r/geospatial

After a weekend of troubleshooting my slope analysis components are finally done...maybe. Considering adding interactivity by rendering in the frontend as a shader instead of on the backend with GDAL but not sure that's necessary yet.

Some cool things I learned:

• Elevation tiles are just PNGs with height encoded into the RGB channels, so slope is edge detection

• Slopes can be calculated pretty easily via 3x3 kernel comparisons and calculating rise over run * 100, BUT the run changes based on zoom and latitude

• The earth being a globe kinda sucks

• GIS is hard

Not including the URL here because I don't want to advertise, I just think this looks neat

I made an AI assistant add-in that runs inside ArcGIS Pro. I teach GIS at the university level and do consulting work in ArcGIS Pro. Like everyone, I've watched students and colleagues keep ChatGPT open in a second window while working in Pro. The AI describes what buttons to click, you have to do the work, and half the answers are wrong because the AI can't see the project.

So I built Waldo, an add-in that puts the assistant inside Pro, connected to your live session. It can see your maps, layers, and schemas. It can advise, but it can also do the work: runs geoprocessing tools, sets symbology and labels, builds and exports layouts. The video is an unscripted session from my own work: mapping uninsured rates by county with graduated colors, then overlaying state Medicaid-expansion status once a pattern jumped out, and finishing with a print-ready layout of the lower 48. About ten minutes of real time, cut down here.

Design choices:

• Bring your own model. It works with an Anthropic or OpenAI API key, OpenRouter, or fully local models via Ollama/LM Studio. No subscription to me, and your data never touches my servers. The add-in itself never touches the network. The only outbound traffic is your own API calls to whichever provider you configured.
• There's an enforced read-only "Ask" mode — the assistant can inspect and explain your project but can't change anything. Enforced at the tool level, not a polite prompt.
• Built for people who don't trust AI output (I'm one of them): every geoprocessing run shows the exact parameters it used, and one click reopens the tool dialog pre-filled with them, so the AI's work is always reproducible by hand.

I use it in my own consulting work (it recently turned a multi-hour needs-assessment mapping job into an afternoon), and it's built around my 30 years of cartographic habits and best practices. It defaults to sane symbology, legends, and layouts instead of whatever an LLM improvises.

7-day free trial, $5 one-time after that, no accounts needed: waldogis.com

Genuinely interested in community reaction. Happy to answer anything about how it works and what it can and can't do.

I’ve just launched these two new browser-based creative tools. 

MapStudio lets you create and style beautiful, professional maps without the complexity of traditional GIS software—think of it as QGIS-lite.

Canvas adds another layer of visual storytelling through drawing, annotation, layout, and graphic design tools. It's similar to Figma, but includes features built specifically for visual storytelling, such as sequence generators, custom callouts, and customizable flow arrows.

I originally built them to aid me to create maps, infographics, diagrams, timelines, and other visuals for history education, but they can be used for almost any visual project.

Both apps are in free. More features are coming, and your feedback will help shape them.
https://history-maps.com/mapstudio - MapStudio
https://history-maps.com/canvas - Canvas