[HN Gopher] Felt
___________________________________________________________________
Felt
Author : bookofjoe
Score : 1272 points
Date : 2022-07-05 00:05 UTC (22 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (felt.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (felt.com)
| NonNefarious wrote:
| What about it?
|
| Another douchily obscure title on HN.
|
| <yawn>
| doodlebugging wrote:
| I checked out the user supplied examples.
|
| On the Appalachian Trail map the Title of the Legend is
| "Bathymetry". Something tells me that is not right. Global
| warming must be a bigger problem for the east coast than I had
| been misled to expect.
|
| The map of community solar proposals also has a problem in the
| legend. All the line sizes for the transmission capacity players
| are identical in the legend even though they are graduated sizes
| on the map.
|
| In addition, there actually end up being two map legends as you
| can see in the Appalachian Trip planner. The first one is tied to
| the base map and the symbology fits for the base map. You need to
| zoom in to see any Campground or Trailhead points since they are
| features common to the National Parks along the route. The second
| one is the user added note with Planned Stops and Estimated Date.
|
| Points associated with the second legend (or note or whatever)
| are all you see at the initial scale. This might be confusing for
| some users who would expect all map layers to belong to one
| legend so this should be clarified.
|
| With these in mind, it would pay off for them to examine their
| Legend tools so that they can become legendarily good because
| right now they serve as a perfect example of how not to do a map
| legend. They are supposed to convey useful information that aids
| visual interpretation of map features and layers.
| [deleted]
| mthom wrote:
| not interested unless it is about the 80s indie pop band
| paxys wrote:
| Very cool, although IMO this would fit much better as a feature
| of something like Google Maps rather than a standalone product.
| While I'm sure it has valid professional use cases, quickly
| annotating and sharing maps is something I do all the time with
| friends (let's meet here, let's check out these three spots,
| here's the route for the hike/drive/bike), and I can't really
| imagine using yet another standalone product that everyone has to
| create accounts and maybe pay for, when a screenshot of maps app
| + built-in annotation tool works perfectly fine.
| bostonvaulter2 wrote:
| Felt employee here, only the map creator needs an account.
| Viewers can view the map anonymously (unless the creator
| restricts anonymous viewing). One benefit is that you can zoom
| out or zoom in from a Felt map, where you can't do that with a
| screenshot (unless you're on CSI of course). But there's plenty
| of cases where a screenshot will still work, and that's fine!
| imgabe wrote:
| This looks promising. I hope they add some way to measure
| distances.
|
| What I'm currently wanting to do is draw a circle that's e.g. 100
| meters around a given latitude and longitude. Google maps doesn't
| let you do this. I could do it with Leaflet, but that would
| involve setting up a whole js app for something that is basically
| just a back of the envelope calculation. I have access to ArcGIS
| which I'm sure can do it, I guess I'll have to learn how to use
| it.
| waterproof wrote:
| You can do that in Caltopo. They have a lot of really handy
| mapmaking features (like viewsheds and their "measure distance"
| tool that can snap to roads and trails), though their UI leaves
| a lot to be desired.
| meigwilym wrote:
| I use Free Map Tools for things like this. It's a bit rough
| around the edges, but does the trick.
|
| https://www.freemaptools.com/
| jschrf wrote:
| Funny thing is, it's not exactly a back of the envelope calc,
| as technically speaking it depends on your requirements on
| accuracy (or rather, your tolerance for different flavours of
| distortion), the projection you wish to draw in, the projection
| the measurement is done in, and what tradeoffs you are willing
| to make on circumference/shape/area.
|
| Also factors: where you draw the circle, because this matters
| depending on your choices of projections.
|
| ArcGIS or GDAL or whatever can do the math for you, but there's
| still domain knowledge and careful tradeoffs involved in
| representing anything spatial and meeting actual IRL need. It's
| all relative (and a bit of a goddamned nightmare)
|
| (src: I used to build spatial tools on ArcGIS)
| cancan wrote:
| It's coming soon!
| darksaints wrote:
| You can do this quite easily using the ST_Buffer function in
| PostGIS.
| injidup wrote:
| What nonsense! Gave up after reading this.
|
| """ Where typical internet maps take 30+ seconds to load after
| each pan and zoom """
|
| What typical maps are the talking about?
| CamelRocketFish wrote:
| I was exactly the same. As soon as I read that hyperbole I
| immediately closed the page. You're either dishonest or perform
| terrible tests which means I'm not going to trust much else of
| what you write on your landing page.
| zimpenfish wrote:
| Given the context, "Never wait for a dataset to load again.
| Where typical internet maps take 30+ seconds to load after each
| pan and zoom, ...", it seems to be specifically talking about
| loading and rendering new bits of data taking 30+ seconds when
| you pan and zoom, not just panning and zooming the map itself.
| kart23 wrote:
| ironically, performance is terrible with most of their demos,
| and I'm using chrome on a decently powerful desktop.
|
| https://felt.com/map/San-Diego-Zoo-Virtual-Tour-LC3QHLPxR4yw...
| sen wrote:
| Wow the performance on that is absolutely terrible. I'm on a
| gaming PC and it bogged me down so hard the tab started
| freezing up.
| BbzzbB wrote:
| Same. Could it be HN overwhelming their servers rather than
| the tool itself?
| bil7 wrote:
| there's no way they've implemented each pan, move and
| zoom to require a server roundtrip. Their client side is
| not performant.
| BbzzbB wrote:
| Thanks for the clarification.
| criddell wrote:
| Yeah, it's borderline unusable for me too, but it is a beta
| so I'll reserve judgement.
| bil7 wrote:
| same here on an m1 macbook pro
| Traubenfuchs wrote:
| Performance is so bad, the page crashes regularly and
| repeatedly on my iPhone 13 pro. It's unusable.
| hbn wrote:
| It seems like they don't support Safari or anything other
| than Chrome (and all browsers on iOS are technically
| Safari)
|
| I tried it in Safari on my i9 late-2019 MBP and (after
| dismissing the warning message) I was barely able to move
| around.
| [deleted]
| schleck8 wrote:
| https://felt.com/map/Appalachian-Trail-Thru-
| Hike-9BZ2GWGGKQ1...
|
| I just loaded this big map on a pixel 4a and while it was
| laggy, it still responded and didn't crash
| cnity wrote:
| After a bit of an inspection, it looks like they segment the
| viewport into multiple canvas elements. I don't think
| repositioning loads of canvas elements by translating the
| parent div in CSS is the most performant approach, but I may
| be wrong.
|
| It would likely be more performant if the map view was a
| single canvas and panning, segmentation and so on was done in
| a buffer and rendered to the canvas by blitting the pre-
| rendered sections, or something along those lines. Maybe even
| rendering the sections to WebGL textures and using a WebGL
| context for the canvas.
| aschleck wrote:
| You're right that using canvas/WebGL will be much faster.
| It seems the embeddable Google Maps JS library recently
| moved in this direction, though it appears they kept the
| layers of stacked divs (almost certainly for backwards
| compatibility with existing users who have HTML layers that
| need to be kept in sync.)
|
| But something fun to notice with Felt is that the rendering
| library (LeafletJS) is using transform3d to do 2d
| translations (instead of just using translate), so you may
| wonder "why?" At least in Chrome (and it seems in Safari)
| if you use transform3d the browser is more likely to keep
| the div in its own layer. This will reduce a lot of the
| paint/compositing time, and make the frame rate
| dramatically better. Of course in this case the micro-
| optimizations are irrelevant in comparison to Felt's JS
| performance problems (which on my machine appears to be due
| to projecting 2000 points from lat/lng space to pixel space
| every frame.) Choosing to project points every frame is
| super confusing because the whole point of the
| translate/transform3d optimization is to avoid having to
| recalculate pixel space during the latency-sensitive pan
| interaction. Odd.
| ev0lv wrote:
| This guy codes! No seriously, this is great feedback for
| the devs.
| lionkor wrote:
| i7-9700k @ 4.9 GHz, RTX 2070 here, no other tabs open,
| absolutely unusable still. Firefox Nightly with hardware
| acceleration. Yikes.
| [deleted]
| tagyro wrote:
| after the initial load and warning to switch to chrome, it's
| running pretty smooth in safari on a m1 macbook air
| madeofpalk wrote:
| On my MBP w/M1 Pro, it's terribly unresponsive trying to
| zoom.
| cr3ative wrote:
| This is... unusable, on a decent Macbook Pro using Chrome.
| ryanbrunner wrote:
| Maybe they started this project in the late 90s with the goal
| to unseat Mapquest.
| jhugo wrote:
| Yeah, it was really hard to take it seriously after reading
| that.
| krstffr wrote:
| A bit sad as the thing that made me decide to not even try
| their app (which looked cool!) was the abysmal performance (in
| FF).
| nik736 wrote:
| Using Firefox their maps are taking a long time to load after
| each pan and zoom. lol.
| 8n4vidtmkvmk wrote:
| they meant they take 30 seconds whereas competitors take
| 300ms. just a little slip up
| judge2020 wrote:
| The TOS and privacy policy[0] are hosted on notion instead of a
| true static page, which is sort of concerning.
|
| 0: https://feltmaps.notion.site/Privacy-
| Policy-69227ee23a8a48dc...
| joegahona wrote:
| I'd call it "odd" rather than "concerning." Guessing they ran
| this by Legal, but there's something's weird about the TOS/PP
| existing on a different domain, without any of the branding of
| the company, and in a Notion doc. It does the job, I suppose.
| cardamomo wrote:
| What do you suppose constitutes a "true" static page? (More to
| the point: what would prevent Felt from updating their static
| pages whenever they wish?)
| sedatk wrote:
| Why is that concerning?
| Karen48 wrote:
| tony_cannistra wrote:
| I am excited about Felt. (And whoever comes around to compete.)
|
| That's mostly because I think (as they also must) that "making
| maps" is something that everyone does (in our heads; verbally; on
| the back of scrap paper; on random car-floor cardboard tacked to
| trailhead signs) but that few easily-accessible software tools
| have ever tried to facilitate digitally.
|
| I'm interested mostly in the user-experience they've created to
| add our "human effects" to an "existing" map (like notes,
| relevant points, lines, directions). I really am drawn to it.
|
| They're putting a lot of energy into the data-layer side of
| things, which I think is admirable considering the complexity,
| and seem to be nailing it. I'm not sure how folks will use those
| things, since I don't think our mental maps often require
| additional data.
|
| I'll also add that their curated set of example uses is an
| excellent model for how to show people how to use a product that
| they might otherwise have no idea what to do with.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| I feel like this product wouldn't have much of a market if
| people didnt forget about desktop google earth.
| coolsank wrote:
| definitely agree to this. And one segment that they could
| (should) definitely get customers are those who use ArcGIS. As
| someone who previously worked in oil & gas, the tax that these
| companies pay to Arc for all their mapping data is just crazy.
| I've always wondered why there isn't a solid tech company that
| could build a product that could take over Arc's business.
| Looking forward to Felt!
| RicoElectrico wrote:
| > I've always wondered why there isn't a solid tech company
| that could build a product that could take over Arc's
| business.
|
| A "friendly relationship" of customers with salespeople,
| perhaps. And familiarity with software that's used in GIS
| courses at universities.
| __turbobrew__ wrote:
| > I've always wondered why there isn't a solid tech company
| that could build a product that could take over Arc's
| business
|
| A few reasons:
|
| 1.) many geotech companies require on premise installations
| because they want control of their data and/or the internet
| quality at remote sites is poor. This means that a SaaS
| solution is a non-starter.
|
| 2.) Most geotechs are already familiar with Arc tools due to
| Arc's aggressive marketing to universities
|
| 3.) Arc is a swiss army knife which can do most things "good
| enough". For most businesses Arc can do what they want out of
| the box. Products like felt only have 1/10th or less of the
| functionality as Arc.
|
| We are in the process of replacing Arc with our own custom
| platform at my company. If you are a heavy user of Arc you
| quickly outgrow the capabilities of the system. We want to
| serve petabytes of geotechnical data, and Arc quickly starts
| to choke on data sizes that large. The operational work of
| keeping Arc up and running smoothly is also a major headache
| since you don't have access to the source code and the error
| messages in Arc are very poor which means you rely on ESRI
| support a lot.
| nly wrote:
| I've always been well served by screenshoting google maps and
| scribbling on it in WhatsApp before I send it to someone
|
| Even in an office environment I think they're biggest
| competitor is going to be MSPaint(3D)
|
| The evacuation plans in my (1000+ employee) company are still
| just building control plans that have been printed out on A3
| and marked with a sharpie.
| sorenbs wrote:
| I am excited to share a map with my group of friends going
| skiing next winter. I used to create a Notion doc with
| manually annotated screenshots from google maps, much like
| you. But this feels way better.
| altilunium wrote:
| As for me, it's not enough.
|
| Qgis is a bare minimum to make a decent map.
| gdudeman wrote:
| Making maps _is_ something everyone does and existing map
| software is really targeted to professionals. Even if you
| figure out how to make a map with the GIS desktop software
| (QGIS or ESRI), taking the maps you made and putting them
| online is another huge hurdle that requires a separate
| skillset.
|
| I think Felt is taking the winning approach - to enlarge the
| market by making map making possible for everyone and making it
| be online-first.
|
| I've been playing with https://clockworkmicro.com/ to make
| layers in my spatial database viewable by others, but it
| requires some GIS knowledge and familiarity with databases
| (unlike Felt).
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Looks pretty cool.
|
| I will probably not use it, but might be interested, if it had an
| API. From my [admittedly, cursory] examination, it does not
| appear to have an API.
|
| I assume it uses OSM data? But maybe not, as I don't see any
| attributions on the maps.
|
| Personally, I am a "cartophile." I love maps, and really enjoy
| using them.
| tony_cannistra wrote:
| I found a "(c) Mapbox, (c) OpenStreetMap contributors" in the
| bottom left when I clicked on an example
| (https://felt.com/map/Community-Solar-Draft-
| Proposal-U8dl9A6Z...)
| jakecopp wrote:
| As an OpenStreetMap contributor I'm extremely grateful they
| are correctly attributing OSM (by the sounds of it).
|
| There are plenty [1] of sites & apps (some quite large) that
| don't correctly attribute OSM data according to the legal
| requirements [2].
|
| [1]: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Lacking_proper_attri
| buti... [2]: https://www.openstreetmap.org/copyright
| [deleted]
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| That makes sense.
|
| I have heard some folks throw shade on MapBox, but it appears
| to be a pretty good system, from what I have seen.
| synicalx wrote:
| Very neat tool, as a little bit of a map nerd I could waste a ton
| of time fiddling with this.
|
| My first thought though when I saw this link was "Damn that's a
| valuable domain name". According to a couple of sources it's
| worth somewhere in the ballpark of $15-25k!
| schleck8 wrote:
| I doubt it, probably more than this. I heard someone rented a
| four character domain for multiple hundred thousand usd per
| year.
| HPsquared wrote:
| That's got me looking at similar domains... belt, celt, delt,
| melt, pelt, welt...
|
| Each could have been something interesting, but disappointingly
| there is only one other "real" website: melt.com ("Cheesed to
| meet you!")
| aerovistae wrote:
| Totally off-topic, but if you click on "Careers" and scroll down
| to where they list their funding sources, the font size becomes
| so large I had to move away from my computer to read it. Reason
| unclear.
| ajoseps wrote:
| I've been looking for something to create a map of the venue for
| an upcoming wedding. This seems to work out nicely. One thing I
| hope it adds on is the use of the arrow keys to pan around the
| map. When creating the polygon, it's annoying to repeatedly zoom
| in/zoom out to create the shape, where panning would be much
| easier.
| koevet wrote:
| For an upcoming trip to NYC, I was trying to map some NYC walks
| and highlights using Google Maps, but I stumbled into a lot of
| limitations (limit on number of layers, limits of number of legs
| of an itinerary, ect.).
|
| I was able to import all my existing NYC geo-points into Felt and
| quickly chart some itineraries from different sources. Way, way
| faster than Google Map.
|
| Let's see how fast it will render once I'm on the ground in the
| city with mobile interent.
|
| One major difference with Google Map is the lack of custom
| layers, but so far it hasn't been a problem.
|
| This is my NYC 2022 trip map :) https://felt.com/map/New-
| York-2022-u7J1aE2ZSLOmdwCP4WGCOA
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Try out google earth desktop instead of google maps. Its much
| more powerful software
| olejorgenb wrote:
| The link does load for me :(
|
| I'm can't find any import function? (maybe I need the phone-
| app?)
|
| It looks really nice, but I think the lack of custom layers
| makes it quite - well - lacking.
|
| A simple feature which allowed to add an arbitrary OSM POI
| category as a layer (and selectively remove individual POIs)
| would've been very useful.
| udfalkso wrote:
| Very nice map!
|
| What seems to be missing from Felt is some interactivity to
| make this map useful. I can't tap on a route to see it's length
| it get it to open in google maps for routing. I can't tap on a
| pin to get its address or get directions to it.
|
| It's just a zoom able picture, which isn't a big payoff for all
| the effort needed to build the map.
| jaksmit wrote:
| i just tried to create a map and it didn't even support searching
| by gps coordinates
|
| how therefore am i supposed to find a place i've identified on
| google maps?
| [deleted]
| mattfrommars wrote:
| I am always intrigued on how to 'start-up' companies come up with
| a UI/look/feel of a website. I am talking about beyond the
| traditional color palette wheel. Spinning up a regular run off
| the mill website get you the experience of Wordpress/Webflow/Wix
| site.
|
| The font, the color, the animation, the bar going across the top,
| who comes up with this?
| et-al wrote:
| The CEO of Felt (hinting) formerly co-founded Remix, which is
| another heavy design-focused company.
|
| Also, check out the Twitter of Felt's lead designer for some of
| their process: https://twitter.com/lorenbaxter
| frozencell wrote:
| Second time founders. They already have an idea of design
| components like fonts, color palette, sizing and margin, nav,
| borders and JavaScript components like faq dropdowns, routing,
| etc.
|
| Is there a need for clean custom components for app design
| development?
| pfraze wrote:
| IMO it's a cross between the personal tastes of the creators
| and the emotional story they're trying to convey. The aesthetic
| here, looking on mobile, seems to be trying to evoke memories
| of vacations, a sense of adventure, perhaps the mystique of
| being a cartographer.
| wokwokwok wrote:
| > We deal with data so you don't have to.
|
| I can't find it now, but a while ago there was a post about
| map/data startups that basically boiled down to: Don't.
|
| The argument went like this:
|
| People who want geospatial visualisations almost always want
| something custom.
|
| Companies selling geospatial products believe that they can churn
| the data into "data layers" that serve "use cases" that mostly
| address this.
|
| It's always more work to work with a company to get the last mile
| of the custom use case... than it would have been to just do it
| yourself.
|
| There aren't that many paying customers.
|
| ...
|
| I don't know how true that is in reality, and the article was
| more nuanced than my dumb summary, but... really? A subscription
| product to annotate maps, which has built in "data layers" so
| "you don't have to"?
|
| Sounds very familiar.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| Yes.
|
| In my own experience, either the product needed very little map
| features, and it didn't warrant paying in full just for that (I
| remember even live Google Maps integration being dismissed as
| "too costly" and moving to pre-rendered optimized maps).
|
| Either we needed a lot more maps, and having full access to the
| underlying data made more sense to limit computational overhead
| and better adapt to our use case.
|
| Basically map/location related features are hard and often
| costly, I expect companies to either avoid them completely or
| bite the bullet and go full in.
| alexalx666 wrote:
| b2c maps is probably one of the worst niches out there, so much
| tiling so little $
| tony_cannistra wrote:
| I think you're thinking of this Joe Morrison substack post:
| https://joemorrison.substack.com/p/nobody-wants-your-fancy-a...
|
| hn post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31074177
| iamthepieman wrote:
| You're right in a narrow sense but wrong in a broad one.
|
| "It's always more work to work with a company to get the last
| mile of the custom use case... than it would have been to just
| do it yourself."
|
| This is true if all you need is a out of the box basemap with
| "data layers"
|
| Many companies need to process data in real time or at least
| nightly to get it into a format that has all the information
| they need usually cross referenced and enhanced with multiple
| related data sources. These can be related via a primary key
| and simple or related via a simple or complex spatial
| relationship or spatial plus primary key relationships. This
| will require custom ETL pipelines that a utility company, for
| instance, doesn't have the in house expertise to create and
| maintain.
|
| This also assumes you have the supporting elements already in
| place. Utilities often need to host data themselves for
| security or legacy reasons so they can't just use a cloud
| service. There are usually tools built on top of the data that
| need to be updated. A new geospatial system usually involves a
| lot more than just a new data layer. If that's all you need,
| then maybe these companies like felt are a good solution.
| dmix wrote:
| These are all interesting and well informed comments but am I
| wrong in thinking they seem to be unrelated to the Felt
| product?
|
| Felt seems to be primarily a visual map annotation tool ala
| building visualizations. I doubt the data part would need to
| be that complex and custom. It could be a generic 'view'
| layer providing just the top layer and leave the data sources
| wide open and flexible but for the current offering it makes
| sense it's building off a 'library' of sources.
|
| Although every B2B product will have customers who demand
| startups be their personal software consultants. That doesn't
| always translate into a repeatable product.
| aguacaterojo wrote:
| I build a product in this space and our traction is pretty good
| because we capture the data as well & follow customers with
| lots of infrastructure way down that very long last mile. We
| put in as much work into a handful of last mile solutions (that
| do scale quite well) as we do to our generic more generic Felt
| like base layer - admittedly Felt is much more polished than
| ours, but yeah we don't have a lot of traction on that self-
| service lightweight easy to use online GIS model.
| lmc wrote:
| Seems cool but I'm wondering what their business model is, and
| what will happen to the product and user data in future.
| danuker wrote:
| "Try Felt free" -> loginwall
|
| I think this flow could be improved, perhaps with a demo account
| or such.
|
| The videos make it pretty clear also, however.
| gorgoiler wrote:
| Always nice to see a newcomer tilting at the b2b status quo. How
| big is the b2b GIS market and what's the sort of volume and
| median deal size? I'm completely guessing here but the big
| players must be:
|
| Government? No thanks! Disrupting government contracts must be
| the last thing on the list of things to conquer. You'll win the
| prize eventually but they are the end game big boss that you get
| just after you get your SOC2 etc.
|
| Mining? Landing a big mining or mineral extraction contract seems
| like it could be a huge deal. There's a lot of money in that
| industry (eg mining, ahem, oil) so I suspect they have their own
| in house cartogeniuses. Selling mapping software to mining
| corporations would be a bit like selling docker consulting to
| Google, I'm guessing.
|
| Agriculture? Small to medium ag would be a nice market to go
| after. Maybe even target one of the other ag b2bs rather than
| selling to ag directly. Exit via John Deere acquihire!
|
| Ecology? Academia? If Elsevier are anything to go by then there's
| a fair bit of cash there to be spent on institutional software.
| Maybe you can do a deal with a whole University to provide felt
| licenses to all staff and students?
|
| On that last point, remember how Facebook started out by
| targeting college kids? Is there a business pattern for pushing
| gratis software tools to undergrads so that they then preach them
| to their new bosses as new hires once they graduate? It sounds so
| obvious but are there good examples of it other than school kids
| learning MS Office? "Hey I loved using Felt for my undergrad
| dissertation -- let's use it here, at my new mining job?!"
|
| Good luck, Felt!
| itintheory wrote:
| > Is there a business pattern for pushing gratis software tools
| to undergrads so that they then preach them to their new bosses
| as new hires once they graduate?
|
| A generation of CS students learned to program in Java on
| Solaris machines subsidized by Sun.
| jeffreyrogers wrote:
| I don't know how big the market is but there is at least one
| multibillion dollar company (ESRI) in the space. I think they
| have products targeted at most major industries. The US has at
| least two government agencies that are heavily involved in
| satellite imagery and they must contract out a lot of that
| work. I think it is getting easier to enter into the government
| contracting space. Anduril shows that you can get VC backing
| and scale fast if you have the right product.
| thematrixturtle wrote:
| > I think it is getting easier to enter into the government
| contracting space.
|
| Hahahaha no.
| jeffreyrogers wrote:
| I mean, I personally know people who have done it at the
| SBIR level and there is definitely more VC interest
| recently than say 10 years ago.
| jschrf wrote:
| Energy (namely Oil and Gas production) contracts are huge in
| B2B GIS and offer the growth opportunities that execs love, but
| in my own opinion the most consistently profitable sector and
| also the one ripest for disruption is local and state
| governments in the USA.
|
| Imagine being a cash strapped county and paying 6 figures for a
| software license to a REST API and then having to become a tiny
| dev shop just to start delivering your generic pothole
| reporting app to web users.
| egorfine wrote:
| > Government? No thanks! Disrupting government contracts must
| be the last thing
|
| Been there, done that. We have developed a similar product for
| WHO and ILO in Geneva: interactive maps with their data (tons
| of it). Put my own money into development based on their
| enthusiastic feedback among heads of departments.
|
| Well, enthusiastic feedback is all we've got. Two years is not
| enough to run the contract by legal and financial depts and
| nowhere even close to get any - any - signed paper.
| a-walker wrote:
| Love this. Been a consistent pain for us just to make as simple
| map you can toss out to someone for a report and then forget
| about. Will be interesting to see how it plays out - arcgis
| recently launched a sort of consumer oriented mapping service -
| wonder how far they're wanting to go.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| People use google earth desktop for this too
| sn41 wrote:
| I am really excited about this. I wanted to share a rather
| complicated walking route around a campus, and it was far from a
| rectangular grid. Just created the route and shared it with my
| friend. It's rather a shame that Google maps or other maps like
| mapquest do not have an option of sharing a "custom route" rather
| than a location. I hope Felt catches on and succeeds.
| curiousgal wrote:
| You can import GPX files into Google Maps and save them as a
| custom map actually. I do it for my hikes.
| schleck8 wrote:
| Google Earth can do that
| carderne wrote:
| Surprised that no one has mentioned Placemark [0] yet. It's the
| other brand new collaborative online mapping thingy, but made by
| a single dev and more focused on data than cartography/print.
|
| [0] https://www.placemark.io/
| mmazzarolo wrote:
| Looks cool! I'm also wondering how much this 4-letter domain is
| worth.
| TrackerFF wrote:
| Does it do custom heatmaps? Can you make lines from imported
| coordinates? Can these be color-coded, or weighted?
|
| I'm asking, because I do a lot of stuff like that, and currently
| I'm just using Folium for whatever tasks I have at hand - but
| would love to try out felt if that's the case.
| larsrc wrote:
| Disappointed to not learn more about the marvelous properties of
| compressed fibers.
| fehrm wrote:
| Is there an app or website that allows me to review restaurants
| or add notes offline? I recently moved and want an easy way to
| remember good restaurants etc, but don't want my entire movements
| sold to best buyer.
| anonymouse008 wrote:
| $20m in funding means they have a serious business case - it
| sounds like to take down ESRI and the rest of GIS?
|
| Does anyone on the team watch HN? Mind chipping in a thought?
| TimTheTinker wrote:
| Esri have a _serious_ moat. Their projection engine in
| particular is nigh on unapproachable in its capabilities.
| (Oracle tried for several years to build a competitor; they
| finally gave up and licensed Esri 's PE).
|
| Esri also have a _vast_ array of products for many niche
| industries.
|
| This product is cool, and I'm sure Felt have given careful
| consideration to how they plan to strategically differentiate
| from both Esri and open source solutions.
| jschrf wrote:
| Most of Esri's core C/C++ tech is fairly beastly. Especially
| the PE and geoprocessing bits. Spent a lot of time in the
| Esri space with enterprise customers, worked for a deeply
| integrated platinum partner, spent time on the campus,
| blahblah.
|
| Beating Esri is a lofty goal. Aside from the aforementioned
| core tech, they are extremely entrenched and scaled in
| basically all horizontals, and have verticals for each, plus
| a big partner network.
|
| I think that in order to "beat" Esri, you'd have to beat them
| in all these different spaces, horizontally and vertically.
| There is some low hanging fruit there technically, IMHO, but
| the picture bigger is that it's going to take a ton of sales
| people over many years to actually disrupt.
|
| I think a long-term technical strategy for a scrappy startup
| to be looked at as an "Esri-beater" would be to start with
| ArcGIS Online and build inroads from there. There are weak
| points there in the business response to the licensing
| evolution, the tech, and the UX/DX.
|
| Just my 2c.
| girvo wrote:
| > ArcGIS Online ... weak points there
|
| Phew is that a bit of an understatement. Where I work would
| _love_ a proper competitor to it, so I definitely agree
| with your assessment as to the approach. Would be amazing
| to see Felt (or someone) tackle it.
| TimTheTinker wrote:
| Yep. I worked for Esri for 17 years. The lead PE dev is a
| math/geography double major (master's in one, Ph.D. in the
| other, I think?) and a great C/C++ developer to boot.
|
| I used to walk by his office and find large integrals on
| his whiteboard, or see him working on his latest project
| with Mathematica and his code editor.
| jschrf wrote:
| Wow. 17 years is a long time. I would love to hear about
| your experiences some day.
|
| Esri is an interesting company to me. Always been
| slightly fascinated by it. One of the older software
| companies and still privately owned. I spent a good chunk
| of my early career both aligning and competing with it.
|
| My colleague and I ran into Jack once. Two random
| nobodies, visiting campus for obscure reasons, running
| into the main building to escape the random rain storm,
| and he opens the door to let us in.
|
| Knew exactly why we were there, and asked us what we
| thought of AWAB before stating something to the effect
| of: "I don't know what we've been doing all these years.
| People don't want to buy our stuff and then have to learn
| to write code, they just want to make maps."
|
| I'm convinced that's the key to the next world-eating web
| mapping company: stop forcing non-technical orgs to have
| to become technical orgs with technical staff just to
| solve simple spatial problems. It's orthogonal to their
| competencies and primary directives.
|
| Easier said than done of course.
|
| P.s. I know (of) who you are referring to btw, and he's
| somewhat of a legend, even outside Redlands.
| TimTheTinker wrote:
| For anyone interested, here's the sort of work Esri's PE
| team do on a regular basis: https://storymaps.arcgis.com/
| stories/756bcae18d304a1eac140f1...
| cyanydeez wrote:
| Esri is mostly an entrenched monopoly. This just recently
| became parity with them,but if you're looking for gis
| development 75% are esri tech stacks.
| testbjjl wrote:
| > This product is cool, and I'm sure Felt have given careful
| consideration to how they plan to strategically differentiate
| from both Esri and open source solutions.
|
| Datawrapper has done a nice job. This feels like that to me.
| Annotated maps, otherwise it's easy enough to use mapbox or
| osm yourself to tell your own story.
| kabes wrote:
| There's probably a use case / audience for this, but it's a
| child's toy compared to stuff like ArcGIS. This is not taking
| on ESRI at all.
|
| $20m is also not that much, mapbox raised 10x that amount and
| still struggles to find customers.
| criddell wrote:
| Could it be a case of not taking on ESRI at the high end, but
| instead going for the low end that likely has a lot more
| potential customers?
| a-walker wrote:
| I'd imagine the audiences are quite different in their needs.
| We focus on the real estate of data centers and I think see
| multiple angles.
|
| We have sales people and analysts that just need to make a
| basic map, call out some data points, and make it look good.
| Feels like Felt is a great tool for that.
|
| We have larger needs where we need to do more complex
| analysis and visualize the relationships of larger data sets
| geographically - that's what we're looking to ArcGIS for.
|
| It's been a bit of a search to find an affordable tool for
| the first use case and am glad to see someone in the space
| doing it.
| thex10 wrote:
| I think that's spot on.
|
| Curious, is there anything else about your needs pushing
| you towards ArcGIS rather than, say, QGIS?
| moralestapia wrote:
| Wow, didn't know you could raise that much with what seems to
| be Mapbox + a custom raster layer (i.e. a literal afternoon
| project).
|
| Wish you the best guys, this industry needs a lot of
| innovation.
| motoxpro wrote:
| "How long will it take you to implement this feature?"
| "Should just be an afternoon!" "It's been 6 months, are you
| done yet?" "There were some unforeseen challenges that I
| didn't expect but I should have it done by tomorrow!"
| repeat...
| ronyfadel wrote:
| Getting Dropbox vibes from this one
| [deleted]
| dewey wrote:
| Every time you label someones project a "literal afternoon
| project" it's probably better to just reconsider and not do
| it.
|
| Especially if it's a company with multiple employees that
| probably don't sit around and do nothing all day.
| ytdytvhxgydvhh wrote:
| Their CEO (username: hinting) commented on this post about Felt
| recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31587950
| blablablub wrote:
| Why does zooming into a map decrease the font sizes for street
| names?
| db39 wrote:
| Looks promising - but performance on some of the demo maps was
| not good.
|
| Having said that, performance when creating my own map was fine.
| It's not a perfect fit for me, and I'll still be using mapbox for
| now. But I'll follow the progress of this for sure.
|
| I'd like to be able to embed on my own site(s) without using an
| iframe. And I would _love_ to be able to use images (like the
| animals around the world example) as a clickable map marker +
| popup that scales properly with zooming.
| JakaJancar wrote:
| > Where typical internet maps take 30+ seconds to load after each
| pan and zoom, Felt loads in under 300ms.
|
| What typical internet maps are they using?
| jenny91 wrote:
| The landing page has over a dozen demos and renders using
| OpenStreetMap data, but I see not a single attribution statement
| anywhere until I open an interactive map.
|
| Even renders and pictures require attribution.
| exadeci wrote:
| Not sure about the demos but at least when you signup they show
| you a tutorial map and both Mapbox and OSM are visible on the
| bottom left
| moffkalast wrote:
| OSM: "Felt? Cute. Might delete later."
| MrThoughtful wrote:
| It looks like Felt uses Mapbox under the hood. Which might also
| require attribution.
|
| So if a journalist makes a screenshot of a website that uses
| Felt, they would have to have a text like ...
|
| "Image courtesy of SomeSite with an image courtesy of Felt with
| an image courtesy of Mapbox with an image courtesy of
| OpenStreetMap?"
|
| .... under the image?
| Doctor_Fegg wrote:
| OSM's attribution is non-negotiable. It's part of the Open
| Database Licence and also the Contributor Terms under which
| individual mappers agree that the OSM Foundation can
| sublicense their work. There is no legal way around it save
| for contacting each individual mapper for permission... which
| is clearly impractical.
|
| By contrast, Mapbox ask for a credit as part of a commercial
| agreement, which by definition can be negotiated away. I
| guarantee if you call up Mapbox and offer them enough money,
| they'll flex on their logo requirement. There is simply no
| legal way to do that with OSM.
| Aeolun wrote:
| Of course, you can simply have a lot of money, and the OSMF
| would go bankrupt before you in any legal challenge.
| throwaway290 wrote:
| Is that really the way it is? No way for law to prevail,
| the one with more money always wins? What about
| individuals (!) winning cases against huge corporations,
| which comes up in the news periodically?
| dhosek wrote:
| The most money winning (and using lawsuits to stifle
| criticism) is very much a part of how society works these
| days (and arguably always has). See, for example, https:/
| /en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_lawsuit_against_publ...
|
| Money might not buy happiness but it buys an awful lot of
| power.
| throwaway290 wrote:
| SLAPPs are bad, but Google any company + settled or lost
| lawsuits. For example, here're some I could find on
| McDonalds:
|
| https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/16/mcdonalds-settles-
| discrimina...
|
| https://www.restaurantbusinessonline.com/operations/mcdon
| ald...
|
| https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/former-mcdonalds-
| workers...
|
| The _oldest_ of these is from end of last year.
|
| Edit: tone down phrasing
| g_sch wrote:
| It comes up in the news precisely because it's such an
| unusual occurrence. Lawfare by attrition is an extremely
| common tactic. Having more resources than your opponent
| can massively tilt the scales in your favor.
| aliswe wrote:
| Did you watch the "Bananas!" documentary, and its
| documentary aftermath documentary "Big boys gone
| bananas!" ?
|
| It's real good, and a good example of big corporations
| sometimes backing off, however unwillingly.
| galoisgirl wrote:
| > Of course, you can simply have a lot of money
|
| Instructions unclear, I'm broke.
| Symbiote wrote:
| OSMF is a British foundation, so this American assumption
| doesn't necessarily apply.
| habi wrote:
| Mapbox is known to discard the necessary attribution to OSM.
| The guidelines for OSM are clear:
| https://www.openstreetmap.org/copyright
| lucideer wrote:
| It's a while since I've used Mapbox but they were very
| strict and diligent about including OSM attribution back
| when I was building apps with it (2018). Have they really
| changed that drastically?
| habi wrote:
| Here's a bit more information:
| https://github.com/matkoniecz/illegal-use-of-
| OpenStreetMap/b...
| colejohnson66 wrote:
| When I open the link at the top on my desktop, I see "(c)
| Mapbox (c) OpenStreetMap Improve this map" in the lower-
| right corner.
| lucideer wrote:
| I mean... yes. There's plenty of bad unattributed journalism
| out there that don't do this of course, but... attribution
| has been a standard of good journalism for many years before
| the internet existed. This is not some new obscure
| requirement.
|
| That is of course more about journalistic standards and good
| practice. In terms of the law, IANAL but I don't think
| attribution is strictly required for Fair Use usage (e.g.
| reportage). Only for functional usage (e.g. providing maps to
| be used as maps).
| rictic wrote:
| Agree, but an interesting point being made here is that as
| we continue to add more layers of separately-attributable
| infrastructure the attributions get quite unwieldy.
|
| I don't have a conclusion from this, and if you're going to
| use something that requires attribution you should
| attribute. Maybe we just need better ways of giving that
| attribution. It's certainly easier in an interactive
| medium, with hyperlinks and collapsable sections than on
| paper.
| lucideer wrote:
| Well, even in hypotheticals, I'm not sure how many cases
| are likely to go beyond 3 layers. And that's just for
| journalism.
|
| For practical functional applications, 3 layers seems
| high, and potentially a sign of over-engineering.
|
| To get a little more technical about our hypothetical:
|
| - I've used Mapbox in the past, and they included (at the
| time) a succint dual-attribution overlay for themselves
| and OSM as part of their APIs. It was well-designed and
| baked in (nothing for me to do).
|
| - If I were to then take my own application and offer it
| as a service for others to embed:
|
| 1. There's a strong likelihood I'm offering a commercial
| service so attribution may not be required for my layer
| (provided service-charges covering white-labelling)
|
| 2. If I am requiring attribution, it might make sense for
| me to invest in direct OSM usage & cut out the Mapbox
| middleman.
|
| 3. If not, it certainly seems like my added layer would
| be the absolute extreme (and baking in a well-made
| 3-component attribution would be challenging but not
| insurmountable).
| jhugo wrote:
| Well, they don't need to word it quite as ridiculously, and
| it depends whether SomeSite and Felt require attribution.
| yial wrote:
| I'm signing up to try it now... I find this exciting as I
| struggle sometimes to make Google maps or similar spit out maps
| how I want it to. (Basically picking address along the exact
| route I want a map of...).
|
| I also have had to make maps to print out for events... this may
| fit the use case there perfectly.
| cancan wrote:
| the demand for printing has been surprising and it's coming ~~
| soon ~~
| UncleEntity wrote:
| Maybe I'm just old school[0] but I would think printing would
| be one of the first use cases to implement.
|
| [0] give me a map, compass and tell me where I am and I'll
| get to wherever I need to be day or night over any terrain--
| desert, jungle, woodlands, been there, done that.
| Group_B wrote:
| Looks like a simpler version of Leaflet
| _1tan wrote:
| Does anyone know a simple (paid) API to get birds eye satellite
| view (45 degrees, not top down) for a given address to persist as
| an image?
| dang wrote:
| Related:
|
| _Why are maps so hard to make?_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31587950 - June 2022 (96
| comments)
| thunkle wrote:
| Did you get this from Dense Discovery? I just saw this in the
| newsletter at the same time.
| bookofjoe wrote:
| Yes, I did.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| My life would be a lot cooler if I had a lot of need for this but
| I can see clearly the needs I could have and appreciate this
| looks incredibly useful.
| 22c wrote:
| Doesn't seem to work very well in Firefox, at least not in my
| browser.
| cancan wrote:
| (felt founder here) Sorry to hear that. What issue are you
| having? Feel free to DM me and I'll take a look.
| bhargav wrote:
| The tech looks really really good. I can see that it serves the
| purposes in their demo well. May be just my ignorance, but I am
| failing to see how this will be a business yet.
|
| The use cases are niche and basically require adoption from
| institutions.
|
| The business model of allowing individuals to use, and allowing
| them to share, seems like a loophole to me. Per their FAQ, paid
| model will be for team collabs, which I would think is even more
| niche.
|
| Hopefully they know better about this space then me. Best of luck
| Felt!
| akersten wrote:
| Why can't I just draw on maps without an account? Chalk one up
| for the bounce rate.
| bpodgursky wrote:
| To be honest, they're probably right. Anyone doing mapping for
| professional reasons is going to spend more effort testing this
| out because of the potential upside.
|
| Nobody just clicking around is likely to buy a sub just for
| kicks.
| feanaro wrote:
| If they're not going to buy a sub either way, what's the
| downside of letting them test it, and then perhaps telling
| their friends about it?
| hackernewds wrote:
| Server cost. Fraud. Indistinguishable user sessions.
| dewey wrote:
| If you are using a provider like Mapbox to render the tiles
| you are going to pay by requests / tiles / resources used
| so having low-intent drive-by traffic is not going to help
| you.
|
| Especially at the beginning when you are still refining
| your product / figure out a business model. Maybe further
| down the line they have a freemium version but it's
| probably not what you should start with if you are aiming
| for paying customers giving feedback.
| benatkin wrote:
| I'm sure they're well aware. The SaaS community decided that
| it's better to use it as a carrot to sign up for the app. Even
| repl.it doesn't let you play around without signing up anymore.
| https://replit.com/talk/ask/Is-it-now-required-sign-up-to-cr...
| And they could use that as an excuse to do cool stuff with
| WebAssembly.
| richrichardsson wrote:
| I think they may have reversed this decision. I just went to
| replit.com, scrolled to the bottom, clicked c++ and arrived
| at https://replit.com/languages/cpp After that I could just
| hit Run and it worked. The "Sign up for the full experience"
| button shook a bit to draw attention to itself, but otherwise
| no sign up was required to use it.
| benatkin wrote:
| I didn't try clicking there! It used to be easier to find.
| [deleted]
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