Launched this week

BrightMaps

Launched this week

Shade-smart walking & biking

7 followers

Shade-smart walking & biking

7 followers

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BrightMaps is a navigation app that routes you through the shade, not just the shortest path. Most maps only care about distance and speed. BrightMaps factors in tree canopy, building shadows, and time-of-day sun position to find routes that keep you cool and comfortable. Real shade data: building shadows, tree canopy, and live sun position, fused for 25 US metro areas with additional tree canopy shade available nationwide. See your route's shade before you go, know what you're walking into!

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Launch tags:Biking•Maps•Climate Tech

Launch Team / Built With

Framer AI AgentsDesign and publish professional sites with AI

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Maker

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Hey Product Hunt I'm Ilyess, solo founder and engineer behind BrightMaps. This started from something dumb and specific: I used to design intersections and streetscapes in Minecraft, and I got obsessed with how much trees (or lack of them) shape whether a street actually feels walkable. Then I moved to Atlanta and noticed it in my first summer there: Tree shade makes a huge difference for pedestrians and bikers! Streets with shade can feel 20F cooler than those without, which makes a massive difference when its 90 degrees outside and humid enough to drink the air. Every map app i've ever known optimized for distance or speed. None of them knew or cared where the shade was. So I built the thing I wanted: a walking and biking navigation app that fuses building shadows, tree canopy data, and real-time sun position to actually route you through comfort, not just efficiency. A few things I'm proud of: It's live across 25 US metro areas with real canopy + shadow data, not a gimmick overlay I Built the whole stack myself: iOS app, backend, the shade fusion pipeline. This is a first release, so there's a backlog of things I'm excited to ship next, like expanding to Europe and Latin America and introduce some new comfort-based features. I'd love feedback, especially if you're in a hot or sunny city. What would make this actually part of your routine? I'm reading every comment!

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1d ago

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1d ago

BrightMaps: Shade-Smart walking and Biking

Hey everyone,

I'm Ilyess, (AKA CaptainMuffin) and i'm building BrightMaps, a walking and biking navigation app, and I wanted to share what i've been working on.

The core problem: every navigation app treats "shade" as either nonexistent or a rough approximation. I wanted actual street-level accuracy, which meant fusing three separate data sources:

Building shadow geometry, computed from building height and footprint data against real-time sun position
Tree canopy density, from NLCD (National Land Cover Database) raster data at the national level, with higher-resolution OSM tree data layered in for cities with full coverage
Live sun position, since shade coverage on a given street changes hour to hour, not just season to season

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