Madpom > 2014/12/01 22:44

A quick look around the applications on my PC - Word, Excel, ArcGIS etc and none of them do that. The hint for a button always shows what the button does when enabled, and does not change just because the button is currently in enabled state. The 'Bold' button hint does not become 'normal' once enabled, 'show toolbox' does not become 'hide toolbox'. etc. Is there any benefit to including both versions of each tooltip and adding extra javascript to show/hide the relevant text each time something is clicked?

I agree that the app should be as usable and friendly as practical - but each time I add an extra moving part I add something that can break, I add complexity, I add processing time, and I add additional size to each download.

Maybe just changing the text to read 'show/hide ####' would be a good compromise if the current 'show ###' is misleading.

Hugh vn > 2014/12/01 08:01

tool tips - the 'name' that appears when you hover over the feature buttons above the map.

When I'm seeing the huts the tooltip should read "hide huts" . When the huts are not showing it should read "show huts". and ditto for all tool tips.

I know these are all small details in themselves - but thats what an app is - thousands of small details done right.

Hugh vn > 2014/12/01 07:56

when huts first appear display them as blue dots. when closer blue squares about the size of the black squares LINZ uses.

Hugh vn > 2014/12/01 07:51

"...assumed there is nothing to see..."

maybe. Add some very general feature like 'national parks' or 'great walks' or 'major huts' early on (before 1:500k) and only add huts etc when they are meaning full .... no more than about twenty at a time(?).

Deciding correctly what visual info (and help detail etc) is needed when, and not bombarding the user with clutter is going to be key to making this site work for people.

Madpom > 2014/11/30 22:43

Map scale (zoom level indicator) on screen coming in next feature pack. Along with various bugfixes - principal amongst them touchscreen functionality for the map - not much use for me but affects a large part of the potential audience. Will look at gradual enabling of feature display per-zoom-level too. But 1:500k is too late to turn at least the basics on. I suspect most potential users would have given in and assumed there's nothing to see before zooming in that far - that's 5 zooms in from the initial map.

Hugh vn > 2014/11/30 20:41

not 100 more like 50 , zoomed past the 1:500k

Hugh vn > 2014/11/30 20:38

ignore for now. And don't show features (routes huts etc) until zoomed much closer (zoom level ?!?) - then missalign won't matter and page will load faster and user experience will improve with less meaningless visual clutter. No point seeing huts and routes untill down to 100k? square.

Madpom > 2014/11/30 10:37

Ah yes. The problematic 1:500k maps. These gave me days of headaches. What we got is the best I could get using the recognised transform algorythms. But there are areas with large errors - west coast being the worst. I can remove the 1:500k maps and either zoom the 1:1 million layer more, or zoom the 1:250k layer to where its unreadable (as nztopomaps does). Or we can live with it.

Or, I can add this to the list and spend another day or so in the future trying to match them using splining. This transform distorts the map surface so that each point matches perfectly to the reference map (I use 1:250k as the reference). But you need to plot a lot of points on both maps to get it to work or you end up with a piece of warped, distorted modern art! As both maps use different projections and grids that means finding a lot of common geographic features to use as georeference points.

What do you reckon? remove the layer? If so go for unreadable 1:250k or detail-poor 1:1million. Or keep it for now & have another go in future to georeference it?

Hugh vn > 2014/11/29 22:16

zooming out from the whataroa just now, there is one level (is a zoom level indicator a useful idea?) where the map doesn't align with the routes huts etc layer the zooming further out alignment fixes again.