So it's pretty compute intensive - my machine also doesn't love it. I wanted to get the general gist of it out there before optimizing, but I'll try my best.
For the below the horizon bit - that was the only way I could get the map to fully render when at a low tilt angle. If I enabled the stop at the ground layer, it would stop rendering the map at close distances (not fully sure why), so it sits like this for now.
The enter an address thing is a great idea, and definitely possible! I'll add it to the road map!
Ah yes! So this is something I'm struggling with from a UX perspective (could use some feedback from anyone here).
News tied to a specific place gets pinned there (like an article about the Blue Jays being pinned at the Toronto Skydome). For stuff in cities, or larger areas like states, it tries to place it within the bounds of the state randomly, and if that fails, a random radius (which I think is what's gone wrong here).
The problem though is with the Toronto Star reporting on news in Jersey. The way I'm going about this right now is a filter I'm calling "Lens" which is just the country. Right now the only lens is Canada, but I want these to be filterable so you can easily see what other places are writing, or just get home grown news (but again, something I'm struggling with how to represent it).
The state boundaries, at least for NJ, seems wrong... so the pin is also in the wrong location.
I honestly find it hard to read the news when they are all stacked on top of each other. For instance, how is this useful? (screenshot: https://ibb.co/DDZ0txJ5)
It's hard to click on the items, and the constant zooming in/out is annoying. The linking of the news to other locations is interesting, but it doesn't really provide any new information to the user - what happens when you need to link something across the globe? How many linking locations can you have per article?
I also noticed that some news show up twice (same title / same source / same state).
It would be more interesting to me to see a sidebar with news titles/desc within a radius/city/state and as I click on the news the locations are displayed in the map. But I would still need to leave the website to go read the news, and then have to switch back and forth to get the "geographic context"... at that point as might as well just search google maps.
Definitely gonna implement some more clustering. The zooming in/out being annoying bit I hadn't thought of, but now that it's mentioned I kind of see it myself too.
I actually started with a sidebar that would then highlight the element on the map, but got rid of it to focus more on the exploration aspect.
Thanks! One of my favourite accidental things to come out of it was the "highlighting" of rural news. Stuff in a city like Toronto, which usually dominates my feed, gets kind of lost in all the other stories, while things in rural areas (which I never see) stand out.
This exactly. I find that I don't remember how to do some of the things I used to have more easily memorized, but I still need the fundamentals when things go horribly wrong and I need to dive into code myself.
I'm actually working on a similar ATC transcription project, but more along the lines of education / entertainment for non-pilots. I'm gonna be posting a YT video about it soon, but would love to chat if you guys are open to it!
Yes, it is the Northern Indiana Commuter Train District. Inside Chicago, they run on Metra track. To avoid competition with Metra, they do not allow boarding on "inbound" trains inside of Illinois (except the Hegewisch station that is on the Illinois/Indiana border), and do not allow people to get off "outbound" trains until the Hegewisch station [1]
Funny thing, is that Chicago has direct rail access from downtown to 4 airports in 3 states - Chicago O'Hare and Chicago Midway via the CTA, Milwaukee Mitchell (via Amtrak), and South Bend Regional (via the South Shore).
Good point. Meta's brand identity is pretty much the blue you picked. I see your marker color is exactly the hex value for blue that's on most of their website.
I think you could go a little lighter, pretty sure the actual trains have a lighter more saturated blue on them. Something closer to the blue you're using for the Mass Bay Trans Authority would be fine, and there's no overlap in service areas to make that confusing.
Or maybe different marker size/shape for regional vs national trains.
So it's pretty compute intensive - my machine also doesn't love it. I wanted to get the general gist of it out there before optimizing, but I'll try my best.
For the below the horizon bit - that was the only way I could get the map to fully render when at a low tilt angle. If I enabled the stop at the ground layer, it would stop rendering the map at close distances (not fully sure why), so it sits like this for now.
The enter an address thing is a great idea, and definitely possible! I'll add it to the road map!