I’ve finally managed to get enough time update the Tile5 site to come into line with 1.0alpha1 release. Additionally, the static demos have been replaced with a code playground that gives you the ability to play around with the demos using the wonderful Ace editor.
Read MoreAlmost two weeks ago now, I posted on my personal blog regarding my thoughts on finding Tile5’s niche in the “web mapping API ecosystem”. While I’ve been very happy with how the library has come together and what I have achieved over the last year, it has become clear to me that sustaining the pace of development (and attemping to keep this site and documentation up-to-date) over the last year is something that I cannot sustain. Nor is it something that is necessarily fair on my family, or my business (especially given that we are growing in non-mapping related areas).
Read MoreIn the last couple of days, some good progress has been made on the 1.0 Development Branch of Tile5. My current thinking is rather than release 0.9.5 or any other further “alpha” releases I would like to get a release candidate ready for 1.0 as soon as possible. The good news is that progress has been pretty solid, despite the changes being quite extensive.
It’s almost been a year now that I’ve been working on Tile5 and in that time there have been a lot of learnings. I’ve tried closure patterns vs prototypal patterns and well some things work better than others. There’s been changes from a pure canvas implementation to one that supports different renderers, and also quite different ways of handling scaling and panning.
Read MoreA process that started with decoupling renderers is getting close to being completed ready for release, and it’s been an interesting last leg journey so I thought I’d share.
This one is just a quick note to say that I have finally gotten around to including a zoom slider as part of the plugins under development in the current Tile5 dev branch. I’ve also updated the demos to use the slider so you can get a look at it.
Read MoreIt’s been a busy last few days as usual with a serious focus at the moment gaining compatibility with what I like to call “boring” browsers. This of course is pretty much Internet Explorer 7 & 8. While half the challenge (or maybe a quarter) of enabling older browser support was achieved through decoupling the canvas rendering from the core of Tile5, it has been a frustrating / interesting / rewarding past few days.
Read MoreFirstly, let me say once you start playing with WebGL (either directly or more pleasantly, via Three.js) there really is no turning back. It’s just a whole bag of awesome, and I couldn’t be happier that in time I will be able to say that Tile5 provides “A Grade” support for different flavours of HTML5 mapping, with WebGL being one of those.
Read MoreJust a quick note to say that I have uploaded the experimental (and very experimental) renderers to the Tile5 site and these can now be viewed in the various demos.
Read MoreHoly crap, the last little bit of coding in Tile5 has been intense. Following on from the previous post there have been some pretty big changes.
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