The impact of rise in price (up to 1400%) of Google Maps API since July 16, 2018 made me find another solution to display Google Maps in my desktop application. Even if the “Surveyor Pocket Tools” is freeware and absolutely free of charge but I cannot pay to Google in any cases.
Fortunately, Google offers the free of charge if the developers with an app or website using but not exceed the limit of 25,000 maps views per day. I think the “Surveyor Pocket Tools” are using by a very small group of users so it should not exceed this limit. Finally, I created a billing account and hand-over my credit card information to Google to get API Key.
In old version, I used system web browser to display Google Maps, for example, Edge, Chrome or Firefox, to open the local html file which created by my application. But now I have to input Google API Key so I cannot use local html file anymore regarding to someone can read my API Key.
This application is developed with PySide2 framework so I looked up the tool to display web page and found QtWebEngineView to meet my requirements. All the tools in “Surveyor Pocket Tools” using Google Maps were implemented QtWebEngineView for this purpose so nobody should not see my API Key.
I uploaded the new version v1.01 build 601 to Download page. Feel free to download and test.