This week wasn’t filled with as much progress as I was hoping for, but I was able to try starting the process to create some data smoothing. I think the way I want to accomplish this is by drawing circles onto the map where they slightly overlap.
I made a rough version of this earlier this week by finding the center latitude and longitude of each state and drawing a circle with the corresponding color.
You can see the rough version here: https://compsci04.snc.edu/cs460/2022/nooycr/circles/
There are a few bugs with this version, the main being I realized for every new year circles are being drawn again on top of the old ones. This means the old color is drawn on top of the new one and after about 20 years the program glitches out really bad.
I think I figured out a solution by creating unique names for each circle when they are created and updating them based on that new name in a loop. However, I didn’t have the time yet to sit down to fix it, so I am hoping to do that tomorrow.
The next step in this process is to try to create data for more circles. I’m not really sure how to accomplish this instead of just doing it manually which is obviously not the idea and way too much work.
I like the concept of having circles, but if I had to present today I would present the state map. With only two weeks left before the presentations, I don’t know if I can make this new concept work in time.
Some other errors with the old version (and the new version) still exist, so I want to fix those this week. One is clicking the info button if the info div is displayed does not make the div disappear which a few test users have remarked that they hoped it would. Another is adding a zoom-out lock and pan coordinate locks so they can’t look outside the US and Canada.
Overall, I think I want to focus these last two weeks on making my site as perfect as possible using the state coloring and creating my presentation. I have the new example as an idea to show what it would have looked like on my site, but I think it is what I would like for the next student who has a similar project to focus on.
