Blogs

The USGS topo maps are awesome … especially when using them for the outdoors or doing historical research. The maps contain a great deal of information on public lands, national parks, nature preserves and most other United States public lands The highlighted features include: trails, amenities, ranger stations, boundaries, elevation data, bathymetry, roads, contour lines, and hill shading, etc. Even better the USGS has topo maps going all the way back to the year 1882. 🤩 ...

I have decided to embark on creating an outdoor mapping product. Why I love maps. As a software engineer for over 20 years, I always wanted to learn maps & geospatial… what better way than to make my own mapping app and self host maps? All of the other mapping apps that I have tried, while really great, contain missing functionality or tons of bloatware as noted below. Goals Build a simple, private, and secure outdoor mapping platform. ...

A technical history and practical summary of how glyphs, fonts, and signed distance fields for vector maps were created back in the Mapbox days and how things look today after the MapLibre fork. Mapbox introduced signed distance field (SDF) glyphs for efficient GPU text rendering in Mapbox GL; glyphs are packaged as small protobuf (.pbf) files indexed by Unicode ranges and served from a “glyphs” URL in the style. The first blog post I see on this topic from Mapbox was on Jun 16, 2014 by Konstantin Käfer (PDF). ...