Wednesday 24 January 2018

Any reason to use TileMill if Mapbox Studio is meant to replace it?


I'm new to using TileMill and it still seems like a popular cross-platform package, though I keep running into common bugs and errors with it (on Mac OSX). On Mapbox's page, it says that Mapbox Studio is meant to "fully replace and improve upon TileMill in functionality".


When learning Mapbox, the service still refers to using TileMill in its tutorials. So am I right in assuming that Mapbox Studio is the way going forward, it's just that they haven't updated their documentation yet?



Answer




TileMill is designed for producing raster tiles. It's powerful and easy to use with CartoCSS and I found it ran well with no bugs (PC version). It's also pretty well documented, with lots of examples and the tiles produced are easy to integrate with Leaflet.js web sites.


Vector tiles potentially offer many advantages, in terms of styling flexibility and new interactivity. But at the moment there are many restrictions in terms of the number of layers, and the amount of geometry you can upload to Mapbox through Mapbox Studio. There is also a real lack of examples at this early stage.


Mapbox's business model is based on them hosting your map data, and there are understandable business reasons for their switch towards vector layers. TileMill layers can be exported as .mbtiles and hosted elsewhere. I do hope TileMill is maintained and updated as it's a great piece of software that Studio will do well to match.


No comments:

Post a Comment

arcpy - Changing output name when exporting data driven pages to JPG?

Is there a way to save the output JPG, changing the output file name to the page name, instead of page number? I mean changing the script fo...