The recent TileMill 0.7.2 release adds new features to the map design tool that make it easier to get started making maps quickly. There’s a new ‘Save & Style’ button that lets you add a new layer and style it automatically. TileMill now saves projects automatically allowing for new data to appear instantly on the map, making TileMill an even better tool for quickly exploring new datasets. Finally, we’ve written elegant default styles that serve as great examples for learning Carto, the TileMill stylesheet language. This video walks through these new features.

We’ve made the TileMill workflow smoother in other areas as well. Choosing a file for a new layer now automatically fills out the required id field with an appropriate name. The Carto tab-based autocompletion we announced in TileMill 0.7.0 has been expanded to include smart completion of variables, properties, keywords, and selectors - and completing all of them in context-sensitive ways. To help figure out what properties describe, we've added tooltips to the style editor so hovering over raster-mode will show its documentation.

For advanced mapmakers, there are some more improvements. Default projects now use Natural Earth 1.4 data, so they correctly represent South Sudanese borders, and tweaks in the color palette and validation code have made basic TileMill functionality like project listing and editing large stylesheets faster than ever.

Download the new version of TileMill to start using these new features to design your custom maps, and take a look at the full changelog. We’re looking forward to hearing questions, feedback, and bugs at support.mapbox.com.