Simple, and Powerful

Summer is over. How did you spend the end of it? This monthly update is a bit late because there was just so much to cover. Tasmap has been growing faster than the herbs in my yard (turns out herbs branch out on their own!). Let's take a look at what changed.

Map Element Rebuild and Styling

This was our biggest improvement last month. We completely rebuilt the rendering engine for map elements and added more styling options.

About 6 years ago, when Tasmap started as a personal project, the choices were limited. The Google Maps SDK was expensive and hard to customize. Mapbox was about to go closed source and tie users to its ecosystem. The open source MapLibre had only been released a few months earlier. So I used Konva.js to build our own map rendering layer. Konva.js gave us a good development experience and a lot of room for customization, but it also caused many integration problems: event handling that isn't native to the map, slow interaction between the map layer and the rendering layer, and the performance limits of canvas itself.

Today, Tasmap has more use cases and needs than before. So we decided to move all map element rendering onto MapLibre, which is now very mature, and redraw every element with WebGL. This improves performance and the user experience, and opens up more styling options. The highlights:

Area: Tasmap now supports Area elements, including all common shapes and texture support.
Texture: All area-type map elements (ground, water, green space, and so on) and custom elements can be filled with textures. The first batch includes 80 common patterns, materials, and brush strokes. You can use them to make stylized maps with the quality of a design magazine, and they stay interactive.
Terrain: Tasmap now supports terrain, which is very useful for outdoor maps, disaster maps, and similar uses. You can also style the terrain shading. All map elements (location, path, area) sit on the terrain exactly.
Borders: Road types now have a border option, which gives you more freedom in styling.
User experience: When you drag or zoom the map quickly, map elements no longer feel like they are floating. They stay firmly attached to the map.

This migration opens the way for large data imports and data visualization in the future, and it greatly expands what you can do with styling. Together with our own map server, it makes Tasmap a different class of product from map tools built only on an SDK.

User Search and Filtering

As we mentioned last time, search and filtering for map users is now live. You can search locations, location posts, and main posts, and each layout focuses the results differently. It also supports Google-style search syntax:

Exact match ("exact phrase")
Exclude (-exclude)
Number range (1200~1800)
Date range (2026-09-01 ~ 2026-09-30)

Also, as we said before, we use the style of markers, paths, and areas as the filter, instead of adding another multi-level panel of tag toggles. It's easy to make an interface look like a cockpit dashboard, but that has no real value, and it doesn't fit our core idea: Simple, and Powerful.

Data Import

For data import, we added a few features to make it easier:

Paste snippets directly: You can now paste CSV, TSV, GeoJSON, KML, or GPX text directly. It also accepts loose fragments of data, such as a single <PlaceMarker>, a few GPX points, GeoJSON that isn't wrapped in a FeatureCollection, or plain latitude and longitude text with no header. Tasmap will try to recognize the format and fill in the missing structure for you. The editor also has live syntax checking and hints.
Automatic field prefill: When you import tabular data (CSV / TSV / XLSX), Tasmap uses AI to pick the location name, latitude and longitude or address, and post fields for you. This saves you from opening each dropdown to map them by hand.

Print-Quality Output

Remember the "Maps, Everywhere" section on our website? It's not an empty phrase. We are moving toward it step by step. For a long time, the experience of maps on and off the screen has been split. Paper maps often have good design but can't be interacted with. Map apps are functional but lack beauty. Tasmap wants both. We want you to make a beautiful online map that you can also print and use on its own, or add to your reports.

Tasmap now supports poster-size, high-resolution map output (up to A0 at 300 DPI), and we will add more advanced support, such as terrain and tilt, in the future. Good maps should exist everywhere. By the way, our map was selected for the State of the Map 2026 poster exhibition!

Editor Experience

Asset management panel: As maps grow, custom markers and post images pile up. We added an asset management panel to the Data workspace. It keeps everything uploaded to a map in one place, and you can clear unneeded files all at once.
Simpler manual map creation: Creating a map by hand is now a single template picker. You choose the map's focus area after entering the editor. The thumbnail and app icon are also generated after you enter the editor, so a new map is ready faster.
Better AI map creation: When you create a map with AI, you can choose the reasoning effort and whether it uses information from the web. This lets you decide between a quick draft and fuller content.
Unified style picker: Choosing and adjusting colors, borders, and textures now works the same way everywhere.

More Improvements

Added an email subscription option.
Redesigned the settings panel to make its style more consistent.
3D buildings are now drawn above roads and text labels, so cities look more natural in 3D.
Daily data backups. The backups are stored with two different providers across Europe, Asia, and the US.
Fixed a stability issue with touch interaction, and a small bug where dragging the search bar selected the placeholder text.

What's Next

We grew a lot this summer, and Tasmap is now much more capable. So our next focus is "making these capabilities available to everyone."

One interesting thing we noticed is that most people don't know how to make a good map, because they haven't seen many good maps. We learn what good design, good presentations, and good report formats look like through years of education and training, from childhood on. But maps? Very little. This will be our next challenge.

We have many ideas that have been in the works for a long time, and as Tasmap grows, they can soon become real. It's an exciting time. We have also received many partnership inquiries recently. We welcome all kinds of collaboration, including agency services, affiliate marketing, and integration services for existing workflows.

That's all for now. The seasons are changing, so take care of your health. See you next month :)