

These were the main features I'd wanted to include, but didn't want to keep you waiting. You're likely to see these in a future release, though not necessarily the next one.

Actually, version 7.0 also had a feature I'd wanted to add, but I cut because the 7.0 release was large and complicated enough without it: I wanted to be able to add non-station labels like the "RD" marker seen at the end of the Red line:

Screenshot of a zoomed-in section of the Washington DC Red and Green lines, showing the station terminus labels reading RD and GR. — I wanted to add Labels in version 7.0 so you could add these to the ends of your lines, but you'll have to wait for a future release.

Browsing metro maps of many different cities, I got a ton of ideas for different label shapes and styles – but it ended up getting very complex very quickly. I still want to do it, but it will have to wait for another day!