Featured software

Have you ever looked at the terms of service or licence restrictions when choosing a spatial platform? Did you know that some platforms don’t let you use them if you use OpenStreetMap? It’s a minefield. This website by Steve Bennett does a

The Mapbox team have continued to churn out release after release for Mapbox GL JS, with countless new features since the last issue of the newsletter. Major improvements include a new LOD-based tiling system (in preparation for relaxing tilt limits) as well as improved

For the QGIS users out there, you’ll want to check out the latest 3.10 release. The update brings with it a huge amount of improvements; including changes to the labelling system, a logarithmic scale for graduated styles, tonnes of layout and print

I’ve been working with NetCDF data a lot over the past few weeks. Something that quickly becomes obvious with NetCDF is that, while powerful, it’s not the simplest data format to work with for creating visualisations. With this in mind, I was

If you use R for spatial visualisation then you’re probably already aware of Rayshader. For those of you who haven’t heard of it before? Well, you’re in for a treat. In short, Rayshader is a framework for 2D and 3D data

If you’ve ever wanted to export maps from QGIS to the Web then you need to check out qgis2web by Tom Chadwin. This plugin has historically supported exporting your maps as Leaflet or OpenLayer maps, and has recently added support for exporting maps

It’s finally here! The official release of PostGIS 3.0.0 has been announced, packed full of new features and performance improvements. This is a big update for anyone who use vector tiles, GeoJSON or want to benefit from the upgrade to PROJ

This could be my favourite spatial software release of the year — it’s certainly near the top of the list! What is it? It’s Aerialod by ephtracy, a lovely tool that takes elevation data and uses a path-tracing renderer to produce stunning 3D

It looks like being adopted by the OGC has opened the doors for various organisations to declare standard support for the GeoTIFF format, like NASA’s Earth Observation data. GeoTIFF v1.1 adopted as an OGC Standard | OGCOGC

Another big release this week is OpenLayers 6, bringing with it a huge number of changes and improvements. Most interesting to me is the ability to compose layers using custom renderers, allowing you to use WebGL layers like Mapbox GL JS. openlayers/openlayersOpenLayers. Contribute

Apparently the GEOS 3.8.0 release is coming soon, and in the meantime you can test the latest improvements in the 3.8.0 Beta 1 release. There are performance improvements as well as various new features. [geos-devel] GEOS 3.8.0 Beta

Continuing in its development cycle, PostGIS 3.0.0rc1 brings a few performance improvements and various fixes over the previous alpha release. As with PostgreSQL 12, I can’t wait for PostGIS 3 to graduate from testing — it has so many new features! PostGIS

I’m particularly excited about the PostgreSQL 12 release — I’ve been waiting for this one for a while. There are a huge number of improvements, particularly around performance. It’s well worth trying out. PostgreSQL: Documentation: 12: E.4. Release 12

Want to try out the latest features in OpenLayers before they’re fully released, like the recent support for Mapbox GL JS layers? You’ll be happy to hear that you can now install the development version from NPM and stay up to date

Development Seed have recently launched OSM Teams, an authentication API for creating teams and roles in the OpenStreetMap ecosystem. It’s purpose is to allow for better management of groups and communities around the existing tools like iD. Launching OSM TeamsToday we are launching

If you’ve ever worked with Mapbox Vector Tiles then you’ll be aware that while powerful, it can be complicated and time-consuming to create and update tilesets. Fortunately, the new Tilesets API aims to improve this by allowing you to create ‘recipes’ for

The latest release of Mapbox GL JS brings with it a slew of updates, including a number of performance improvements. Of particular interest is the increase in performance of panning and zooming through more aggressive cancellation of superfluous tile requests. mapbox/mapbox-gl-jsInteractive, thoroughly customizable

If you’ve wanted a way to consume and use the new Ordnance Survey Zoomstack dataset then you’ll be glad to hear that MapTiler have made available both the underlying data as well as the styles though their MapTiler Cloud product. They also

MARTINI is a new library from the prolific Vladimir Agafonkin, providing a method for generating RTIN meshes from terrain data. And of course — being an Agafonkin library — it has a focus on performance, to the point where it can be used to generate 3D

Map with Me is a fun tool created by Javier Arce — it’s a way to create maps with your friends and other people online. The code is also open and able to be taken and remixed to create your own version if you’

It’s now possible to perform change detection analysis of satellite data without leaving your browser through the LandViewer. The new change-detection tool allows you to perform pixel-based comparison between satellite images and do things like outputting the difference between the images (eg. detecting

While not new, Uber’s H3 spatial index framework is well worth a highlight. Originally created to optimise their ride pricing and dispatch, the hexagonal approach has proven popular and is being used by a variety of other people. The link details how it

If you’ve ever played Sim City then you’ll be familiar with agent-based simulation in a spatial context, from the individual people all the way down to the energy and water as it flows through the network. AgentMaps is a JavaScript library for

You may have already heard of Google Earth Studio — a Web-based animation tool for Google Earth’s satellite and 3D imagery. It’s certainly not new but it’s still well worth a feature. I’m seeing it used more and more, especially for