
TileMill – An open source map design studio - susi22
https://tilemill-project.github.io/tilemill/
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msimpson
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dependencies had become outdated.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.

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

~~~
andrewljohnson
We use maputnik now because we want the style to be MapBox GL and not
CartoCSS:
[https://github.com/maputnik/editor](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.

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pacofvf
What do you use for hosting the vector tiles?

~~~
andrewljohnson
AWS

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ivanbakel
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
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.)

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pimlottc
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?

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wodenokoto
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.

~~~
pimlottc
Yes, but it's still grounded in technical terms. What kind of end user use
cases are supported by this tool?

Does this help me create an overlay layer for Google Maps? Does this help me
embed a map widget on my own website? Does this help me remix open-source
mapping data to produce a customized rendering? Does this help me create maps
for my fantasy RPG campaign setting?

Yes, I can do some googling and research these terms and figure it out, that's
not the point. The point is that this website does not do a good job of
telling a random person (or random developer) why they might be interested in
this tool and what it can do for them if they are not already familiar with
web map viewer technology..

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Doctor_Fegg
Not every website is intended for a random person (or random developer),
especially in the open-source space, and especially when the developers don't
want to take on the support burden of users who do not have a certain degree
of background knowledge.

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jason_pomerleau
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.

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scardine
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
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/](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
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.

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anc84
From back when Mapbox was about free and open-source. Great tool!

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

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FTA
geoJson or vector style editor? For the former, QGIS is a good bet. For the
latter, maputnik.

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cesarniculescu
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
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).

