A globe made of triangles, not textures

Summit's map is a globe you can spin, and the countries you have climbed in glow. The obvious implementation is a sphere with an image of the world painted on it. It is a few lines of code and it looks fine in a screenshot.

It also cannot do the one thing the app needs. If the Earth is a picture, a country is just some pixels. You cannot light one up, you cannot tap it, and you cannot ask which one the user just touched.

Real geometry instead

So the globe is built from actual triangulated geometry, one mesh per region, rendered with Metal. Every country and every state is a real object with a real shape. Lighting one up is setting a color on a mesh. Tapping one is a hit test that returns which region you touched, which is what opens the panel listing your climbs there.

Once regions are real geometry, other things fall out for free. Pro adds a heat-map style that extrudes each region in proportion to how many times you have climbed there, so the places you keep going back to physically rise off the globe. That is not possible with a painted sphere at all.

Seven styles, two projections

The same geometry drives every look in the app: Atlas, Topographic, Blueprint, Continental, Night Lights, Antique Parchment, and Mosaic, each available as a globe or a flat map. Fourteen views, one mesh pipeline. Atlas is free, and the rest come with Pro.

All of it is bundled. The map geometry ships in the app alongside the peak database, so the globe renders with no network connection at all.