How Mapbox Is Winning Over Developers to Challenge Google's Mapping Dominance

Re:How Mapbox Is Winning Over Developers to Challenge Google... by bazizbaziz on Tuesday May 08, 2018 @11:47AM (#17021811)

Last I checked, MapBox's WebGL based vector tile renderer was a cut above the rest. For simple mapping, Google's stuff may cut it, but MapBox has the ability to draw complex vector polygons over a wide area that render/zoom/scroll fast and provide a nice experience. This is pretty important if you want to provide fine grained analysis of geographic areas.

If you wanted this on GMaps, you were stuck rendering all your vectors to image tiles, hugely increasing the size. MapBox's vector support made this very easy! It may be that Google/free options have caught up in this space, but I haven't re-evaluated in a few years.

I think MapBox could also be a winner in the GIS space as the GIS options have not made the most graceful move to the web.

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Re:How Mapbox Is Winning Over Developers to Challenge Google... by zerebubuth on Tuesday May 08, 2018 @12:12PM (#17022037)

Mapzen, a now sadly defunct mapping startup, also had an awesome (if I say so myself - I used to work there, but not on that team) vector tile renderer for browser and mobile. Check it out at https://github.com/tangrams

Also, there was a great interactive style editor (https://github.com/tangrams/tangram-play), although it seems the demo site is broken now :-(

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Re:How Mapbox Is Winning Over Developers to Challenge Google... by peatmoss on Tuesday May 08, 2018 @12:46PM (#17022373)

RIP Mapzen. I loved how much much you all were contributing to the open source web space.

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Re:How Mapbox Is Winning Over Developers to Challenge Google... by skate22 on Tuesday May 08, 2018 @01:37PM (#17022819)

Any chance mapzen would open source the code used to make metro extracts? The formats your team had to offer were so much nicer than working with raw OSM data

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Re:How Mapbox Is Winning Over Developers to Challenge Google... by zerebubuth on Tuesday May 08, 2018 @02:18PM (#17023264)

I'm glad you found them useful! The code which made all the metro extracts was embedded as a Chef recipe, although I'm sure you could just extract the bits which do stuff from the Chef wrappers: https://github.com/mapzen/chef-metroextractor

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Re:How Mapbox Is Winning Over Developers to Challenge Google... by skate22 on Tuesday May 08, 2018 @04:03PM (#17024386)

Cool! Thanks you!!

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Re:How Mapbox Is Winning Over Developers to Challenge Google... by lukeqsee on Tuesday May 08, 2018 @12:36PM (#17022272)

> MapBox's WebGL based vector tile renderer was a cut above the rest.

It really is. I've done a lot of work in the web with various rendering engines, and it's hard to beat the quality of MapBox GL.

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