OpenStreetMap Tiles now available for Manifold!

Just saw this post on the forum. After a long time where the idea of a OpenStreetMap ISI Driver for Manifold was thrown around on the forum, James K. finally stepped up to the plate!
James did a stellar job, not only generating a ISI Dll for the default OSM Mapnik Tile Layer, but also adding the Tiles@Home and Cloudmade Cycle Map. The Dll works fine in both x32 and x64, and finally allows map makers to quickly and easily add a high quality OSM background map to their products.

This is a significant step for map makers, as the OSM tiles offer a level of freedom in terms of usage license. Altough a acknowledgement of the OSM license is needed in any mapping products which contain any OSM data, this is a simple requirement when compared with the grey and murky licensing requirements for Google, Microsoft Virtual Earth and Yahoo tiles.

It remains to be seen with the imminent update to 9.0, if Manifold.net are going to support OSM XML as a Import/Export format. Altough there are existing scripts to enable the import of OSM XML data, these scripts have issues and don't scale efficiently to bulk downloads. A native solution hopefully would enable bulk imports and the ability to save (or even upload directly to OSM) to OSM XML for update of OSM.

PS: AFAIK planet.osm, representing a database dump in XML form of the whole OSM dataset, is one of the largest publicily available vector datasets out there (over 364 million elements). Import and display of such a huge dataset could be a great benchmark test for upcoming versions of Manifold!