Feedback

[jbartley]

Hi Tom!

I checked out your app. Very cool! I like the look of it with the crisp color theme.

Here is some feedback based on a quick look. . @ekenes might have other feedback.

• The airline passenger count donut graphs have colors that compete with your sleek blue vibe. Would be tough to have enough colors that worked with your blue theme that didn't clash. You could try Adobe's color wheel for inspiration. Maybe the Airline Passenger Counts charts aren't that important to the overall story and could be hidden under a tool on the map or in the app? You know better than I the importance though.
• The projection is cool, but because you use a well known text for the spatial reference the queries that the app sends end up being an http post because the url is too long to be an http get. HTTP Posts aren't cached at the cdn. ArcGIS Online does cache the results on posts so it isn't that bad. If the app went viral then you would want the CDN to kick in. Only thing you can do here I think is to pick a projection by ID that is close enough to the projection you want. I assume that you picked a custom projection so you could tweak the projection parameters (central meridian for example). You could see if ArcGIS has a well known projection that you could use that is close to the projection you picked.
• When the user picks a filter can you use featureLayerView.filter() or featureLayerView.effect() instead of featureLayer.definitionExpression()? This will ensure that the query is done on the client and you don't have to go back to the server to get the filtered data. This assumes that when the app loads it loads with all the features that you need. See these samples (1, 2) in the jsapi.
• I wasn't entirely sure what would happen when switching between "Passengers" and "Competition". Maybe a different label than "Map View" would help? Maybe something like, "Visualize by:" Passengers or Competition. I am not entirely sure on this one...
• Are you currently varying the line thickness by scale? I couldn't quite tell if that was happening or if it was the same size at all scales. It might look slightly more crisp if you vary by scale. See this sample.

Very cool app! Thanks for sharing.

Jeremy

[tomtl]

Updated line widths to vary as the user zooms in and out: https://github.com/tomtl/us-aviation/pull/20

[tomtl]

Good news, the app is already using layerView.filter() on line 549 instead of layer.definitionExpression()! I have removed a previously commented-out line containing definitionExpression() but couldn't find any other occurrences.

[tomtl]

For the charts and the charts colors, there's mixed opinions on the importance of the map vs charts depending on the user's needs. Some people just want the charts and see the map as a nice-to-have, whereas some are more interested in exploring the data using the map alone. It would be tough to choose if the map or the charts should be hidden initially for all users. Maybe there could be a feature to allow the user to resize or hide the charts or map depending on which they prefer. Will put this one down as a feature for future investigation.