

TileMill 0.9.0 Released with Full Windows Support (and plugins) - AdrianRossouw
http://mapbox.com/blog/tilemill-090-released/

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untog
I am a huge, huge fan of TileMill. I've been making a mobile HTML5-based app
that had used the Google Maps API, which is slow on even the most recent
phones, and the Custom Tiles, which are limited and now have the potential to
be very expensive.

So I ripped the whole lot out and replaced it with some custom TileMill-built
map tiles and CloudMade's leaflet.js mapping library. It looks ten times
better, works like a native map, and I can even control things like local
caching of map tiles, which the Google licenses restrict you from doing. I
have the tiles served from an EC2 instance running TileStream, and a
CloudFront CDN to cut down on costs- it works great.

That said, it isn't for everyone- I'm lucky in that my app currently NYC-
specific, so I only needed NYC map tiles. Those alone took ~9 hours to
generate (x2 for separate 'retina display' tiles). I dread to think how long
generating a whole world would take.

There's a preview of the tiles here, if anyone is interested:
<http://www.taxono.my/> . The process isn't quite seamless yet- there were
some bugs related to street labels that I couldn't fix (and appear to be
related to the underlying Mapnik library). This post has reminded me that I
really need to write a full rundown of my experience, but in case you couldn't
tell, I'm impressed.

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dspringmeyer
We're aware of the labeling issues in recent Mapnik and will land a fix soon:
<https://github.com/mapnik/mapnik/issues/1017>

~~~
untog
That's awesome. Thanks!

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jashkenas

        > Leveraging the architecture of Bones, our server side
        > Backbone.js framework, and the package management API 
        > of npm, the node package manager, the TileMill UI can 
        > now be extended and modified using standalone, 
        > JavaScript plugins.
    

I'd love to hear more about how exactly this works, if you don't mind sharing.
Installing JavaScript plugins into a desktop app via npm sounds like a very
neat trick.

~~~
yhahn
We use Bones as our code loader in this case though depending on your use case
a straight node `require()` might be simple enough.

The npm JS api is quite usable, so it was simply a matter of establishing a
directory for plugins (in this case `~/.tilemill/node_modules`) and using the
npm API to install, uninstall, etc. plugin packages to there. We identify
plugin packages by the `tilemill` tag in the npm repo and each plugin is
required to declare their compatibility with a particular tilemill version at
the `engines` key.

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overshard
I always enjoy anything that can help me avoid using external services such as
Google Maps. I'm not one who hates these services, I think they are great. But
what if they get taken down? All the maps I have out there on sites are now
down. It's a lot more reassuring when I can make my own.

~~~
lbotos
That's the beauty of TileMill. They offer the Mapbox.com service but you
aren't tied to their platform. You can use something like
<http://tilestache.org/> to serve titles made in TileMill. I'm excited to see
this update as I'm using TileMill for a project with a big dataset and I hope
this will speed it up. Kudos TileMill team! :)

~~~
tmcw
In fact, there are quite a few other implementations, for various
python/node/whathaveyou enthusiasts: <https://github.com/mapbox/mbtiles-
spec/wiki/Implementations>

(of course, it'd be nice if people hosted on MapBox, as it's the main driver
of TileMill development :)

~~~
lbotos
Do you guys have a donation link somewhere? I'm using TileMill for a small
project and The smallest Mapbox hosting is way overkill. I wouldn't mind
donating some money as it's an awesome product and TileMill is wonderful!

Edit: The initial dataset is huge but the implemented map is only a small
subset.

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joshfinnie
I think this will be a huge advantage for Mapbox. Most GIS professionals use
Windows (due to ArcGIS's requirement), and now it's easy to install TileMill
on their Windows machines.

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dageshi
Can I just mention Maperitive

<http://maperitive.net/>

You fire it up, draw a bounding box around the area you want to work with, it
downloads that area from open street map as raw data which you can then theme
using rule files.

Plus all its commands have command-line equivalents which means you can
automate much of it, so far it's been a joy to work with.

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leetreveil
Very interested in hearing about your experiences developing a desktop app
with node.js.

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cadab
Anyone else having trouble installing/running the .exe?

I've installed okay, but when i click "Start TileMill" nothing happens :(

~~~
cadab
scratch that, uninstall and reinstall fixed it.

