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> greatly-improved UX of modern GIS tools I was surprised when you said that. Recently I was doing some georeferecing of historical maps on top of current maps

by dmos62 7y ago

> greatly-improved UX of modern GIS tools I was surprised when you said that. Recently I was doing some georeferecing of historical maps on top of current maps, and I was very disappointed with the choices. That was my first experience with GIS toolkits. I tried ArcGIS, QGIS and a few lesser knowns. I was looking for a good UI/UX, partly because the goal was to teach a non-technical acquintance to do it. There was a shareware toolkit that was exclusively for georeferencing that had a very satisfactory UI, but it had a blocking bug that would cause it to crash.

Waterluvian 7y ago
Yeah, that's true. If you walk through a standard GIS toolbox you'll notice that it covers a _lot_ of ground. It's difficult to make all these tools equally generic and straightforward. If you are running ArcGIS or QGIS you're already in "advanced user mode", in my opinion. I'm not sure how common your use case is, but maybe it does need some simpler option (does it exist in Google Earth maybe?). I think a lot of the improvements are in the form of data authoring and presentation. Even just, "hey here's a public participation map of jogging/biking routes, all measured out and hand-optimized for avoiding traffic lights. Check it out and add your own!" has gone from impossible to pretty easy since I began in the field.
phaedrus 7y ago
I used to work for a GIS company. All of these companies' tools are based on whatever software development platform was current when the project was initiated. The mapping tool may grow to be 8, 10, 15, even 20+ years old and new features are continuously added, but never is the underlying software platform upgraded or the tool rewritten. I'm not sure why this is or even if it is peculiar to GIS, or just more visible compared to the many slow-to-upgrade software fields which don't have a UI or which do more server-side. Also I think some of it is also driven by having one or more big customers who themselves refuse to upgrade. The effect was particularly visible as an outside team was developing a greenfield iOS app for our data at the same time as our team maintained their old-new Windows app. The iOS team was able to, as they say, "move fast and break things" and gain accolades for whizbang features. It was interesting to watch them accomplish more with less computing power and a more primitive (IMO) development language (their Objective-C to our C#). Edit: I called it the "old-new" Windows app as there had been an even older app (predating C#) which the C# app replaced. In the circle of life the once-new C# app itself became ossified and stuck with whatever short-sighted design legacy decisions were baked in. There was a lot of technical debt in the codebase. I should say, partially replaced, as they were never (while I was there) able to convince all of the customers to upgrade from the original app built, hence why I say that big customers who can simply refuse to change might be a factor.

by dmos62 7y ago

Waterluvian 7y ago

Yeah, that's true. If you walk through a standard GIS toolbox you'll notice that it covers a _lot_ of ground. It's difficult to make all these tools equally generic and straightforward. If you are running ArcGIS or QGIS you're already in "advanced user mode", in my opinion. I'm not sure how common your use case is, but maybe it does need some simpler option (does it exist in Google Earth maybe?). I think a lot of the improvements are in the form of data authoring and presentation. Even just, "hey here's a public participation map of jogging/biking routes, all measured out and hand-optimized for avoiding traffic lights. Check it out and add your own!" has gone from impossible to pretty easy since I began in the field.

phaedrus 7y ago

I used to work for a GIS company. All of these companies' tools are based on whatever software development platform was current when the project was initiated. The mapping tool may grow to be 8, 10, 15, even 20+ years old and new features are continuously added, but never is the underlying software platform upgraded or the tool rewritten. I'm not sure why this is or even if it is peculiar to GIS, or just more visible compared to the many slow-to-upgrade software fields which don't have a UI or which do more server-side. Also I think some of it is also driven by having one or more big customers who themselves refuse to upgrade. The effect was particularly visible as an outside team was developing a greenfield iOS app for our data at the same time as our team maintained their old-new Windows app. The iOS team was able to, as they say, "move fast and break things" and gain accolades for whizbang features. It was interesting to watch them accomplish more with less computing power and a more primitive (IMO) development language (their Objective-C to our C#). Edit: I called it the "old-new" Windows app as there had been an even older app (predating C#) which the C# app replaced. In the circle of life the once-new C# app itself became ossified and stuck with whatever short-sighted design legacy decisions were baked in. There was a lot of technical debt in the codebase. I should say, partially replaced, as they were never (while I was there) able to convince all of the customers to upgrade from the original app built, hence why I say that big customers who can simply refuse to change might be a factor.