PIxel City Maps Are Here

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Isometric NYC has definitely started a new trend for developing pixelated interactive city maps. In the last few weeks it has inspired Isopolis in San Francisco and London, drawn in London. Now a new project is taking the idea to Brazil – and suggests that we could soon be seeing a lot more of these pixelated cities. EARTH TO PIXELS earthToPixels has now transformed aerial imagery of João Pessoa, a coastal city in northeastern Brazil, into a sprawling, SimCity-style isometric pixel-art map. Like the earlier maps, the pixelated map of João Pessoa is a joy to explore. Buildings, roads, parks and coastline are transformed into a giant isometric pixel-art landscape that you can... more →
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Pixel Art via Vibe Coding

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I am 100% against the term "vibe coding". To be clear, my issue is with the name, it just strikes me as, well, horrible. That being said, I’ve been using gen AI to generate code samples over the past few months and it’s been incredibly interesting at times. It absolutely requires technical skill to evaluate the results and to help guide the AI when mistakes happen, but it’s been fun to give this a few tries recently. This morning I gave Claude’s desktop app a try and gave it what I thought was a non-trivial prompt: can you generate JavaScript code that will look at an image in the DOM and convert it to simplified pixel art? I then submitted the prompt and stood... more →
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Pixel View

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I’ve created a simple game using images from Mapillary (and a couple of images from Wikimedia).Mapillary is a crowd-sourced ‘Street View’ service that allows users to capture, share, and explore street-level imagery from around the world. Developers are allowed to use images submitted to Mapillary under a CC BY-SA 4.0 license. Mapillary ‘street view’ images can be a great resource for Maps Mania… more →
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