There are a lot of choices. I like using OGMO (
http://www.ogmoeditor.com/) and TileED (
http://www.mapeditor.org/). If you're not using an integrated editor, I'd suggest doing something similar to Casey's live code reloading, check the file modification time and auto-reload every time you save or export the tilemap, it helps iteration a lot.
Frogotto has a really nice looking editor, some good stuff in there:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ri614C_Buwg
And I think it's open source so you can check it out to see how they built their editor.