These are things I’ve worked on over the years, some for clients, and some as personal projects. A lot of the work I did for clients is not available for public viewing, but every project I’ve worked on has taught me something new and the experience has been invaluable.
Web Maps
QGIS Plugins
Other Projects
Web Maps
QVIEW
My pride and joy. I started work on this project in 2022 as a solution for a fast and lightweight way to display spatial data online, as opposed to the massive project that is Tel Aviv’s IView system which is based on the ArcGIS JavaScript API. It relies on MapLibre GL JS for the map display, with the main system acting as a platform for sources and layers defined in JSON files which can be selected based on the URL parameters. Easily one of my favorite projects, and I’m really proud of how it turned out, and how well it performs even with a lot of data on the map.
You can see the project here and already integrated in several municipal apps.
GeoSpatial Companies Map
A map I created as personal project based on data originally collected by Christoph Rieke. It shows the locations of companies that are involved in the geospatial industry, and users can search or filter by category or country. All the data is stored in a Google Sheet, is updated by the community and managed by me.
You can see the code here The data is available here And the map is available at https://bogind.github.io/Geospatial-Companies/
Election Maps
Due to Israel having so many elections in the past few years, I got the chance to create quite a few election maps. These maps were created using MapLibre GL JS with the basemap created by me using GeoServer.
Here are some examples:
2020 Elections for the 23rd Israeli Knesset (for Kaplan Open Source Inc.)
3D version of the 2020 Elections for the 23rd Israeli Knesset (for Kaplan Open Source Inc.) - elevation is based on voter turnout
2021 Elections for the 24th Israeli Knesset (for Kaplan Open Source Inc.)
2022 Elections for the 25th Israeli Knesset (As a hobby project)
Pretty proud of this one, it was done mostly in the evenings and didn’t take a lot of time to create.
It supports 4 languages and doesn’t rely on a regular basemap, but uses 2 layers which together weigh about 1MB.
The “backend” here is simply using GitHub Pages to host the site and the actual realtime processing is done using Google Sheets and AppScript.
You can see the code here: GitHub
Purimap
A map/game I created for the Israeli Association For Cartography & Geographical Information Systems for Purim 2022. The map is a simple game where you have to guess the which city’s polygon is displayed on the map. The polygons are out of place and 5 options are given to the user to choose from.
You can see the code here
QGIS Plugins
qlyrx (with Netta Beninson)
A simple QGIS plugin which adds two buttons to your plugins toolbar:
- One lets you apply SLD/QML stored symbology to your vector layers.
- The other lets you apply ArcGIS Pro .lyrx Symbology to your vector layers.
The Idea behind this is liberating organizations from having to keep using ESRI products just because it would take too long to transfer years worth of symbology files to QGIS.
This way, if you use a simple python script (which Netta created) you can convert all your old .lyr files to .lyrx and use directly in QGIS, or convert them further to QML.
Proxy Handler
A plugin that allows adding prefix proxy addresses to data source connections.
QGIS Sound Effects
Started out as a silly plugin that adds sound effects to QGIS to make work less boring.
Since then it evolved to include processing algorithms that can be integrated to play sound effects, audio files and even text-to-speech in your QGIS models.
It is still a young project, but has also come a long way since it started.
You can hear me talk about it on the July 2024 QGIS Open Day:
GIF Clicker
Another silly plugin that started as a POC, just to see if it was possible to make QGIS play GIFs on click (it was, but in a really annoying way).
While doing it I also played around a bit with changing the cursor icons, but left that out of the plugin eventually.
You can still see the result of the early playing around with cursor icons and playing GIFs on click in the video below.
And while I really tried to find a use case for this plugin, I couldn’t find one, but I did package and published it anyway, to let others have fun with it as well. The current version of the plugin lets the user play one of 3 GIFs packaged with the plugin, or add their own GIFs and use them in the same way. The GIFs are played on click of the pan map tool when they are enabled.
Curved RTL Label Fixer
I won’t go into too much detail about this one here, as I have already written a blog post about it, but in short, this plugin is a simple tool that allows users to fix a very old issue of labels written in right-to-left (like Hebrew and Arabic) languages having their characters reversed when the label positioning is set to “Curved”.
It’s still not perfect, and I would have loved to find a solution to the actual issue in the QGIS codebase, but as a quick and easy solution for users who need to use curved labels in RTL languages, this plugin does the trick.
You can see the plugin in action in the video below, and you can read more about it in the blog post linked above.
Israeli Open Data Loader
Created for Kaplan Open Source Inc.
A plugin that enables to quickly add Israeli open data resources. Including sources from Government ministries and agencies, Municipalities (paid version only), NGO / non-profits and Open Data websites.
Other Projects
MapLibre Symbol Utils
A JavaScript utility functions library for creating advanced symbols in MapLibre GL JS. Allows users to create line pattern fill or use the MapLibre marker for the entire layer.
Google Podcasts Themes
I loved using the (depending when you are reading this) soon to be/already dead Google Podcasts, but I didn’t like how it looked in my browser. So I created a browser extension for Chrome and Firefox that allows you to change the theme of the Google Podcasts website (it turned out to be a lot less work then you would think). While Google Podcasts is no longer relevant, the extension is still available for download and was a great first attempt at building an extension and navigating both the Chrome and Firefox web stores publishing process.