MapTiler: Map overlay, cut map tiles for Google Maps, GIS layers and mobile apps | Hacker News Reader

MapTiler: Map overlay, cut map tiles for Google Maps, GIS layers and mobile apps

maptiler.com

153 pointssabas_ge45 comments

I didn't realise open street map had made so much progress, the demo page looks really nice. The satellite view is not very detailed where I was checking but other than that I'm very impressed with the offering.

Openstreetmap is just the underlying data - absolutely anyone can come along and build a program to draw images from it. That's why OSM is so powerful, and what distinguishes it from Google maps etc.

That, and OSM helps you find things other than retail outlets.

Are you suggesting OSM has better point-of-interest search than Google Maps?

I love OSM, but this doesn't match my experience at all. Can you provide a bit more detail, maybe some examples of searches that OSM has better data for than Google?

At least here in Sweden you have much more detailed POI info in the countryside, like rune stoned and such. In Google Maps they can be impossible to find, and even the small path leading to them do not appear.

I thought the same as simonw, I guess the confusion comes from that I would interpret POI search as being shops in towns. Indeed, things like runes and other countryside things with trails leading to them, gmaps is terrible at. I guess they just don't see the money in it, so it's up to us to map it ourselves.

OSM is obviously not so good for shops, but it has incredible detail in other points of interest, down to drinking fountains and benches. Although of course it depends of how well mapped your part of the world is.

For me, it's the user experience. Searching for anything recreational will bombard you with hotels, restaurants, etc. It's nice to be free of this information at times.

Maptiler is not OpenStreeMap - they're one of the many companies who productize OSM.

Which is exactly the way it's meant to be.

I didn't understand that part. If I remember right, the open street map website used to have a demo page of their own. In any case I'm very happy to see this.

OpenStreetMap's own demo page is openstreetmap.org (or osm.org). I find lima's reply also a little confusing, but I think he just means that it's fine for companies to take the data and use it for a map (and indeed it is), but I don't understand how that makes this not openstreetmap. I mean, technically OSM is the database, and the demo on their own page "is" not openstreetmap because openstreetmap isn't a demo but only a database... but I'm not sure he meant to be pedantic so I'm not sure what it meant.

"Is" as in "it's not the same entity".

Great to hear you like it. You can also make your own design with the customization tool - https://www.maptiler.com/blog/2018/05/customize-your-map-in-...

Unfortunately I bought a license for MapTiler and then I lost it when I reinstalled my pc. They preferred to do email ping-pong instead of giving me my license back. Apparently you have to "release" the license before reinstalling the pc. Because this is what you have to put up with if you try to be fair and actually pay for software...

Reminds me especially of computer games in general and some single player Assasins Creed title specifically which had always online copy protection. The copy protection server was DDOSed meaning players that bought the game couldn't play or would always be kicked out of the game once the server went down again.

On the other hand the pirates played the game without problems once they circumvented the proctection (a week?) after the game release.

I can vouch for their MapTiler Engine product. I consulted with a company that used it to create map tiles of mosaicked images captured by drones. MapTiler Engine worked great. Not cheap, but in our eyes, it definitely was worth the price. Thumbs up for MapTiler.

It's a pretty nice piece of software. Unfortunately the affordable version is far too restricted and the 'useful' version is stupidly expensive. Had it been less than $1000 I probably would have bought a license.

Market Size. You can't sell stuff for 39.99 if only 20 people in the world will buy it

Very cool, I recently wrote a map tiler that runs on AWS lambda and supports real-time tiling at any zoom level and real-time reprojection. Planning to open source it soon.

Keen to see this! Please contact me it you do.

The examples on the site totally hijack my back button on iOS.

I hope you get your back button back.

It could definitely do with some replaceState instead of pushState.

I used MapTiler to generate a graph of the largest connected nodes on the Disqus network: http://webrender.net/disqus-universe/

Found it fast and easy to use. Couldn't believe how difficult it would have been to render the tiles otherwise.

I’ve used one of their mobile apps to overlay a hiking map on the satellite map and (iirc) cache the tiles in the area. Very useful to have gps positioning on a map that may only be available on paper, pdf, etc.

Yet another landing page influenced by Stripe. :)

This is raster tiles, not vector.

Both are available, see https://www.maptiler.com/maps/

The software Maptiler is for raster output. Not sure what that map page is supposed to demo.

It says "Continue to MapTiler Cloud" in the bottom right corner. https://www.maptiler.com/cloud/

Looks like it's an online map editor/map viewer that supports both vector an raster images.

The page demonstrates our worldwide map service - it is an alternative to Google Maps API - for a fraction of the price. You can use the maps in Leaflet, OpenLayers, in the mobile apps, etc.

There seem to be a "vector <-> raster" switch hidden in the map view of the ... product demo or whatever that is.

Alas, I couldn't find what this has to do with OSM anywhere, so I don't get why it's mentioned in the submission title.

> Alas, I couldn't find what this has to do with OSM anywhere,

The software generates map tiles out of OSM data, based on a few sample points I looked at.

That's what I thought originally - similar to Mapnik. But I've downloaded it and can't see any way to work from raw osm data.

The base is Openmaptiles (https://openmaptiles.org), to build from osm data you'd need to spin the infrastructure from docker. I posted the link to maptiler because in other threads people were looking for a simpler cloud instance (I'm at the sotm conference and they presented it)

Thanks! Openmaptiles looks like it might be exactly what I'm looking for at work. Enjoy the conference. I didn't know it existed but hopefully I can get my company to send me next year.

Next year is in Heidelberg from 21 to 23 September!

There is a toggle on the demo page that flips to vector.

I also found that if I hold ctrl I can rotate at random and even go "3d" and see some of the building's heights (in London anyway).

I've got no interest or relation in this (apart from being a OSM contributor years ago), but this is one of the most convincing alternatives to google maps I've seen. The free-rotate on the vector tiles really makes a difference.

> apart from being a OSM contributor years ago

Could I asked why you stopped contributing? I kind of feel like the userbase is struggling a bit, and I wonder if it's just Google's (using Android's) influence, or if it is something else.

It seems not to be 100% clear from the website, but MapTiler is a family of products.

One of them is called MapTiler Cloud [0], which is based on our own open-source project OpenMapTiles and data from OpenStreetMap and offers base maps in vectors and rasters.

Apart from it, there is a MapTiler Desktop [1] (and Engine [2]), which is a desktop software producing raster tiles (the support for vector tiles is work-in-progress).

[0] https://www.maptiler.com/cloud/ [1] https://www.maptiler.com/desktop/ *[2] https://www.maptiler.com/engine/

What CDN do you use?

stripe.css

Could you elaborate?

Probably that the design takes inspiration from Stripe’s one.

Looks like every other product page, though. They all look the same.

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