mousebirdc

For those competitors who still exist, maybe a little. But once a solution is entrenched and it isn't tooooo onerous, developers won't switch away.

It won't make much difference. The damage is done, Mapbox has remade the community in its image and we can only live in that world.

Oh come on Tom. Making a great, free toolkit utterly decimated the competition. Just completely destroyed any funding for a competitor. And I should know.

I believe that you believe this is well intentioned, but it had a very negative impact on open source geospatial software development. Again, I SHOULD KNOW.

Mapbox is doing what is good for Mapbox. It's a company. But let's not pretend this change is good for anyone but Mapbox.

Can someone confirm this? Do you need an actual Mapbox token to even run an offline map from data you've downloaded off of, say, Maptiler?

We make a competitor to MapboxGL for mobile called WhirlyGlobe-Maply (https://mousebird.github.io/WhirlyGlobe/). It supports vector tiles & Mapbox style sheets, works on Android and iOS, even supporting Metal on iOS. Indirect mode in Metal, actually, which is no mean feat.

WhirlyGlobe/Maply has been around a long time. It actually predates MapboxGL and it's used in popular apps like Dark Sky, as well as a ton of aviation apps and a not a few GIS apps.

Engineers like to write their own, so we're going to hear from a ton of random projects here. And hey, more power to 'em.

But you're looking for a fast, open source mobile map toolkit that's going to be around next week? It us.

Hi, I make the toolkit that Dark Sky (and others) use for their visuals. Been in the weather/aviation mobile space a long time.

I'd floated a Weather-Service-In-A-Box to my clients a few months ago, but got no takers. The idea was something you could set up on a small number of instances fairly quickly and leave running to harvest NOAA/ECMWF/etc data. Fairly simple front end to answer queries. Data tiles for the visuals. That sort of thing.

If people (with money) are interested now, hit me up.

From a technical perspective, Apple Maps is fine. There are some data problems, but then it's a gigantic task.

The perception that every map app must be google maps is honestly part of the problem. A winner take all approach is not working well for developers or consumers.

So circling back to my own post there, I'm saying break the technology into bite sized pieces so iOS developers can have a crack at it.

How Apple could make geospatial apps (maps, mostly) faster, better & cooler to develop.

This is a tutorial I put together for OpenGL ES 2.0 addressing a few things I run into displaying geospatial data (maps, globes).