joshuabowers
commented
11 years ago Repurposing this issue: rather than have these be zoom dependent, per se, have tweaked versions of these things be layers on the map. Specifically: still keep markers (but see alterations on the coalesced issue), but add in a heatmap layer as a toggaleable construct. Heat maps seem to be exactly what I was so inartfully describing above.
The current database contains nearly 1000 recorded incidents. While this is not a terribly significant amount, the server can be slightly unresponsive for a short period if tasked with returning all of them to the UX. Placing markers for each incident (even coalesced) is cumbersome and difficult to properly visualize, which is one of the underlying tenets of this application.
Markers are still desirable at closer zoom levels (though it would be really neat to replace them with custom icons associated with a tag); however, at further zooms, some other display mechanism would be desirable. One idea would be to replace the pins by a series of circles, the radius of which being indicative of the number of incidents collocated. Ideally, the circles would be visible even when fully zoomed out, which suggests that they would also scale based off of the current distance between two points at the current zoom level.
Rather than do wonky math to make crazy circles work, how about some sort of density projection, with transparent overlays? Still would utilize circles, but different colors would represent a different number of collocated incidents. As these would be transparent, as the number of circles increased, the displayed colors would shift. Still might become laggy, though.