Book Image

Mapbox Cookbook

Book Image

Mapbox Cookbook

Overview of this book

Maps are an essential element in today’s location aware applications. Right from displaying earth surface information to creating thematic maps displaying plethora of information, most of the developers lack the necessary knowledge to create customizable maps with combination of various tools and libraries. The MapBox platform is one such platform which offers all the tools and API required to create and publish a totally customizable map. Starting with building your first map with the online MapBox Editor, we will take you all the way to building advanced web and mobile applications with totally customizable map styles. Through the course of chapters we’ll learn CartoCSS styling language and understand the various components of MapBox platform and their corresponding JavaScript API. In the initial few chapters we will dive deeper into the TileMill and MapBox Studio components of MapBox and use them to generate custom styled map tiles and vector maps. Furthermore, we will publish these custom maps using PHP, node.js and third party tools like Geoserver. We’ll also learn to create different visualizations and map styles like a choropleth map, a heat map and add user interactivity using a UFTGrid. Moving on, we dive into advanced concepts and focus on integration with third party services like Foursquare, Google FusionTables, CartoDB, and Torque to help you populate and even animate your maps. In the final chapter we’ll learn to use the Mapbox SDK to create and publish interactive maps for the iOS platform. By the end of this book, you will learn about MapBox GL and how to create a fully functional, location-aware mobile app, using the maps styles created in the recipes.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)
Mapbox Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Styling a map with TileMill


If you haven't downloaded TileMill yet, head over to the Mapbox website and download it right now from https://www.mapbox.com/tilemill/.

The installation is pretty straightforward, and detailed instructions are provided in the page you download TileMill from, for all supported operating systems—Windows, OS X, and Linux.

How it works…

Once TileMill is installed and you have opened it, you will be greeted with the templates screen, where you can select one of the predefined templates, one of your previous projects, or create a new one:

Go ahead and select any template you like. We will examine the user interface at this point.

After a template is selected, we will consider the main user interface of TileMill. It is separated into different sections, with the most dominant section being our styled map:

The map will be a live preview, showing the data that we imported into TileMill.

At this point, it is worth mentioning again that TileMill is not connected to any mapping...