Modest Maps is a BSD-licensed display and interaction library for tile-based maps in Flash (ActionScript 2.0 and ActionScript 3.0) and Python.

Our intent is to provide a minimal, extensible, customizable, and free display library for discriminating designers and developers who want to use interactive maps in their own projects. Modest Maps provides a core set of features in a tight, clean package, with plenty of hooks for additional functionality.

See simple example applications: NASA Blue Marble satellite images, AC Transit Oakland bus lines.

Download Modest Maps Actionscript 3, 2, and Python ports.

We also have a discussion group, a roadmap, subversion, and a news feed for new releases and patches made necessary by occasional updates from map tile providers. If you are writing your own map tiles, you may find our map transformation calculator and Zoomifyer tile tutorial useful. If you are interested in using Modest Maps as a server-side map generation tool, check out the ws-compose and ws-pinwin tutorial.

As of December 2008, Modest Maps no longer contains support for Google Maps, sorry. You may wish to look at Google's Maps API for Flash or the Google Static Maps API for similar functionality in Flash or Python respectively.

What Modest Maps does:

• Displays tile-based maps, from sources such as OpenStreetMap, NASA Blue Marble, Yahoo!, Microsoft, and others.
• Supports developer-defined tile sets in arbitrary geographical projections.
• Smoothly pans and zooms.
• Tracks the position of geographical map markers.
• ActionScript 2.0 codebase works with FlashLite.

Where Modest Maps stops:

• No default display of geographical map markers.
• No default buttons for zooming or panning.
• No support for “local” API’s, such as business searches or white pages look-up.

Modest Maps is a product of Michal Migurski, Tom Carden and Shawn Allen of Stamen Design, Darren David of Stimulant, Aaron Straup Cope, David Knape, Tomas Apodaca and Travis Collins. Project hosting is graciously provided by Andrew Turner of Mapstraction.

If Modest Maps doesn't offer what you're looking for, you might also be interested in:

• OpenLayers javascript mapping framework
• Mapstraction javascript mapping API wrappers
• OpenZoom flex library for tile-based image viewers
• Advanced Flash Components' UMap