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.
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.
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.
Op here - I understand the perspective toward walled gardens, but I do not believe this is the issue here. A single developer is likely not going to make a new Encarta Atlas equivalent.
(street and trips, maybe, using google maps APIs or something and relying on 3rd party data?)
Given the hundred thousand meaningless apps in existence though, it really doesn't feel like the walled garden is the problem here. Either there's no interest in making these, or no interest in consuming, or both. But to this day it astonishes me that searching for Atlas in either Google play or Apple app store, finds me Nothing like encarta or Compton atlas used to bring to the table. :-(
I don't see why you couldn't write a bespoke tool that meets your needs and build out your own functionality. It doesn't have to be pretty or perfect. I do this a lot with other things with my laptop. I imagine there are already plenty of apis that make this easy with open street maps.
Encarta atlas and Compton atlas had a phenomenal amount of information presented in myriad ways. They were (for thr time) polished and comprehensive and extensive and powerful. I may be underestimating the power of a hyper dedicated solo super developer. But if so, nevertheless the $100 dev fee remains even more the least of the obstacles here.
You don't have to build out every feature much less at once. You just need to be able to iterate your own novel features. That's what writing your own code for your own tooling lets you do, and what you can't do currently with these walled gardens.
Thanks; I do not believe we are discussing the same topic though - what I'm discussing (modern Encarta Atlas or Compton Atlas) is primarily about content, whereas I believe you're primarily talking about code.
I understand the dislike of walled gardens; I do not believe they have any bearing whatsoever on the gap that I've brought up though.
That’s a ridiculous amount of friction for a kid who wants to mess around with programming on a phone. With $100 they could, I don’t know, pay to see a doctor or get a tank of gas, or throw a party. Immediate needs like that come first to teenagers who don’t know what to do with their life yet. Apple is limiting the next generation of hires to keep up the walls today.
I took the trouble of logging in to HN to call bullshit on this whole thread. The reason these teenagers aren’t building standalone apps is generally because they know that web apps are the future. Moreover, there are dozens of new travel planning startups every year (YC regularly funds them!) and they seem to discover the same thing that Microsoft did—the real reason they stopped updating this magical app—which is that everybody wants better travel apps but nobody wants to pay for it.
I’m sure someone will crack the code someday and I’m glad they will keep trying, but I refuse to accept the premise that $100 Apple developer accounts are their primary impediment.
$100 is $100, you seem to comment from a position of privilege. When I learned programming, in my early 20s, that was close to my monthly salary. Granted I've been a paid programmer for more than 15 years now and I make more than that, but, even so, seeing as app development is not what brings me money it looks like a waste to me to throw $100 at something each year so that I'd have the privilege of running my code on a piece of hardware I already own.
And let's say that maybe I'm a cheap bastard, but the reality remains that $100 is still a lot of money for a lot of young people around the world who have just gotten into programming.
No way my parents would have forked over $100 to me on some computer thing they didn't understand. Being able to spend your parents money on the internet as a kid is rare.
Maybe web apps are going to be used for commercial things but nothing beats the power of being able to write your own tools, and its just so easy to do that locally as its always been. A little bash script or some python goes far.
Replying to my own post since I said that I would check it out this afternoon.
I read through the website, checked open job listings (I love maps and maybe, just maybe...), and finally found at the bottom of the page the button giving the opportunity to Try Felt Free. To get there I had to read the blog post - which gives the vibe that it is an advertisement, and then read everything on the About page.
That is not where I expected to find a free trial opportunity. Regardless, I clicked that button for the "Free" trial.
I was asked to provide an email address or login through Google since the Free link takes you straight to the SignUp dialog.
It isn't free if you have to give something in return so I chose to take a pass on it today.
Good luck to the founders and to the team.
I am probably not a customer since it is a subscription service and I avoid them as much as possible in today's world.
It has made such a huge difference in how we planned and managed trips with the kids. I would always plan a general route around a specific set of activities that we booked in advance. I knew when I needed to arrive at a specific location and in general, how long it would occupy us. A typical trip would revolve around a main activity like rafting a river for a few days, I would work in opportunities to visit a few national parks where the kids could build their Junior Ranger badge collections, and leave opportunities for adding local activities that may not be obvious up front.
We mapped hotels and campgrounds, nearby attractions, etc. and then I filled in gaps so that we didn't spend the entire day traveling with no fun stuff on the agenda. I was always able to use the functionality to get an accurate idea about distances per day, time spent traveling per day, fuel costs per day, etc. We picked restaurants using online searches so that we could locate great food options and figure out whether we would pass close enough to drop in and eat well without breaking our schedule.
Once we made it to a stop, and time could be allocated to every stop in advance, planned to the minute(!), we would review our future plans and evaluate whether we could or should change anything including the route, accommodations, etc. I would investigate any ideas that you normally find on hotel or campground brochures, any highway local interest signs, etc and see whether we could detour if they weren't already on the map.
I would lay out all the new options and, with the wife and kids, we would take a vote on how to proceed. I could modify all the plans right there on the laptop dump the maps to a USB drive, and print the new maps on the hotel printer or at Kinkos so that we would have up-to-date plans at hand every morning.
We took many multi-state trips circling across the US. They were precision planned and simple for anyone to follow so that my wife and I could switch from driver to navigator as needed.
After it was all cancelled and new maps and highway info was not available we would use online maps to find new addresses and then locate that spot in S&T and place a marker in S&T and navigate to that marker. That's how we play it now.
I am so glad that you responded since I wanted someone to know that they did excellent work and that at least one of us appreciates all the thought and effort that went into it. And we still use it in planning road trips.
Kudos to you and your colleagues.
I use ESRI-ArcGIS, QGIS, and have used GRASS. You all produced such a user-friendly, feature-packed, useful product with a gentle learning curve so that a casual user could get what they need from standard, easy to understand menu selections and you made it affordable.
It truly is and was a great product and I have been using computers since the DOS wars on X86 hardware and the days of the original Mac. Some software I have used I always hoped never to need to use again after the first time. I know with S&T that the task is easy because talented people put some thought into a list of useful features and then executed the coding to the point where annoyances were absent and roadblocks existed only where the latest highway update said they existed.
Thanks! My wife and I have really enjoyed using that software. It is a masterpiece.
Thank you! I loved working in USGEO - S&T and MapPoint were great - we each got to leave an Easter-egg POI [0]! I even make maps in my spare time[1] :) . W
That's great. Leaving your own Easter egg is a nice perk. The maps are great too.
I have been toying with creating something for my kids from the combined set of travel maps that we made over the years. Add a few pictures and it would make a nice clickable travelogue.
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.
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
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.
I have a few production apps in the GIS/mapping space and I think the big area for growth is a truly cross-platform mapping solution that works across all platforms. Right now Mapbox's (and Maplibre's) options are the closest to this, but web and the two mobile platforms still differ quite a bit, and there's only support for macOS on the desktop.
Maplibre-rs is something to keep an eye on, but it's very much a proof of concept and early going. It's using wgpu (https://github.com/gfx-rs/wgpu), which is a rust-based "implementation" of the WebGPU api, so to speak, which of course would support running via wasm in the browser as well as having support for pretty much all the other platforms.
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.
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.
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.
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/... This shows how its done in code, but the public API underpins the Web Map Viewer, which exposes a UI for most of it.
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.
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.
Around 2011 I had a job that required me to use ArcGIS often. Quantum GIS (now just QGIS) was nearly unknown in my office, I think I was the first person to require a QGIS install there. Fast forward 10 years and it is awesome how the project progressed in this time. Now the situation inverted, my old colleagues and the people that came after use mostly QGIS.
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.
I started planning out a someday road trip. I found mymaps.google.com at least a good starting point as I want to (in the US) do something that is vaguely circular--i.e. avoids excessive backtracks and spurs. It let me choose a bunch of locations and assign various colors as I tuned the route.
My 2013 honeymoon was a four-week, 7000-mile loop from Seattle down the Pacific coast and back up through the Rockies. We were in a Honda Fit and camped about 60% of the nights, usually at a NFS or NPS campground when possible. We passed through the majority of the National Parks in the western states, including the Grand Canyon and Glacier.
I planned the entire route in Google Maps (“My maps”) and then used a highlighter to trace it out on a paper road atlas because I didn’t own a smartphone at the time. We used interstate highways sparingly. The only time we almost lost our way was while trying to find a primitive campground high above Death Valley on some unpaved NFS roads.
I'm sure I'll end up using other planning and tracking tools, including paper state maps and a laminated US map I bought. But I found this really helpful as a first cut at "What's an interesting big swing I can do that optimizes for places I haven't been but want to see and that involves a minimum of out-of-the-way driving." I basically put a bunch of color-coded places on the map and then started recoloring them if they didn't really fit my objectives.
My intent is certainly not to overplan. But having a "strategic" first cut seems useful.
> 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.
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.
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?
Can people add their own layers, like a WMS overlay? and, relatedly, have you considered adding georeferenced historical map layers? It seems like a good platform for story-telling.
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?
(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?
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.
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
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.
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.
I have done this previously using http://maperitive.net/ to download OpenStreetMap data and exporting roads as SVG or AI, then using Illustrator or Inkscape to clean up and print. Maperitive is a bit clumsy and hasn't been updated for years at this point, I think, but it's free and worked well for my purpose (which sounds like exactly what you're trying to do).
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).
Sure, I just mentioned it in the off-chance it was good enough out of the box. Big jump from making a screenshot (or perhaps stitching a few together) to editing OSM vectors in QGIS/Inkscape, which others have mentioned already.
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
> 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...
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.
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
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/) 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.
The tile size doesn't change, but the number of pixels per meter does as you note--distortion being greater the farther you get from the equator (in the Mercator projection).
The protomaps blog has some heady stuff you may enjoy reading: https://protomaps.com/blog/free-tier-maps. Felt apparently uses protomaps.js, which you can learn more about in that blog as well.
Well tile size in meters changes. Pixels stay the same but when a tile is rendered at a specific zoom level of meters/pixel on the screen it needs to be scaled differently and you may even need to request another ring of tiles to fill up the same FoV. Perhaps that was just a specific quirk of my application since I needed to overlay a metric grid with other data.
Thanks for the link, that was an interesting read. Though it seems odd to me that they insist on using AWS and complain about bandwidth when there are providers like Scaleway that do not charge for bandwidth usage at all. Though on the other hand they do only have EU locations so you can't use the CDN principle to reduce latency. But I'm sure people would wait a second longer if it meant a free API.
I read somewhere was that apparently vector data would be too slow to render on the client for some reason. Now that's likely to be somewhat true for the low zoom tiles where you need to render out an entire continent worth of roads and borders, but the more you zoom in the more the trade-off becomes in favour of using svgs instead since there's less overall data on screen.
I bet you could also move away from the tile system if you used vector graphics, since the client can just render its own seamless zoom levels and then request specific data based on what it can comfortably display. I'm sure Google, Bing, etc. have already implemented all that ages ago.
Yeah that statement may have been completely accurate 15, maybe even 10 years ago, but gets less and less true as time goes on. After all OSM was apparently conceived in 2006.
Ah, re-reading what I wrote I see I made it ambiguous. The statement I'm talking about is "vector data would be too slow to render on the client", not your comment.
I don’t get it, projecting a curved surface onto a flat surface given some constraints isn’t even grad school level math. The 2D Map is hard because it requires knowledge of undergrad Math?
Assuming your not not seeking to create a perfect representation of 3D reality since that is impossibly hard.
If you mean the best undergrad in the world can write better than that yes, I agree. If you mean the median I would disagree since worse spelling mistakes are commonly made.
Assuming everyone’s using a tablet with 15 seconds of free time and auto spell check turned off.
Right, but I don’t claim that writing on HN is fundamentally hard, or that I went through a great effort to write comments here. And I would expect for someone to call me out on it if I did.
Even the most charitable view of the parent comment would indicate that there was an erroneous belief that a perfect, or near perfect, map would only be finitely more difficult, and achievable in finite time. Whereas in reality the difficulty and time required asymptomatically approaches infinity.
Right, that’s my point. Anyone with knowledge of undergrad math would understand a perfect projection is impossible whereas a less than perfect projection is easy.
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.