Development Seed

Blog

  • Feb 24, 2010
    New map tiles are approximately 75-80% smaller
    We're currently in the process of updating our set of world maps for MapBox to update data, improve visuals, and increase speed. Here's what will change: Move from 24-bit PNGs to 8-bit PNGs with a 32-color palette Adjustments to labels to improve...
  • Feb 10, 2010
    Advances in administration, performance, and extensibility for a better mapping platform
    OpenLayers 2.0-alpha1 has been released, and there is a clear upgrade path from both 0.x and 1.x. I want to share some advances for administration, performance, and extensibility that have been made during the past couple months to give everyone a...
  • Feb 9, 2010
    Everything you need to know to render and edit styles yourself
    I recently added new documentation explaining how to use stylesheets with MapBox, our open source toolset to create custom maps in the cloud, by walking through how we created the DC Nightvision tiles. If you're interested in creating your own...
  • Feb 4, 2010
    85 New Mapping Icons Available Under BSD License
    I just finished the final adjustments to the 85 icons that make up the Maki icon set and have committed them to GitHub. AJ had started these after needing a few specific symbols for an internal custom map. After the earthquake in Haiti, we...
  • Jan 13, 2010
    Beautiful custom maps and step by steps instructions on how to add them to your site
    You can create custom maps for your website in ten minutes or less by combining Google Maps with MapBox. Adding custom maps to your site can allow you to easily make your maps stand out and really accentuate the data they're depicting, and in the...
  • Dec 16, 2009
    Maps For America and MapBox
    On Saturday we hosted a mapping and data event for the Great American Hackathon, organized by Sunlight Labs, where we designed and generated a map set showing the current congressional districts of the United States. Today we are publicly releasing...
  • Dec 10, 2009
    Mapping congressional districts from TIGER with MapBox
    This weekend AJ and I are hosting a mapping hacking party in association with the Great American Hackathon. Our goal is to generate a custom set of tiles for U.S. congressional districts with MapBox. We want to make it easy for people to embed...
  • Nov 10, 2009
    High-quality public data opens up design possibilities
    The government of Washington, DC has an excellent open data resource for mappers called DCGIS that provides an incredible amount of very detailed data. (Want the coordinates of all the streetside trees in the city? They've got them.) This resource...
  • Nov 5, 2009
    An early winter snow can be a major factor in transportation
    In a country like Afghanistan with many remote and mountainous regions, winter snow can effectively shut down whole sections of the country. I originally designed the "Afghanistan Winter" tile set to show how Afghanistan's winter landscape could...
  • Nov 4, 2009
    Conference tomorrow will feature open source solutions for government
    Eric and Tom are both presenting tomorrow (Thursday the 5th) at GOSCON, the Government Open Source Conference, which will be happening downtown in Washington, DC. They should bring an interesting international development angle to the conversation...