This is cool, i like this, its made my lunch
- A Brit
River Runner: drop a raindrop anywhere in the USA, watch where it ends up
61–70 of 128 posts
Re: River Runner: drop a raindrop anywhere in the USA, watch where it ends up
#62Really neat tool. Reminds me of a favorite quote: Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. - A River Runs Through It - Norman Maclean
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Re: River Runner: drop a raindrop anywhere in the USA, watch where it ends up
#63Request for enhancement. Add the flow of the Great Lakes. Modeling Lake Michigan near Chicago may be difficult, but everything else should eventually flow over Niagara Falls and through the St. Lawrence into the Atlantic.
Re: River Runner: drop a raindrop anywhere in the USA, watch where it ends up
#64I live near the Continental Divide. I dropped a drop in Datil, NM, which is a few miles east of the divide, and it went west. But isn't the Continental Divide defined as the line at which water drains east or west? Is the app mistaken, is my definition wrong, or what?
Re: River Runner: drop a raindrop anywhere in the USA, watch where it ends up
#65Saw some "BLM" forests along the The Tongue River. For the curious that's acronym for "Bureau of Land Management".
Re: River Runner: drop a raindrop anywhere in the USA, watch where it ends up
#66I can't see anyone else commenting this here yet - I just get a blank white screen, both on Firefox and Chromium. And no, I haven't disabled Javascript for it. Any ideas?
Re: River Runner: drop a raindrop anywhere in the USA, watch where it ends up
#67At a high level, I really like this. Some UX concerns are all that stop it from being amazing: - The mouse should be a pointer, not a hand. Not only is that the expectation when an element is interactive, but it helps with precision clicking. - The map almost made me sick when it starting moving. It needs to be slower and smoother. You already let people speed it up, but start slower. - Dragging the map should be pos…
Hey, thanks for the feedback. I actually struggled on what to do with the cursor, since the map is draggable (when not at min zoom level) prior to a click and the default mapbox cursor is denoting that. On balance, I think you're right that a default cursor might be better.
Re: interaction during the run, I thought about allowing you to interact and just pausing the run while you do, but thought that too many people would interact accidentally, pause the run and then not understand that they had to click somewhere to resume. It's a feature that would technically be ideal, but practically would throw a lot of people off-track with incidental interaction I think (I had this same issue with the decision to start the run right away instead of giving the user and overview at the beginning. Technically, I think it would be ideal, practically, I think a lot of people could miss the main feature of the site altogether).
Speed-wise, I've already slowed it down a good amount from the original iteration, if you can believe that, but I could take it down a little more. There's a weird kind of balance in perceptual speed between camera height and true speed, so I've tried to not give a user full control over speed/zoom, because most options are very bad. I can, at least, take the base speed down a little, and maybe give more precise speed control than what's there. Fundamentally, though, I don't want the default setting to take ten minutes for a run, and I also want you to really be able to see the mountains and canyons.
Re: River Runner: drop a raindrop anywhere in the USA, watch where it ends up
#68I live near the Continental Divide. I dropped a drop in Datil, NM, which is a few miles east of the divide, and it went west. But isn't the Continental Divide defined as the line at which water drains east or west? Is the app mistaken, is my definition wrong, or what?
There are multiple places where the divide forks and then joins back together, and even then there are other exceptions. If you live near it, I wouldn't visualize it as a single point, but as a general shift in overall trends.
Re: River Runner: drop a raindrop anywhere in the USA, watch where it ends up
#69It would be an interesting problem to see / solve where in this map would a drop travel the most. By just clicking, I got one that travels from Cavour, South Dakota to Gulf of Mexico over a 3523 Kms journey. I am sure there must be something that is longer! Edit - some of the routes stop at border of Canada - is this due to lack of dataset?
You can click in Northern Montana for longer routes, e.g. Browning, Montana gives about 5587km.
This is cool! Did you have some info on this or use some data to find this? I was randomly clicking points on center of US and many were just ending in a nearby lake. I only found a few that ended up in the sea..
Re: River Runner: drop a raindrop anywhere in the USA, watch where it ends up
#70Accolades! Since no one else has done it I will ask for features: sometimes it takes a while for it to determine the route, there is no way to cancel that to go back to trying a new raindrop location Wish there was a different way to get back to raindrop location instead of closing the existing route. Would prefer some kind of click/tap-state or gesture. More easily noticeable of an inconvenience on an ultrawide scre…
I love it. Another feature request would be to not fly the path but just show the plotted flow.
I struggled with this a lot. Originally set that ending overview at the beginning, but was worried that practically a lot of users might miss the main feature. I've heard from a lot of people that they were surprised it went into the 3D view, and I think some people might see the plot and just assume that's it.