This will probably sound more cynical than it's meant, because I do admire this, but here we go anyway - Whenever I see these impressive-looking online data visualisation projects, I think: What would be interesting - and/or convincing - would be case studies written by experienced GIS people showing how and why they would use this (as compared with other offerings).
Because there are quite a few data visualisation options around these days, many re-imagining subsets of standard GIS functionality from 20+ years ago, into their own online, collaborative, friendly UI (<-- what Microsoft used to call "a wizard"). It's very impressive but at the same time, the unique contributions of such projects are often in the areas of visualisation and UI, rather than in the area of geography. Which are important in their own right!, but will not necessarily be the primary consideration of some categories of user.
At least for static representations, you can get some amazing quality GIS visualisations from QGIS with minimal experience and a bit of work. Paid online GIS visualisations have to compete with some pretty good open source stuff that is often enough for a project's needs.
Modern QGIS is very good. As a former professional turned casual home user, it covers my all requirements personally, but on the other hand there is certainly room for other options in the industry.
On the other topic of online offerings: Putting performance aside, a significant business objection to online GIS - especially regarding large or long term projects - is in the notion that it transfers (some) custody, security, continuity, redundancy of, not just your work, but also your tools, to a 3rd party, making your access subject to the ongoing wellbeing of that 3rd party enterprise.
i.e. My business requires certainty that, should the need arise, I will definitely be able to access the entire functionality over all working files, 5+ years from now, regardless of what happens to 'FancyMapsWeb Inc.' over the intervening years.
Yep. This is what makes QGIS such a great option. Being open source means it is both free and you can easily get your hands on old versions should you need them.
It’s success comes from having a good enough GUI these days.
I think the win here is where people who are not GIS professionals can use it to create stuff rather than waiting a month for their org's GIS team to get around to it.
Atlas (and Felt, as another commenter mentioned) are interesting, but seem to be targeting a market I feel is too small. If you're established in GIS, you likely have your own stack (and biases). If you're new to it and need something more than just a visualization tool, these offerings can work well, but I fear that users may quickly outgrow the functionality and then move to a more conventional GIS offering.
I do like how Felt includes QGIS integrations as a marketing point. I feel like tools like these are great compliments, but not wholesale replacements. "The new standard for GIS software" is a gross overstatement. If I normally deal with data in the multi-GB range, limiting my uploads to 250MB seems woefully insufficient.
And I think far too many people have experienced data loss when any new platform goes under. Both Atlas and Felt have "sign in with Google" but not Microsoft OAuth which just seems odd to me unless they truly aren't targeting the existing desktop GIS user community. Import/export from OneDrive/O365 would likely be a selling point to many GIS users.
> If I normally deal with data in the multi-GB range, limiting my uploads to 250MB seems woefully insufficient.
I think you're on to something here, which is that bytes stored isn't a great price discriminator for this class of software. The SaaS business model for Sentry or Notion succeeds because bigger teams store more content and have a higher willingness to pay.
For mapping applications, the county government GIS analyst might work daily with a 10GB aerial raster or parcel footprint dataset and be willing to pay $100 for a slicker solution, while a boutique real estate sales office stores a couple hundred dots (kilobytes of data) and is willing to pay $XXXX for the same solution!
It would be nice to have some plans with listed prices in between "Free" and "Enterprise" ("book a demo"). For comparison, Felt has $30/mo and $90/mo plans.
Calling yourselves "the new standard for GIS software" seems like overly strong branding.
Also interesting to see this pop up two months after Tom MacWright announced he was shutting down and open-sourcing Placemark: https://macwright.com/2023/11/13/placemark
The difference for me is that your link loads and atlas does not show any sign of connecting after several minutes
Edit: and of course, just as I submit this, atlas decides to show up, with an illegal cookie banner. Any other page takes just as long to load, it does nothing for literally 5 minutes and then loads all at once. I've never seen this behaviour on another site and HN works fine so I'm not sure that's me. Felt is looking like a great option by comparison!
This is pretty cool - sort of a lightweight QGIS in the browser, with the ability to create and share maps.
So far the functionality looks kind of wide but thin. Lots of features but each one isn't fully cooked yet. For instance, you can create comment threads, but you can't resolve them - just delete them.
Various functions are also a bit buggy or clunky. I tried some vector operations on built in datasets, and they were just greyed out with no explanation.
Is there an API? Who knows. Hopefully there will be.
Overall, impressively easy to use.
I also hope they add map data authoring features to it.
The front landing page needs to do a better job of selling what it does, particularly the range of vector and raster analysis features, which is pretty impressive.
Just signed up, will report back. Why is this awesome to me?
I have had a passion for GIS as a hobby my whole life, but neer anything deep... until recently I have been doing a lot of art, and I want to make GIS Map art.
I have been using a number of various tools and grabbing open data from places like OpenTopography, USGS, municipality resources, etc.
Further, I love GIS based data science, and especially how informationally dense maps and GIS can be. They are wonderful. (think of how informative looking at a full 3d model of an games to see all the details of a level, objectives, risks, resources. GIS/Mapping is intrinsic to communicating the world around you.
So - I have been looking for the right tool(s) to use - and devour stuff like this.
Looking forward to coming back here with a review after I dive into this for a minute.
The community maps are freaking beautiful. I am sad I hadnt found you earlier!
Some of your community maps deserve their own HN posts, such as the global submarine cable map:
I'd love to be able to duplicate a community map into my workspace and then do work on them - Maybe you can ask people when they make a "community map" if they can license it with "credit creator" appropriate license type?
For example - the ecological California map in hexagons is wonderful, and I want to duplicate it, and export it and print the hex version of California out with the topological height map applied to it...
> Some of your community maps deserve their own HN posts, such as the global submarine cable map:
Other submarine cable maps have been posted to HN before [1]. The one on https://www.submarinecablemap.com is more interactive and provides more information that this map on Atlas.
What I noticed is the Infrastructure Tab, and reminded of how an infra map was pulled from some kids thesis because they felt it was a threat to have a map of communications infra in public hands.
I tried Atlas for quite a while now and compared to others (both in-cloud and local softwares) it's the most interesting.
I'm an Italian urban planner and I've been using various GIS tools for 9 years now. It makes pretty easy for me to add layers quickly, and share my projects with co-workers and online.
For something this ostensibly awesome their landing page needs an interactive demo map, not a video (which incidentally takes too long to load) overlayed by popups and cookie dialogs.
Imagine if maps.google.com had brought you to a video when it first came out.
I really want a news application that is rendered visually as the Globe. Then a user can drag, zoom, and pan around the world, similar to Google Earth.
The difference being, this news app overlays current trending news stories on the physical location of where it is happening in the world.
Maybe I can manage this idea with this underneath?
this is so cool! you just know that it's real shit when the website looks like that. i wonder if this is gonna be the new "quality" stamp - a website not looking like the generic react tailwind app but rather stuff like this?!
I've actually been making exactly what you describe as a side-project - and am very close to launch-ready. I was looking for the same thing and decided it would be fun to build it myself. It's good to hear (at least one) other persons might be interested in such an app.
Facebook Live used to have a global view, where you could drag around on a Google-earth-style map, and each dot would be a live stream.
It was amazing. Unfortunately there were crimes committed on stream, notably a mass shooting in New Zealand. They shut down the map view soon after that.
A news broadcast would be feasible, because presumably the streamers would be verified reporters.
This is a cool idea. I think this is achievable with APIs/scraping of news sites, some machine learning/LLM (to assign locations to news stories), and an open source library like Leaflet.
A prototype could use manually sourced news sites that consistently use datelines that are easy to parse. It could be hard to scale that up, especially for languages-you-don't-read, but could still be interesting.
Could also have a global weather data layer/view, since that'll be relevant for extreme weather events.
Awesome dream. I've pitched / currently attempting to pull it off for an Australian news org (scoped to their stories). But a radio.garden x gdelt is where it's at!
As a full time web app maker for many clients over the last 6 years I'm potentially a customer for this.
But that pricing page is a massive turn off. I can't see the functionality or see the pricing without booking a demo with some sales people? No thank you.
Because there are quite a few data visualisation options around these days, many re-imagining subsets of standard GIS functionality from 20+ years ago, into their own online, collaborative, friendly UI (<-- what Microsoft used to call "a wizard"). It's very impressive but at the same time, the unique contributions of such projects are often in the areas of visualisation and UI, rather than in the area of geography. Which are important in their own right!, but will not necessarily be the primary consideration of some categories of user.