The Map Editor
If necessity is the mother of invention, then laziness is the father
Almost a year ago, I started diving into the world of interactive web maps. I made my first project, and from there I continued to learn by doing (you can see my other projects here).
I strongly believe that this kind of medium can have a big impact, since it can democratize and show informations in a way that no other medium can do. Everyone loves to play with interactive maps.
However, since I don’t do this “as a living” but only in my free time, it is difficult to remember every trick, every function, every parameter to build from scratch a new web map. Everytime I wanted to start a new project, I needed to check again a lot of things that I forgot, usually causing the abandoning of the project. Often I found myself asking my best companions (Mr. Claude by Anthropic and Ms. Gemini by Google) the stupidest questions ever in order to understand what I was doing, also for the most basic things.
(did somebody say… MapLibre Expressions?)
And here comes the laziness: how about to use AI… to make you independent from AI? How about make it build a tool that sets you free from asking it stupid or unnecessary questions, saving precious tokens for more important stuff?
So, a few months ago I started developing this sort of platform, originally only with a single scope: create interactively and from scratch a style.json file readable for a web map based on MapLibre. So that once I created my basic web map template, I could simply plug in my brand-new style.json file and that’s it.
No more headaches searching for the right expressions or putting the stuff in the right place
This app allows me also to style every aspect of a layer following the official MapLibre Style Specs, and ultimately wraps everything in a .json file ready to be used.
Eventually, this app evolved in a more serious thing and every week or so I started to add more and more functionalities, in particular the ones that may come in handy on my ordinary job.
”But… there a lot of web platforms out there that do everything your crappy app does, more and better! Why did you waste so much time?”
I didn’t need to reinvent the wheel, I am well aware that the internet is full of SaaS perfect for this kind of stuff. But I am the kind of person that likes to do things with its own hands. And I personally love when I make something that works, also if it is useless.
So, feel free to use this app and for any question or feeback, feel free to contact me