Partly because I find this an amazing and wonderful piece of application and partly because it is terribly quite on this site I thought I should post this.

http://mapeditor.org/

It's an generic tile editor yet supports both square tiles of any size and isometric tiles of any size.

It's features, from what I can see are

- square, isometric, hexagonal (beta) support
- transparency, translucency
- can import pictures as tilesets using any color as transparent (death magenta is the default if you're not using .png)
- layers
- unlimited tileset size and number of tilesets.
- written in java so runs on most platforms.
-plugin system allows it to export most map formats possible
- more stuff I haven't discovered yet.

Because no one has written a verge map plugin I simply export as an image and load that into the verge map editor as a layer. That works great for things like world maps, with no overhanging objects, but it can get confusing for things like towns, where you need two or more layers of images to make sense and transparency/shadow issues happen. I was wondering if anyone found this to be a better alternative to maped 3?

I use it on my 5 year old low end windows box and it works just fine as long as I don't run any other applications at the same time. I in fact downloaded this on my macintosh but I had java problems and so sent the folder to my windows where it worked without any hitches.

Despite this I still love my mac :)