TileMill – An open source map design studio

105 points by susi22 8 years ago | 24 comments
  • msimpson 8 years ago
    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    However, last I checked it gave me tremendous issues running on Linux as many dependencies had become outdated.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.

    • Doctor_Fegg 8 years ago
      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.
      • andrewljohnson 8 years ago
        We use maputnik now because we want the style to be MapBox GL and not CartoCSS: https://github.com/maputnik/editor. We use the MapBox client libs, but host the vector tiles and styles ourselves. Raster tiles seem so 2010 :)

        MapBox hired the maintainer of maputnik though, so the future is unclear.

    • ivanbakel 8 years ago
      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.
      • Doctor_Fegg 8 years ago
        It's a UI around the Mapnik raster map rendering engine and the CartoCSS styling language. The idea is that you write your stylesheets and see the map's appearance change accordingly. It was originally developed by Mapbox, but they've since moved to vector rendering.

        (Not disagreeing with your point.)

        • pimlottc 8 years ago
          That's a little better but I don't know what most of those terms (Mapnik? CartoCSS? Mapbox?) mean. What's the use case, in plain language?
          • wodenokoto 8 years ago
            I think that description is more than a little better.

            > Mapnik raster map rendering engine

            An engine that renders maps as raster images, called Mapnik. Should be clear from the quote.

            > CartoCSS styling language

            A CSS like language to style maps (change the looks of) instead of HTML. If you know CSS, that should follow from the description.

            > It was originally developed by Mapbox, but they've since moved to vector rendering.

            Should be pretty obvious from context that Mapbox is the name of the company that originally developed the software.

            ELI5: It is for drawing pictures of maps.

        • tonetheman 8 years ago
          double plus plus on this
        • jason_pomerleau 8 years ago
          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.

          • scardine 8 years ago
            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.

            • Doctor_Fegg 8 years ago
              Open-source vector renderers don't yet have the cartographic chops that raster renderers do.

              The most glaring difference is that label placement in common vector renderers is generally "try once, fail if no room", whereas in Mapnik (standard raster renderer), for example, you can supply a list of positions to try in order of preference.

              There's a lot to like about client-side rendering (which is why I wrote https://github.com/systemed/tilemaker/ to generate vector tiles) but it's not up to feature parity with raster rendering yet, and for some of us those features are important.

              • scardine 8 years ago
                This is true, but I'm not a cartographer. I know enough to appreciate a well rendered map but it is not my job.

                In fact most of the time I can get way with just a vector layer over a 3rd party tile layer using Leaflet and some fancy fireworks showing labels on click/hover events.

                I'm really glad I don't need to render tiles in the server side anymore but I remember the time when I had not choice but manage my own tile server simply because many clients could not handle something simple like a choropleth map with all the voting districts in my state.

              • trynewideas 8 years ago
                Vector tiling is still useful for dynamically simplifying dense maps from a single data set, so that a browser doesn't have to consume and process a few dozen MB of GeoJSON or what have you into SVG or canvas output, but TileMill isn't the tool for that either. Mapbox maintains a list of vector tile parsers and generators: https://github.com/mapbox/awesome-vector-tiles

                Also, map data is getting progressively richer and more expensive to render, particularly when adding 3D data, so I'm not convinced that offloading everything to the client is still a 90% use case.

                • xyzzy_plugh 8 years ago
                  Sure, but if the content is mostly static, why place that burden on clients? I can understand if it's dynamic or interactive in some way, but most maps aren't.
                  • scardine 8 years ago
                    I don't have a single use case where I'm publishing a map on the web and it is not interactive. Someone could make the case for a PDF file - if it is static, why not? I can even browse it off-line!
                • anc84 8 years ago
                  From back when Mapbox was about free and open-source. Great tool!
                  • cesarniculescu 8 years ago
                    Curious if anyone knew a decent geoJson editor similar to tilemill for Mac
                    • FTA 8 years ago
                      geoJson or vector style editor? For the former, QGIS is a good bet. For the latter, maputnik.
                      • cesarniculescu 8 years ago
                        GeoJSON. Was hoping there was something lighter than QGIS as I just want to create a collection of markers, no unique shapes, point clouds, etc.
                        • FTA 8 years ago
                          Maybe check out geojson.io then. It may be too lightweight but perhaps it meets most of your functionality (assuming you will have a web connection).
                          • 8 years ago