Bright Rain builds things. Some of them become useful. That's usually how we find out which ones.
This is where we share what we're making, breaking, and figuring out — custom apps, mapping tools, workflows, whatever the current obsession is. Not theory. Not thought leadership. Just experiments worth writing about because we learned something, or because someone else might save themselves the trouble.
The best ideas are the ones you can actually use. We're interested in those.
Togglability Many of the desktop GIS paradigms have unfortunately made their way to the web. Second only to the “Identify” tool in popularity, the checkbox for toggling layers is still the most common way to turn map layers on and off. While I appreciate the…
Continue reading...Update (2025): This post describes a workflow I built in 2014 for converting GeoJSON ↔ ArcJSON using a custom tool. Some of the external services mentioned below — including the City of Fort Collins ArcGIS REST endpoint used in the example — are no longer…
Continue reading...I put together a dead simple interface to convert GeoJSON to ArcJSON using the Esri GeoJSON Utils repo. I also threw in a feature to preview the result on a map, but it’s a bit spotty… Source available on GitHub It really is just a…
Continue reading...For many of my clients purchasing and managing ArcGIS Server has been out of the question based on limited IT and GIS resources. So for years I’ve been testing hosted services that would allow them to get maps out to their customers via the web.
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On Tuesday, MapBox announced the release of its new Satellite layer, based partially on NAIP imagery in the US. So I said I’d like to test it for speed against the NAIP Web Map Service (WMS) hosted by USGS National Map, which I was currently…
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