We Can Display Your Mapbox Style Map

When people think of us, most think of WhirlyGlobe. It’s the iconic interface in weather apps like DarkSky and tons of aviation apps you’d only know if you’re a pilot.

Saildrone Forecast

But did you know we also make a good 2D slippy map? That’s Maply and it’s completely open source.

Our support for Mapbox style maps has gotten really good this year, but we’d like to make it better!

Mapbox Kinda Maps

Vector Tiles and Mapbox Style Sheets are a potent combo and they’ve won the geospatial format wars. If you want to make your own vector slippy map, that’s likely how you’re doing it.

Maply has supported Vector Tiles for years, but the Mapbox Style Sheet support lagged…. until this year.

MapTiler Streets

With the recent move to a unified code base we’ve got one single Mapbox Style Sheet implementation for iOS and Android…. and wherever else we port to. On iOS we upgraded our shaders to react to zoom level changes and it looks fantastic.

But there’s a lot more to do. The spec if vast, and the fiddly bits are so very fiddly. We need money for more.

Who Are You Again?

mousebird consulting is a little company that makes WhirlyGlobe-Maply. We specialize in weather, aviation, and GIS mobile app development based on the toolkit.

We’ve been around with this thing for nearly a decade. It actually predates most of the competition… and it really is open source.

How Much Money We Talking?

Mapbox Style Sheet support is vast and will absorb a lot of development money. Two platforms with two graphics APIs (Metal and OpenGL ES) make it more complex. But architecturally, things are good and money will translate directly to features.

As for amounts, $150k means I can hire someone just for this. $30k means we spend a couple of sprints on new features. Obviously more is better, but even $10k would move things along.

I Dunno, We’re Kind of Invested In…

Oh, I know you are. Maybe you’ll consider switching someday, but that’s not what this is about.

Some very large companies are committed to this technology. Toss us a little cash and we’ll be there as your backup plan.

And for the rest of you, our toolkit has gotten really good and we’ve outlived most of our competitors. We’re stable and we’re not going anywhere. If you’re committed to open source, check us out.

This information was first published on https://mousebirdconsulting.blogspot.com/2020/11/we-can-display-your-mapbox-style-map.html