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Comment by jinushaun | Hacker News Reader

I've used TileMill pretty extensively, and while TileMill is great for generating static maps (PNGs) for infographics, it won't replace Google Maps any time soon for serving dynamic maps.

For example, you can serve a dynamic map of Washington DC on a website using TileStream and TileMap, but if you wanted to also view Fairfax, VA or Baltimore, MD, you're out of luck unless the tileset includes those tiles. With Google Maps, you always have access to all the tiles.

That's not to say that TileMill isn't a great product. The choice to use CSS is brilliant. Plus they're based in Washington DC, where I'm currently living! Nice to see tech outside of the Bay Area, NYC and Boston.

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You're right by definition - TileMill doesn't serve maps. Right now it generates them, and TileStream serves generated maps. It's extremely fast and stable, but inherently limiting.

That's not to say this won't change in the future :)

Thanks for releasing a "native" app for OSX! This makes it much easier to use TileMill. The previous installation method was not the most user friendly--this coming from a Node.js developer.

Glad you like the Mac app. We're definitely shooting for a first class OS X app experience. Feedback on ways to improve it further are welcome, too.

Did you package it yourself or used some package/library?

We packaged it ourselves. It's open source, too. Check out https://github.com/mapbox/tilemill/tree/master/platforms/osx

Amazing, thanks!

Is the server open sourced?

Yep, https://github.com/mapbox/tilestream

There is a TileStream Hosting service that has integration with a CDN & DropBox, stats, etc. It uses the open version and just adds glue code to services.

Cool. Definitely looking into this then!

Thank you.

One tradeoff here, though, is offline use. Ever try to use Google Maps offline on a mobile device? :-)

Yes, I have and it worked great! You have to enable the labs feature called "Pre-Cache Map Area" and it's a bit annoying that it will only let you grab a few (10) chunks at a time, but I used it last month while traveling 100 miles from "civilization" and it worked great.

TileMill doesn't seem particularly well suited for that either. I did a rough calculation and it looks like getting a usable map of Washington D.C. would run several hundred gigabytes. I'm wondering if the only way to do something like this realistically on a mobile device is to move the rendering to the client.

Maybe your definition of usable is a bit different than mine, but we've done two maps of DC:

http://tiles.mapbox.com/mapbox#!/map/dc-bright http://tiles.mapbox.com/mapbox#!/map/dc-nightvision

The first is 17MB, the second is 57MB. One could probably get to sidewalk-level without cracking 1GB here. Where did hundreds of gigabytes come from?

That said - we'd like to start doing rendering on-client, and it would be great - the question is how to slice and dice data so that the data itself isn't gigantic and rendering it isn't slow.

I probably made a mistake when estimating this. I exported 21 tiles to MBTiles at 429KB, and extrapolated based on the 5.7 billion tiles it would take to do D.C. at 13-16.

I'm still waiting for a larger job to complete, so I don't have a sense of the file size there.

Edit: Got it. The default export is the entire world. Whoops.

Though perhaps not optimized for an urban solution like DC, we have done work around tile de-duping and tile data compression to combat things like this.

I've been using TileMill recently and their focus is mainly web/html. The static maps (PNGs) are pretty, but there is also some frustrating aspects. For example, PNG/PDF exports don't include legends and they don't have plans to implement that feature presently.

Carto (the CSS inspired syntax) kicks the crap out of SLD (the XML standard that makes absolutely no sense)

Yeah, SLD is no fun. Check out the CSS extension for geoserver -- it's a great replacement for SLD. http://docs.geoserver.org/2.0.x/en/user/community/css/index....

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