Out Standing in the Field

Mom, Dad...I love ya'll. Just make sure this loads completely before you start playing with it.

Anne.


http://mason.gmu.edu/~adement/Final_V6.html

http://mason.gmu.edu/~adement/Northern_Arizona_University.kmz

This isn't fancy but I had some interesting shapes that made things kind of tough. In particular, the circular building is actually a dome but I could not figure out how to do that despite checking out lots of stuff in "Help". I think it might be part of the advanced version you have to pay for. I think this has lots of potential...it was just frustrating because I had to experiment a great deal to get it to do things beyond what was in the tutorials.

Also, whenever I bring the file back up in Google, it zooms in too far and whips past the model. I couldn't figure out how to get it to stop doing that.

http://mason.gmu.edu/~adement/AnneDement_Lab8.kmz

Here's my Google Earth stuff. A couple of comments:

1) I went down to a fairly low level when placing the place markers for the 10 favorite places. However, on my cruise ship route, I was covering such large distances that creating the path at an extremely detailed level within each of the ports didn't seem appropriate. The cruise ship route is best viewed when all ports are visible on the route; so, the finer detailed placement of route points/place markers didn't seem necessary.

2) Also on the cruise ship route, I played around with altitude on the route but I found that it tended to blank out parts of the route when I used anything other than zero meters. So, the route has no altitude component. I also couldn't figure out how to put in arrows to show the correct order of the ports; so, I numbered them.

http://mason.gmu.edu/~adement/Invasion.html


It works but I'm still not happy with it. I've got over 30 hours invested in this and I just think it's time to move on. Comments:

1) I only did the main army branches, not the little off shoots.
2) Two of the armies didn't show any movement on the reference map; so, I just let them stay in the rear as reserves.
3) The different projections used between the reference map and the boundary file made it hard to locate where things belonged. I think I'm close, though.
4) Flash would not let me add points to the tweening polygons despite my reading the Help manual. (This isn't the first time Flash has lied to me...nasty little program!) As a result, I had to create the more complicated last front first (25 Aug) and then work backward to the original front (22 Jun). Of course, the thing tweened in all sorts of perverse ways. I figured out how to stop it from overrunning Odessa and Kiev using the Shape Hints function but I can't get it to quit making an amphibious invasion of Estonia. In my version of history, the Germans used their Navy.
5) I figured out the little tricks using the Ease function to slow down the armies so that they don't get ahead of the front. Some of them are still a little anxious to advance but overeagerness isn't necessarily a bad trait for an invading army.

I must admit that there is value to this kind of map. One can't help but notice how Germany dashed across Eastern Europe and then ground to a halt inside Russia. It gives one an appreciation for the flow of events and the awful toll the Eastern Front took on everyone involved.

Finally, I now despise Flash on entirely new levels. I'm so looking forward to the final project.

http://mason.gmu.edu/~adement/Lab6_v2.html

(1) OK. I had issues. I used the 20% alpha to generate the color gradients; however, even after 5 states were selected, the color did not hit "100%" and remain constant. Apparently, the way the transparency is generated by the computer, the addition of more transparent layers just continues to deepen the color. As a result, up to 8 shades are possible if all maps are selected. Beyond 5 years, it becomes nearly impossible to distinguish between all the colors.

So...I went ahead and did all 8 maps but I only put 5 colors in the legend and I told the user to only pick 5. While the user could still check all 8 boxes (proving their inability to follow directions), the map becomes increasingly useless and the disobedient reader must extrapolate the colors (which serves them right). I couldn't figure out how to make the software police their actions and limit them to only picking 5 of the 8 years.

(2) Because of this same color problem, creating the legend was problematic. For example, 4 overlapped 20% alpha symbols on the map yields a significantly different color than one 80% alpha graphics object in the legend. As a result, to replicate the map shades in the legend, I had to generate symbols and overlap them just like on the map rather than just drawing objects and using the standard fill tool with different alphas (40%, 60%, etc.)

(3) I did the mapping with a plain white background and then decided to add a color to the background afterward. Turns out that because of the transparency of the symbols, adding a color behind them completely changes the visual perception of color for the symbols. This can have some shocking results. Fortunately, I found that a sick yellow shade behind the maps actually provided better gradient differentiation than using white alone. Picking the background color before the symbol color, however, is a design concern that would be better addressed at the start of a project.

(4) I wouldn't say this is my worst map but because of the color issues, it's now in the top 3 along with dot density and the Maryland cows. I like the whole faux-GIS idea, though.

http://mason.gmu.edu/~adement/Elections_Lab5.html

Here's my map for lab 5. This was a bit odd because I couldn't get any sounds to work in the Geography Lab despite trying several computers and probably screwing up all the audio settings. So, I did all the actions in the lab for putting in sounds without knowing what any of it sounded like. Once I got home, I was able to test it in Blogger to make sure sounds were there. These are probably not the sounds I'd like to have used but since I didn't know what they were while building the map, they'll have to do.

http://mason.gmu.edu/~adement/NewElections.html


The link to the map is listed above. I had difficulties with a couple of things during this lab:

(1) I created a cool neatline and caret but when I went to publish, Flash told me that the viewer version didn't support the enhanced features even though it allows you to actually create the graphics on the screen; so, it published as just black. I ended up having to create less cool versions of the neatline and caret just to get the thing to publish what was actually on the screen. Kind of a cheesy bait and switch mentality on the part of the program...I'm sure my beloved Illustrator would not be so lacking in integrity.

(2) Because I used the boundary layer that required using the paint bucket rather than the fill tool, I ran into an odd problem. I was working with color schemes that had radial gradients. Apparently with the paint bucket, the center of the radial gradient is not placed at the center of the area to be filled but rather where the paint bucket touches the area. As a result, I got a flickering effect between years due to having touched the bucket to different parts of the states each time I colored them. It took some doing to minimize this through trial and error. I don't think the fill tool works that way...it just puts the center of the radial gradient in the center of the polygon being colored.

(3) Finally, I now know more about the Mason cluster/UNIX/etc. than I ever wanted to. I had flashbacks to my old days using DOS prompts. Whoever wrote the guides and manuals obviously wasn't expecting normal people to read them. It took me almost as long to figure out the cluster account as it did to create the maps. I'm armed and dangerous now, though. Watch out world...I'm Web-enabled!