For others curious like I was, it seems he hired a cartographer to render essentially a set of huge, nice-looking, custom map images with details like hiking trails that Apple Maps doesn't have.
So unlike Apple Maps, which is dynamically rendered, it basically shows image tiles. It allows for a nicer-looking, more detailed map, but affects things like needing separate downloads for different zoom levels, rotation, updatability.
The use of the cartographer to generate separate designs and the technology used to render/deliver those designs are two entirely separate concerns.
His original map provider offers both vector and raster tile services: https://www.thunderforest.com/maps/outdoors/
A common pattern is to use a vector tile service + style definition directly or to generate raster tiles if those are desired.
Good point, I assumed he was using images because his screenshots show text perfectly following the curves of rivers, which seems hard to do with dynamic rendering.
That’s the point of a vector (not raster) tiles. Wh do you say it is hard to do with dynamic rendering? With Maplibre or any modern map SDK this this is standard…
> With Maplibre or any modern map SDK this this is standard…
In practise, this doesn’t work out as visually pleasing as you’d like; labels repeat, or render partially or not at all, or become interfered with by other labels, or only work well at one given zoom. It’s easy to end up in a visually dissatisfying place that’s taking an unfathomable number of magic rules to get to.
The secret sauce to fixing this is creating separate label layers of perfect point locations or lines for labels to follow in advance. Added bonus is faster render and interaction times due to fewer rules.
I think this may not even be possible because Apple does not give access to the Metal graphics API on Apple Watch to third-party developers.