Placemark is now open source – web-based geospatial data editor | Hacker News Reader

Placemark is now open source – web-based geospatial data editor

github.com

248 pointsdanboarder21 comments

The same person also did geojson.io, which is a wonderful tool I use occasionally. Great for testing geojson. It's a pity placemark did not make it as a company but fantastic it's now open sourced.

The people at geomob did an interview with Tom MacWright two years ago or so on their podcast: https://thegeomob.com/podcast/episode-118 when he just launched placemark.

I can’t believe I’m saying this but: I wish they had placed an ad for placemark on geojson.io.

I had no idea this existed until just now but I’ve worked at two companies where a lot of coworkers could have benefited greatly from a map app that has a few more features than geojson.io but is less complex than qgis/arcgis.

geojson.io is owned & managed by our former employer, Mapbox, where Tom built it originally some years ago, whereas Placemark was an independent project by Tom.

Placemark is going open source and shutting down (72 days ago)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38250459

Very polished project. The founder is now helping build Val town, which seems pretty awesome, too:

https://www.val.town/

(Also his blog is a great read: https://macwright.com/)

I wish I had a use for this, GIS tools usually don't have such a level of polish and intuitiveness. I could maybe see building a capable data viewer on Placemark as a base, but I would be ignoring half its features at that point.

Since this was a commercial product for some time, I'd love to hear some user anecdotes: What did they use it for? Did Placemark replace some existing tool, or was it used for new kinds of tasks?

This is amazing, thanks for open sourcing it!!

I own the domain chattymaps and have been planning to do a map based chat app on there - maybe digging into placemark will spur me on todo that.

I've seen a lot of these generic GIS tools.

the problem is ArcGIS is so prevalent and invasive in work flows that the remaining work and workers simply aren't substantial enough.

a product like this needs a ecosystem and a "killerapp" to really thrive.

you mistake "lockin" for competition. GIS will always be niche. There is no reason not to use standards for GIS, and open source has a place in the long term.

the point is ArcGIS simply as first right of refusal for almost any significant workflow.

certainly GIS outside of this is valuable but it's within a specific project specific world that it's a component of and not the central hub

maybe people are trying to build a better alternative to arcgis? and to do this, maybe you start with a simple app first? and perhaps these people are also experts in gis? crazy to think about

oh I agree, I run QGIS and Postgresql with PostGIS. I switched my entire work flow out of ArcGIS in 2016 because ArcGIS Pro was heading to LaLa land with it's online subscription garbage.

But, my point is: If you're goin gto compete with ArcGIS, it's going to come from the spokes to the hub, and not from the hub to the spokes. That is, you need a killer app for a very specific work flow and go from there into a ecosystem.

Without a "killer app", trying to build a separate hub and market that as-is just won't sell.

Can you point to a few successful worked examples of "spokes-to-hub"?

well, Google was a search engine.

Facebook was a college phone book.

Electron was propelled by multiple killerapp, initially by GitHub as Atom. it wasn't originally a standalone.

ArcGIS was also pretty niche until it gained the user base.

Anywhere we can see a working demo?

See it being used? https://www.youtube.com/@_tmcw/videos

I didn't see an URL to reach a working demo for hands on test drive.

https://app.placemark.io/play

Wow, nice.

Great news! It could totally look like a G Suite app.

This is different from a project that was started as open source without any company backing. Without a company backing it it likely won't survive.

would be interesting to find some mutualisation with umap-project.org ... or at least become a friend project :)

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