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TileMill — an application for making beautiful maps

mapbox.com

11–20 of 37 posts

Re: TileMill — an application for making beautiful maps

#11
Looks great, and kudos on releasing open source code as well. As a developer who has specialized in making web-based maps, I've been dreaming of something like this coming a long, and here it is.

I had seriously considered working toward the same goal, but gave up because I wasn't sure about what kind of customers I might find. I'm still convinced that there are a lot of customers out there for this type of thing, and I hope you guys make this into something big!

Re: TileMill — an application for making beautiful maps

#13
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No Windows version.

Not yet.

Plans for Windows just announced in the 2012 roadmap: http://developmentseed.org/blog/2012/jan/02/major-mapbox-inv...

"Just two months ago, after Node.js added native Windows support, we started testing and porting TileMill to a native Windows application. We plan to release a beta version this quarter"

Re: TileMill — an application for making beautiful maps

#14
we just posted 2012 TileMill + MapBox major investment priorities today: http://ds.io/mapbox-2012. In short, big push for:

- TileMill on Windows,

- Live map rendering for dynamic data via TileMill + direct uploads to MapBox for hosting,

- Beautiful new OpenStreetMap base maps as an alternative for Google Maps w/ its new usage fees,

- Shipping fast hardware (which we are still designing :) http://www.flickr.com/photos/developmentseed/5812414817/).

Re: TileMill — an application for making beautiful maps

#15
TileMill is a lot of fun; you can download it and be making custom maps in just a few minutes. There's a lot of very sophisticated open source cartography hiding under the covers, not to mention nodejs wizardry. They've done a great job of packaging it all and making an easy to use tool for map-makers without requiring a lot of GIS or OSGeo expertise.

One particularly nice option is the ability to "print" your pre-rendered map to an MBTiles bundle for serving in a slippy map on the web.

Re: TileMill — an application for making beautiful maps

#18

Can you create large map images from tiles that can be turned into a poster?

Yes. Stitching the tiles together is relatively easy. Depending on the specific tiling scheme, you may be able to do so without any depth of knowledge in geography.

That said mapnik [1], the rendering engine used to generate tiles, is a general purpose geographic data renderer. You could use tilemill as a tool to generate the map style then use mapnik directly to render your map at any pixel or geographic dimensions desired.

[1] http://mapnik.org/

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