from Hacker News

TileMill – An open source map design studio

by susi22 on 7/10/17, 9:55 AM with 24 comments

  • by msimpson on 7/10/17, 4:30 PM

    It's important to note:

    > TileMill has shifted to an open open source contributor model and moved to its own organization, tilemill-project.

    A shift which has come a year or so after the project was abandoned by Mapbox in favor of Mapbox Studio (the official, supported successor to TileMill).

    TileMill alone is still useful for creating one's own raster tile set, as long as the application remains in working order.

    However, last I checked it gave me tremendous issues running on Linux as many dependencies had become outdated.

    Although, I haven't checked back in a while since I moved to Mapbox Studio.

  • by Doctor_Fegg on 7/10/17, 4:59 PM

    Check out also Kosmtik, https://github.com/kosmtik/kosmtik, which is a similar alternative and which many in the OpenStreetMap community have shifted to using.

  • by ivanbakel on 7/10/17, 4:53 PM

    This would be helped by the landing page actually explaining what this is and what I would do with it. A central collection of technical links shouldn't be how you introduce a project.

  • by jason_pomerleau on 7/10/17, 4:40 PM

    I used TileMill quite a bit in 2014-15, but stopped after Mapbox abandoned it. Last I checked it wouldn't even run on MacOS anymore. The latest release was in 2012, and based on commit history there hasn't been any movement for ~8 months.

    I was a lot of fun to work with, CartoCSS allowed me to be immediately productive with it. In the end though it was too expensive to serve tiles from AWS.

  • by scardine on 7/10/17, 5:40 PM

    A few years ago a good share of the client browsers would choke on complex map renderings, lets say, more than a few thousand SVG complex polygons. At the time, for this kind of use case often it was faster to generate bitmap tiles at the server side. I wrote a tile server using Mapnik bindings for Python - and TileMill was of great help.

    It is no longer the case, modern computers and browsers have acceptable performance when using vectorial maps even for very complex maps. The need for firing your own tile server is very unusual.

  • by anc84 on 7/11/17, 12:15 AM

    From back when Mapbox was about free and open-source. Great tool!

  • by cesarniculescu on 7/10/17, 5:35 PM

    Curious if anyone knew a decent geoJson editor similar to tilemill for Mac