19 ms·

Why are maps so hard to make?

115 points by danso 4y ago

ytdytvhxgydvhh 4y ago
reads blog post Yeah, I’ll give it a shot. clicks link to felt.com clicks link that says “Try Felt free” prompted to “Sign up for Felt” Oh, no thanks.
- alx__ 4y ago
  This link worked fine for me: https://felt.com/map/Cross-USA-Road-Trip-kiQ9CRDdlS02s8w65KoRO9AB https://felt.com/map/Cross-USA-Road-Trip-kiQ9CRDdlS02s8w65Ko...
- hinting 4y ago
  if you scroll down, there's a bunch of example maps you can check out! an account is only needed to create new maps
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
deepsun 4y ago
> Mind you, making a website in the 90s was not for the faint of heart. Even the simplest tasks required an alphabet soup of technologies one had to master. And they say nowadays you have to learn so much tech to make a website...
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- moffkalast 4y ago
  You really don't. Well unless you intend to work at a company obsessed with trendy frameworks.
simoneau 4y ago
How much of that $15M went into the sweet domain name, felt.com?
- hinting 4y ago
  only $12m of it!
  - hinting 4y ago
    the last $3m went to the @felt twitter handle
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- everybodyknows 4y ago
  $74,750. ~0.5% https://namebio.com/felt.com https://namebio.com/felt.com
hinting 4y ago
hi everyone, ceo here! and former YC W15 founder. let me know your questions, and i will answer them!
- cancan 4y ago
  hey sam! i am the author of the post (and the cofounder here at felt), alongside hinting — happy to answer of the questions also
  - tomarr 4y ago
    Hey I tried Felt and it looked good. However for me the marker / polygon moved significantly with different zoom levels which is a fairly big issue. This was in 54,-1 area (lat/lng) - I don't know if it could be as simple as different coordinate systems on markers vs mapping?
    - bostonvaulter2 4y ago
      (Felt engineer here) That does sounds like a big issue! Are you able to reproduce the marker or polygon moving based on zoom levels? I tried for a bit and I wasn't able to reproduce this. How are you changing the map zoom?
      - tomarr 4y ago
        Emailed
- an9n 4y ago
  As someone with formal education plus getting on for 20 years in the field I've often wondered whether the software really needs to be so damned hard to use! I like the interface and I think nobody has yet conclusively cracked the problem of providing a super simple map creation app, so I wish you luck and think it looks interesting. I'm interested to know options for import and export of data/maps? Can data be sourced from a database? Also why should someone use Felt instead of AGOL, mapbox etc? And what support do you offer for open APIs e.g. OGC? What integration options do you offer e.g. API for scripting creation of maps - or are the maps always envisaged to be manually created?
anticristi 4y ago
I'm about to organise a family road trip and I can see how this tool can make that so much more informative and fun. I currently rely on an Google Sheet and Google Maps List, which is a bit tiring. I'd like to see the following features: - Ability to search for GPS coordinates. - Ability to search for plus codes (I hate them, but Google forces them onto me.) - Display route duration: This is good for judging if a segment is too long and needs to be spliced in two. - Somehow searching for places in Europe is lacking compared to Google Maps.
- hinting 4y ago
  glad to hear it! searching for lat/lng, route duration, and better search are in the works what's the deal with plus codes? i've heard about them a couple times but don't have a good sense of where/how they are used
  - anticristi 4y ago
    Plus codes are pretty much like GPS coordinates, but made by Google: https://maps.google.com/pluscodes/ https://maps.google.com/pluscodes/ For some reason Google Maps throws plus codes at you, but requires you to dig deeper to find GPS coordinates.
  - phabricator 4y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Location_Code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Location_Code > i've heard about them a couple times Did you do much competitive analysis?
  - lifthrasiir 4y ago
    > don't have a good sense of where/how they are used This is arguably a main problem with geocodes, however they are well designed or not (I believe plus codes are actually pretty well designed). It is obvious that they can't replace street addresses---unless they don't already exist, in which (uncommon) cases geocodes can actually be a solution---so they have to solve some different problems than street addresses, but those problems are too niche. If they look like solutions looking for problems, that's because they mostly are.
dv35z 4y ago
Map gurus - I was thinking of printing a black and white map of my neighborhood on my wall, and then putting pins, annotations etc in it. I found it difficult to find a good tool which could accept a Google Map location, and export a PDF with street names, but not so much details. I ended up taking a screen shot of google Maps, then vectorizing it, the manually changing to B&W, updating details etc. Anyone found good tool / workflow for this
- dvdkon 4y ago
  I use QGIS, usually importing an OSM-based vector map (look for the MapTiler plugin) and tweaking the layer appearance does it for me. I'm not 100% on board with how QGIS' print layout tool works, but I think that's just because I have a different model in mind. It's more print oriented, so it should hopefully work for you.
- cwal37 4y ago
  I would have done it all in GIS software (QGIS most likely) myself using shapefiles from the County/State/Town, but I suppose that depends on your preexisting knowledge of GIS software and access to high quality data. I In order to look good, it would probably also require some substantial design work in the symbology of the layers you're using. EDIT: Another commenter suggests OSM, and yeah, that would be way easier than starting with shapefiles for various features.
- jabyess 4y ago
  mapbox studio will let you custom design layers, but i haven't gotten very far into it so i can't speak to the level of control you get.
- okok3857 4y ago
  The Stamen toner map may work well for you: http://maps.stamen.com/#toner/14/37.8024/-122.2645 http://maps.stamen.com/#toner/14/37.8024/-122.2645 Also checkout their watercolor rendering... probably my favorite basemap that I never get to use. If you do use QGIS, you can get the Quick Map Services plugin that will connect you with these Stamen basemaps as well (and tons of other basemaps, a must-have plugin).
frzen 4y ago
Would be cool to have it like geolayers 3 meets Google earth studio, with added collaborative map editing and be able to export nice animations I'm sure there are a lot of people who could be making interesting map videos / news / explainers who don't already have geolayers3, and who don't want to pay a mapbox sub on top of Adobe CC. Or people who have the After effects skills could benefit from other experts updating their maps content while they work on the animation. I make map animations from time to time at work for news and I spend a decent amount of time wrestling with overpass turbo to export features to overlay in Google earth studio as a kml.
doodlebugging 4y ago
This looks good. I will check it out this afternoon. I can see several use cases for it. The best ever mapping software for personal use was Microsoft's Streets and Trips. buy a license and use it forever. Too bad they killed it off so you no longer can get updated roads and maps. It had every feature that one could need to facilitate navigation. I keep an old laptop with WinXP around so I can do trip planning even today. It made the whole method of defining individual legs of a trip simple so that one could adjust things on the fly if you made it to one destination and discovered a lot of other interesting things to do or see. You could brainstorm different side trips in a few minutes. You could even print point to point maps. I love that software. I really love any software that I can buy for one price and use forever. I am not a SaaS fan though that is where everyone is going. Sad.
- NikolaNovak 4y ago
  It's astonishing that there were things which existed decades ago with only inferior substitutes today. Ms Streets and Trips had functionality google maps doesn't seem to aspire to; and same of course goes for Encarta. It seems a no brainer something like that shoild exist for tablets - but it doesn't. The myriad data and graphs you could overlay and chart on maps was wonderful.
  - asdff 4y ago
    This is the natural product of having these walled off gardens. You can't just build a simpler and better product yourself. There would be a dozen clones of Streets and Trips on github for iPad if only you'd be able to run unsigned code on the device you purchased yourself. It's like, we could be in this amazing emergent world of open source and constantly iterating software with these handheld devices, but we decided instead to chain an anchor to it and throw it overboard with how locked down they are. Don't these companies want better engineers long term? That starts with letting 10 year olds write scripts on their ipad without any training wheels attached or patronizing abstractions. Let people tinker.
    - MichaelZuo 4y ago
tech_tuna 4y ago
Everything is hard. Names and naming things. Currency. Time. Passwords. Authentication. Error handling. Concurrency. Every. Thing.
- moffkalast 4y ago
  Things remain overcomplicated as long as there's no high level enough interface to make them simple. No exceptions.
phabricator 4y ago
This is an advertisement, I was hoping it would be about cartography. I don't mind plugging your product at the end but "Why are maps so hard to make?" is never answered. > creating and collaborating a map today is not much easier than it was in the 90s Yes, yes it is. It is MUCH easier. This product looks nice but there's no insight here.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- moffkalast 4y ago
  Well if you're looking for some insight, I've recently had the (dis?)pleasure of implementing tile rendering for a web satnav type thing for a mobile robot with OpenStreetMap. Tile servers are an interesting thing, there's 70 TB of data composed of 256x256 prerendered images on one end, and a user wanting a picture that goes below some weird angles they have on the other. They call the map setup a "slippy map", and it's composed of up to around 20 zoom levels, each one being a subdivision of the previous one. So the first tile covers the entire planet, the next one is split into 4, and then into 16, etc. Level 20 zoom which is used to be the max offered by OSM (now only 19 it seems) is roughly a trillion tiles, each measuring up to about a 40 meter square. https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Zoom_levels https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Zoom_levels Anyhow, these tile servers let you request tiles in a somewhat standard format of http://url.com/zoom/x/y.png http://url.com/zoom/x/y.png. X and Y not being the latitude and longitude of course, but they are tile indexes which have an entire wiki page on their calculation in most languages you'd want: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Slippy_map_tilenames https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Slippy_map_tilenames But wait, we live on a spheroid don't we? Projecting a sphere onto a flat plane has always been a futile endeavour (https://xkcd.com/977/ https://xkcd.com/977/) but what's used by functional maps at large seems to be Mercator. It's mostly fine, but it does have this tiny issue that the tiles aren't all the same size in all places. So for example at max zoom Saudi Arabia gets 0.149 m/pixel while Iceland only gets 0.06 m/pixel, which means you need more tiles the further away from the equator you go. How many do you need at the poles you ask? Well... I'm not entirely sure how this tile size fits together with the fixed subdivision setup, but boy am I glad I didn't need to figure that out. Luckily if you're rendering just one part of the map at high zoom you can just scale it properly, tile it sequentially, and you can forget the rest of these shenanigans and treat it like it's linear space. If you can live with that it's not too hard.
n8cpdx 4y ago
Esri, the leader in corporate/enterprise/government map-making (GIS), recently launched its first direct-to-consumer product, StoryMaps. It fits a slightly different use case from Felt - it is oriented to storytelling - but in some ways it is solving a similar problem. https://storymaps.com/ https://storymaps.com/ For people willing to sign up for a personal use subscription (too difficult and not marketed to consumers, unfortunately), ArcGIS Online makes it easy to make really powerful maps, far beyond what Felt offers, for those interested. Newer things like blending modes are making the design aspect of map making a lot more accessible. Video for those interested in what “more powerful than Felt” looks like: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0XI-J8XUNeU https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0XI-J8XUNeU And for developers, you can try out the samples to see what the tech can do and the code to do it. The flow renderer is one of the newer flashier features: https://developers.arcgis.com/javascript/latest/sample-code/layers-imagery-afrenderer-blending/ https://developers.arcgis.com/javascript/latest/sample-code/... This shows how its done in code, but the public API underpins the Web Map Viewer, which exposes a UI for most of it.
- cancan 4y ago
  Would it be worth mentioning here that you work for Esri? disclaimer: i'm the co-founder at felt.
  - n8cpdx 4y ago
    I’m paid by the hour and I posted in my personal time. I don’t own stock or have any financial interest in the company. I’m also a satisfied customer. I’m not sure it’s relevant though; everything I mentioned is factual and backed up with sources. Note that I didn’t advocate anything other than learning that the technology exists, which I think is fair game.
    - SOLAR_FIELDS 4y ago
      Even with the points in your above post, I think it's tough to make the case that you're posting something unbiased and should have still disclosed that information. Even if you're paid hourly and posting in your personal time, in the end I can't see any situation where positive press for the company you work for doesn't somehow affect you positively, no matter how small the needle. Saying you don't have any financial interest in a company while you are employed there is almost an oxymoron, even if your incentives are much more diminished than someone who owns equity.
thomasguide 4y ago
Not to hijack this thread, but curious whether some map people out there might opine on growth areas for this space - technologically, artistically, product-wise.
- iamthepieman 4y ago
  Spent most of my career in GIS. So, not a map person as much as a map data person. I do work with actual map makers though and get first look, editing and testing privileges. A map made for a specific purpose will almost always be hand tuned. The first, second...nth draft might mostly or completely auto-generated but the final product (for a good product anyways) will be hand edited. It could be additional graphics, legend or chloropleth tweaking, emphasis or de-emphasis any of the thousands of things you can tweak on a digital document that is also mostly graphical and part art. So tools for better intent manifestation, even more rapid live visualizations etc. Someone linked an Esri story map video in this thread and that's a good example of state of the art for map generation right now. There's lots of room for innovations on the data side of things. Making spatial relations to non-spatial data. There's no unified spatial query language that allows arbitrary length depth, lambdas and subqueries. Yes there are spatially aware relational databases but it's a dream of mine to build a universal spatial query language that can do something like Relate river to city by nearest ordered by city.population where river.distancefrom(max_elevation(city)) < 100 and max_elevation(city) < 0 Select river.name, (river.width.nearest_point(city)) as width, etc
  - SOLAR_FIELDS 4y ago
    Can’t you do something similar currently using PostGIS? Granted, it’s ugly and you’ll see ST_ everywhere and it won’t be super readable, but it seems possible at least.
- greggsy 4y ago
  I could totally see this being integrated into white boarding tools like Miro, but I’d personally love to see Microsoft integrate it with a next-gen Visio/Whiteboard hybrid, with PowerBI integration.
- 4y ago
RicoElectrico 4y ago
Maps are hard to make if you are a typical programmer who thinks everything can be abstracted with an API. I checked out Felt and while what it has is polished, the feature set seems to be tailored towards investor demos, not actual mapmaking. There are only 2 basemaps, the only feature styling is coloring. Datasets are pretty much biased towards USA. Clipping is arbitrarily nerfed to US administrative divisions and buildings. If I were doing such service, I would jump on the trend of communities creating maps and infographics such as [1][2][3] - observe how large they are. [1] https://www.facebook.com/groups/mapawka/ https://www.facebook.com/groups/mapawka/ [2] https://www.facebook.com/SimonGerman600/ https://www.facebook.com/SimonGerman600/ [3] https://old.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/ https://old.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/
wavvebiird 4y ago
I work for onWater Fly Fishing. Good maps can definitely be tricky to make and manage. We are building hand-curated fly fishing maps to make it easier for anglers to plan trips, view property boundaries, understand regulations, and stay on top of changing conditions. https://onwaterapp.com/subscribe/Will-Moore https://onwaterapp.com/subscribe/Will-Moore

115 points by danso 4y ago

reads blog post Yeah, I’ll give it a shot. clicks link to felt.com clicks link that says “Try Felt free” prompted to “Sign up for Felt” Oh, no thanks.

alx__ 4y ago
This link worked fine for me: https://felt.com/map/Cross-USA-Road-Trip-kiQ9CRDdlS02s8w65KoRO9AB https://felt.com/map/Cross-USA-Road-Trip-kiQ9CRDdlS02s8w65Ko...
hinting 4y ago
if you scroll down, there's a bunch of example maps you can check out! an account is only needed to create new maps
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

deepsun 4y ago

> Mind you, making a website in the 90s was not for the faint of heart. Even the simplest tasks required an alphabet soup of technologies one had to master. And they say nowadays you have to learn so much tech to make a website...

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
moffkalast 4y ago
You really don't. Well unless you intend to work at a company obsessed with trendy frameworks.

simoneau 4y ago

How much of that $15M went into the sweet domain name, felt.com?

hinting 4y ago
only $12m of it!
- hinting 4y ago
  the last $3m went to the @felt twitter handle
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
everybodyknows 4y ago
$74,750. ~0.5% https://namebio.com/felt.com https://namebio.com/felt.com

hinting 4y ago

hi everyone, ceo here! and former YC W15 founder. let me know your questions, and i will answer them!

cancan 4y ago
hey sam! i am the author of the post (and the cofounder here at felt), alongside hinting — happy to answer of the questions also
- tomarr 4y ago
  Hey I tried Felt and it looked good. However for me the marker / polygon moved significantly with different zoom levels which is a fairly big issue. This was in 54,-1 area (lat/lng) - I don't know if it could be as simple as different coordinate systems on markers vs mapping?
  - bostonvaulter2 4y ago
    (Felt engineer here) That does sounds like a big issue! Are you able to reproduce the marker or polygon moving based on zoom levels? I tried for a bit and I wasn't able to reproduce this. How are you changing the map zoom?
    - tomarr 4y ago
      Emailed
an9n 4y ago
As someone with formal education plus getting on for 20 years in the field I've often wondered whether the software really needs to be so damned hard to use! I like the interface and I think nobody has yet conclusively cracked the problem of providing a super simple map creation app, so I wish you luck and think it looks interesting. I'm interested to know options for import and export of data/maps? Can data be sourced from a database? Also why should someone use Felt instead of AGOL, mapbox etc? And what support do you offer for open APIs e.g. OGC? What integration options do you offer e.g. API for scripting creation of maps - or are the maps always envisaged to be manually created?

anticristi 4y ago

I'm about to organise a family road trip and I can see how this tool can make that so much more informative and fun. I currently rely on an Google Sheet and Google Maps List, which is a bit tiring. I'd like to see the following features: - Ability to search for GPS coordinates. - Ability to search for plus codes (I hate them, but Google forces them onto me.) - Display route duration: This is good for judging if a segment is too long and needs to be spliced in two. - Somehow searching for places in Europe is lacking compared to Google Maps.

hinting 4y ago
glad to hear it! searching for lat/lng, route duration, and better search are in the works what's the deal with plus codes? i've heard about them a couple times but don't have a good sense of where/how they are used
- anticristi 4y ago
  Plus codes are pretty much like GPS coordinates, but made by Google: https://maps.google.com/pluscodes/ https://maps.google.com/pluscodes/ For some reason Google Maps throws plus codes at you, but requires you to dig deeper to find GPS coordinates.
- phabricator 4y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Location_Code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Location_Code > i've heard about them a couple times Did you do much competitive analysis?
- lifthrasiir 4y ago
  > don't have a good sense of where/how they are used This is arguably a main problem with geocodes, however they are well designed or not (I believe plus codes are actually pretty well designed). It is obvious that they can't replace street addresses---unless they don't already exist, in which (uncommon) cases geocodes can actually be a solution---so they have to solve some different problems than street addresses, but those problems are too niche. If they look like solutions looking for problems, that's because they mostly are.

dv35z 4y ago

Map gurus - I was thinking of printing a black and white map of my neighborhood on my wall, and then putting pins, annotations etc in it. I found it difficult to find a good tool which could accept a Google Map location, and export a PDF with street names, but not so much details. I ended up taking a screen shot of google Maps, then vectorizing it, the manually changing to B&W, updating details etc. Anyone found good tool / workflow for this

dvdkon 4y ago
I use QGIS, usually importing an OSM-based vector map (look for the MapTiler plugin) and tweaking the layer appearance does it for me. I'm not 100% on board with how QGIS' print layout tool works, but I think that's just because I have a different model in mind. It's more print oriented, so it should hopefully work for you.
cwal37 4y ago
I would have done it all in GIS software (QGIS most likely) myself using shapefiles from the County/State/Town, but I suppose that depends on your preexisting knowledge of GIS software and access to high quality data. I In order to look good, it would probably also require some substantial design work in the symbology of the layers you're using. EDIT: Another commenter suggests OSM, and yeah, that would be way easier than starting with shapefiles for various features.
jabyess 4y ago
mapbox studio will let you custom design layers, but i haven't gotten very far into it so i can't speak to the level of control you get.
okok3857 4y ago
The Stamen toner map may work well for you: http://maps.stamen.com/#toner/14/37.8024/-122.2645 http://maps.stamen.com/#toner/14/37.8024/-122.2645 Also checkout their watercolor rendering... probably my favorite basemap that I never get to use. If you do use QGIS, you can get the Quick Map Services plugin that will connect you with these Stamen basemaps as well (and tons of other basemaps, a must-have plugin).

frzen 4y ago

Would be cool to have it like geolayers 3 meets Google earth studio, with added collaborative map editing and be able to export nice animations I'm sure there are a lot of people who could be making interesting map videos / news / explainers who don't already have geolayers3, and who don't want to pay a mapbox sub on top of Adobe CC. Or people who have the After effects skills could benefit from other experts updating their maps content while they work on the animation. I make map animations from time to time at work for news and I spend a decent amount of time wrestling with overpass turbo to export features to overlay in Google earth studio as a kml.

doodlebugging 4y ago

This looks good. I will check it out this afternoon. I can see several use cases for it. The best ever mapping software for personal use was Microsoft's Streets and Trips. buy a license and use it forever. Too bad they killed it off so you no longer can get updated roads and maps. It had every feature that one could need to facilitate navigation. I keep an old laptop with WinXP around so I can do trip planning even today. It made the whole method of defining individual legs of a trip simple so that one could adjust things on the fly if you made it to one destination and discovered a lot of other interesting things to do or see. You could brainstorm different side trips in a few minutes. You could even print point to point maps. I love that software. I really love any software that I can buy for one price and use forever. I am not a SaaS fan though that is where everyone is going. Sad.

NikolaNovak 4y ago
It's astonishing that there were things which existed decades ago with only inferior substitutes today. Ms Streets and Trips had functionality google maps doesn't seem to aspire to; and same of course goes for Encarta. It seems a no brainer something like that shoild exist for tablets - but it doesn't. The myriad data and graphs you could overlay and chart on maps was wonderful.
- asdff 4y ago
  This is the natural product of having these walled off gardens. You can't just build a simpler and better product yourself. There would be a dozen clones of Streets and Trips on github for iPad if only you'd be able to run unsigned code on the device you purchased yourself. It's like, we could be in this amazing emergent world of open source and constantly iterating software with these handheld devices, but we decided instead to chain an anchor to it and throw it overboard with how locked down they are. Don't these companies want better engineers long term? That starts with letting 10 year olds write scripts on their ipad without any training wheels attached or patronizing abstractions. Let people tinker.
  - MichaelZuo 4y ago

tech_tuna 4y ago

Everything is hard. Names and naming things. Currency. Time. Passwords. Authentication. Error handling. Concurrency. Every. Thing.

moffkalast 4y ago
Things remain overcomplicated as long as there's no high level enough interface to make them simple. No exceptions.

phabricator 4y ago

This is an advertisement, I was hoping it would be about cartography. I don't mind plugging your product at the end but "Why are maps so hard to make?" is never answered. > creating and collaborating a map today is not much easier than it was in the 90s Yes, yes it is. It is MUCH easier. This product looks nice but there's no insight here.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
moffkalast 4y ago
Well if you're looking for some insight, I've recently had the (dis?)pleasure of implementing tile rendering for a web satnav type thing for a mobile robot with OpenStreetMap. Tile servers are an interesting thing, there's 70 TB of data composed of 256x256 prerendered images on one end, and a user wanting a picture that goes below some weird angles they have on the other. They call the map setup a "slippy map", and it's composed of up to around 20 zoom levels, each one being a subdivision of the previous one. So the first tile covers the entire planet, the next one is split into 4, and then into 16, etc. Level 20 zoom which is used to be the max offered by OSM (now only 19 it seems) is roughly a trillion tiles, each measuring up to about a 40 meter square. https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Zoom_levels https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Zoom_levels Anyhow, these tile servers let you request tiles in a somewhat standard format of http://url.com/zoom/x/y.png http://url.com/zoom/x/y.png. X and Y not being the latitude and longitude of course, but they are tile indexes which have an entire wiki page on their calculation in most languages you'd want: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Slippy_map_tilenames https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Slippy_map_tilenames But wait, we live on a spheroid don't we? Projecting a sphere onto a flat plane has always been a futile endeavour (https://xkcd.com/977/ https://xkcd.com/977/) but what's used by functional maps at large seems to be Mercator. It's mostly fine, but it does have this tiny issue that the tiles aren't all the same size in all places. So for example at max zoom Saudi Arabia gets 0.149 m/pixel while Iceland only gets 0.06 m/pixel, which means you need more tiles the further away from the equator you go. How many do you need at the poles you ask? Well... I'm not entirely sure how this tile size fits together with the fixed subdivision setup, but boy am I glad I didn't need to figure that out. Luckily if you're rendering just one part of the map at high zoom you can just scale it properly, tile it sequentially, and you can forget the rest of these shenanigans and treat it like it's linear space. If you can live with that it's not too hard.

n8cpdx 4y ago

Esri, the leader in corporate/enterprise/government map-making (GIS), recently launched its first direct-to-consumer product, StoryMaps. It fits a slightly different use case from Felt - it is oriented to storytelling - but in some ways it is solving a similar problem. https://storymaps.com/ https://storymaps.com/ For people willing to sign up for a personal use subscription (too difficult and not marketed to consumers, unfortunately), ArcGIS Online makes it easy to make really powerful maps, far beyond what Felt offers, for those interested. Newer things like blending modes are making the design aspect of map making a lot more accessible. Video for those interested in what “more powerful than Felt” looks like: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0XI-J8XUNeU https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0XI-J8XUNeU And for developers, you can try out the samples to see what the tech can do and the code to do it. The flow renderer is one of the newer flashier features: https://developers.arcgis.com/javascript/latest/sample-code/layers-imagery-afrenderer-blending/ https://developers.arcgis.com/javascript/latest/sample-code/... This shows how its done in code, but the public API underpins the Web Map Viewer, which exposes a UI for most of it.

cancan 4y ago
Would it be worth mentioning here that you work for Esri? disclaimer: i'm the co-founder at felt.
- n8cpdx 4y ago
  I’m paid by the hour and I posted in my personal time. I don’t own stock or have any financial interest in the company. I’m also a satisfied customer. I’m not sure it’s relevant though; everything I mentioned is factual and backed up with sources. Note that I didn’t advocate anything other than learning that the technology exists, which I think is fair game.
  - SOLAR_FIELDS 4y ago
    Even with the points in your above post, I think it's tough to make the case that you're posting something unbiased and should have still disclosed that information. Even if you're paid hourly and posting in your personal time, in the end I can't see any situation where positive press for the company you work for doesn't somehow affect you positively, no matter how small the needle. Saying you don't have any financial interest in a company while you are employed there is almost an oxymoron, even if your incentives are much more diminished than someone who owns equity.

thomasguide 4y ago

Not to hijack this thread, but curious whether some map people out there might opine on growth areas for this space - technologically, artistically, product-wise.

iamthepieman 4y ago
Spent most of my career in GIS. So, not a map person as much as a map data person. I do work with actual map makers though and get first look, editing and testing privileges. A map made for a specific purpose will almost always be hand tuned. The first, second...nth draft might mostly or completely auto-generated but the final product (for a good product anyways) will be hand edited. It could be additional graphics, legend or chloropleth tweaking, emphasis or de-emphasis any of the thousands of things you can tweak on a digital document that is also mostly graphical and part art. So tools for better intent manifestation, even more rapid live visualizations etc. Someone linked an Esri story map video in this thread and that's a good example of state of the art for map generation right now. There's lots of room for innovations on the data side of things. Making spatial relations to non-spatial data. There's no unified spatial query language that allows arbitrary length depth, lambdas and subqueries. Yes there are spatially aware relational databases but it's a dream of mine to build a universal spatial query language that can do something like Relate river to city by nearest ordered by city.population where river.distancefrom(max_elevation(city)) < 100 and max_elevation(city) < 0 Select river.name, (river.width.nearest_point(city)) as width, etc
- SOLAR_FIELDS 4y ago
  Can’t you do something similar currently using PostGIS? Granted, it’s ugly and you’ll see ST_ everywhere and it won’t be super readable, but it seems possible at least.
greggsy 4y ago
I could totally see this being integrated into white boarding tools like Miro, but I’d personally love to see Microsoft integrate it with a next-gen Visio/Whiteboard hybrid, with PowerBI integration.
4y ago

RicoElectrico 4y ago

Maps are hard to make if you are a typical programmer who thinks everything can be abstracted with an API. I checked out Felt and while what it has is polished, the feature set seems to be tailored towards investor demos, not actual mapmaking. There are only 2 basemaps, the only feature styling is coloring. Datasets are pretty much biased towards USA. Clipping is arbitrarily nerfed to US administrative divisions and buildings. If I were doing such service, I would jump on the trend of communities creating maps and infographics such as [1][2][3] - observe how large they are. [1] https://www.facebook.com/groups/mapawka/ https://www.facebook.com/groups/mapawka/ [2] https://www.facebook.com/SimonGerman600/ https://www.facebook.com/SimonGerman600/ [3] https://old.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/ https://old.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/

wavvebiird 4y ago

I work for onWater Fly Fishing. Good maps can definitely be tricky to make and manage. We are building hand-curated fly fishing maps to make it easier for anglers to plan trips, view property boundaries, understand regulations, and stay on top of changing conditions. https://onwaterapp.com/subscribe/Will-Moore https://onwaterapp.com/subscribe/Will-Moore