Future Data Overlays Plans
Known bugs
- The maps sometimes do not show in some Safari browsers. I'm having a little difficulty troubleshooting this, because they show up in my Safari just fine. I will need to find a system where they don't work in order to troubleshoot more.
Port to fully use v2, instead of the bastard hybrid that I am using right now.Calculating the maps at higher zoom levels is really slow, slow enough that I'm concerned that my server won't be able to handle lots of people looking at it at the same time.There is sometimes a horizontal line at the bottom of a tile.For some reason, passing the zoom in the query string is broken on the maps that use version 2 of the Google API.- Very small tracts are drawn as triangles, when I meant to draw them as squares of the bounding box. I decided I like the triangles better, but I think I'm drawing the bounding box for tracts that are too many pixels big -- I should only make that approximation for smaller tracts.
Future work, in rough priority order:
Figure out why the zoom is broken on the "Link to this page".Have a way to switch the data on the fly, without having to always go back to SF.I now have a "link to this page" URL that changes as you move around. That's not quite the same thing, but good enough.- Fix the horizonal line artifact.
- Fix the bounding box bug.
Speed, speed, speed. I need to instrument the code and find out where the delay is. I might need to cache tiles when zoomed way out. Note that a rough estimate of caching all of the tiles for the entire US would take about 1000G of disk space per data type (e.g. percent white, density, median age, etc). Furthermore, I want to make it easier for users to change the color mapping. Thus I have to be clever about the caching.I think speed is okay, with some hand-waving and some restrictions. The speed is okay for now, so I'm probably not going to work on it for a while.Make a list of anomalies in the data -- tiny census tracts inside freeways, tracts with too many people in them, etc.See Anomalies- Make a way for people to report anomalies.
- Insert color bars -- a legend so that people can figure out what the colors mean.
Make it easier for people to start at a particular geographic region.I now have a "link to this page" URL that changes as you move around. That's not quite the same thing, but almost as good.Make it easier for people to save a link to a particular setup.Allow people to enter a lat/long directly from a map page, to zoom there directly.See the expert form.- Allow people to enter an address to jump directly there (aka "geocoding").
Convert to use version 2 of the Google Maps API.Make a way to clear out the center picture so that users can see what's underneath.No longer relevant.Set up a form for people to select what they want mapped (including starting point).See the expert form.- Beauty. The pages are kind of ugly (well, okay, very ugly) right now.
If I can get the speed up, plot a larger central area and/or ditch the two-level map for an overlay on top of a "normal" Google map.- Allow the user to change the color mapping on the fly, including being able to show two different data values.
- Allow users to look at data from different years.
- More data! I'd particularly like to look at median income.
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