First, I'm a big believer in the move to GL and am very supportive of that. Here are some comments I gathered while beta testing.
###Critical
- RTL Support - Can't launch without support for Right To Left languages.
###Needed
- Line-Offset - I couldn't find it and it's very needed, especially when it comes to special road styling.
- Image-Filters / Comp-Op - I've seen there's a ticket for it. It's very much needed, I hope it doesn't cost too much on performance.
- Tilt - This is another feature that is supported in the underlying library and is quite necessary to support in the editor as tilted views will have design implications.
- Edit Style's Code - I understand the strategic decision to move from code to GUI, but there are still things you can only do in code, especially since there's a lag between the underlying technology's updates and the GUI's updates. + If I need to edit the code manually I need to make sure Studio won't override any of my changes that are yet not exposed to the interface.
- Why only SVG tiles? - can’t we use bitmap tiles and textures or do they too have to be wrapped as SVGs?
- Delete SVG Tiles - currently you can add them, overwrite them, but not delete them.
- Variables - variables were very useful for our work in Tilemill and in Studio Classic, but are no longer an option in Studio GL. This was especially useful with color (and font) management. I wish you could come up with some alternative to that, ideally one that would take color manipulations (like mix, darken, saturate, fadeout and so on…) into account as well.
###Nice To have
- Line smooth & Line Simplify - I have been using these in the past but couldn’t find them in the new version.
- Browser Support Documentation - clearer tracking of and what happens when the browser does not support WebGL.
- Expected Release Date - I would love to use Mapbox GL in my next project, but I need to know whether you see it as ready for primetime and if not when will it be ready?