The app allows for easy previewing of MBTiles files
One of the new features in the latest TileMill release is the new TileMill Mac OS X app, which makes creating maps easier than ever. In this post, I’ll discuss quickly what the app does and then talk about the process of creating it.
The TileMill app features a QuickLook plugin that makes it easy to preview MBTiles files. Like any other QuickLook-enabled file type, you can just hit the space bar and immediately see the tiles contained in the file, without having to set up TileStream.
Previewing MBTiles files
The preview isn’t just a static image. It’s fully interactive, and you can pan and zoom from the preview to explore other parts of the tileset. It’s not restricted to just the QuickLook function either. You can see a preview tile whenever the Finder generates a thumbnail for the MBTiles file, and with Justin’s Spotlight importer it’s easy to find MBTiles files on your computer by indexing the metadata in an MBTiles file.