Worldle — Name the Country based on its Shape

Fun little wordle-inspired guess game where you get presented a country shape and you need to guess its name. Per guess you get to see how far off you are and which direction to look into. Worldle → Related: Globle also lets you search for a country, without an initial shape hint. If you want …

Lights at Sea — A map of Lighthouses

This map shows all the blinking beacons from OpenStreetMap. More specifically, it asks the Overpass API for all elements with an seamark:light:sequence attribute, decodes these, and displays them as coloured circles on the map using Leaflet. It also tries to take the seamark:light:range and seamark:light:colour into account. The cool part is that the size and …

Efficient Distance Querying in MySQL

Aaron Francis looks into querying MySQL with a ST_Distance_Sphere clause — a function to calculate the linear distance in meters between two lon/lat points — in an efficient way. There’s a few things he does there: No unnecessary calculations in WHERE clauses Pre-limiting the set by applying a bounding box Leveraging Generated Columns Using a …

Google Maps JavaScript API WebGL

I’m a huge mapping nerd, so I’m a sucker for the Maps JavaScript API WebGL beta which was announced at Google I/O back in May: Introduced are three new features: WebGL Overlay View lets you add custom 2D and 3D graphics and animated content to your maps. Tilt and heading can now be adjusted programmatically, …

Launching the Facebook Map

Jodah Adkins from Stamen Design: For the past year and a half, it’s been our privilege to work on one of our largest and most ambitious undertakings ever: collaborating closely with a team of Facebook engineers, designers, and data experts to roll out a global, multi-scale base map for all of Facebook’s billions of users. …

Unfolded Studio — Geospatial Data Reinvented

A geospatial analytics platform for data unification, enrichment, and visualization. It’s built on top of the aforementioned deck.gl and Kepler.gl Unfolded Studio →Unfolded Studio Example: All Public Transport stops in Germany → Sidenote: By the looks of it, the open-source Kepler.gl is doing the heavy lifting there.

Google Maps Hacks: Creating a Virtual Traffic Jam

Google Maps Hack by Simon Weckert: 99 second hand smartphones are transported in a handcart to generate virtual traffic jam in Google Maps. Through this activity, it is possible to turn a green street red which has an impact in the physical world by navigating cars on another route to avoid being stuck in traffic. …

The Spilhaus “World Ocean Map in a Square“ Projection

Coming to the next version of ArcGIS is the “Spilhaus projection”: In September and October of 2018, three maps went viral on social media and the web. All of them had the same perspective, featured oceans as the main focus, and presented the oceans as one body of water. The maps were based on the …