

Introducing Simple Tiles: ProPublica's new Mapping Library - jashkenas
http://www.propublica.org/nerds/item/introducing-simple-tiles-our-new-mapping-library

======
thejefflarson
Code is here:

<https://github.com/propublica/simple-tiles>

Documentation here:

<http://propublica.github.com/simple-tiles/>

------
mikehuffman
2012 is making my head explode. Two things that used to be hard and out of
reach for the "poor" are becoming mainstream and easy for anyone to
access....college level education and mapping. I'm going to be honest,
mapping-for-all is more surprising to me than the recent education explosion.
It is traditionally considered a "hard" problem, that requires understanding
or mastery of a few different disciplines just to whip it into shape.
Absolutely amazing! I haven't been this excited with tech development since
the "old" tech bubble. (ask your parents!)

------
NelsonMinar
Cool! Any writeups yet on how it compares to existing solutions like Mapnik,
TileMill, Tilestache, etc?

~~~
thejefflarson
Not really, though I'd say it's smaller than Mapnik. TileMill (backed by
Mapnik) is an amazing GUI for styling maps, and TileStache is an awesome
caching server. But, really at it's heart all SimpleTiles does is convert
spatial data into an image, and does that by relying on GDAL and Cairo as much
as possible.

