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by dylrich 2843 days ago
It's interesting seeing the process they went through to work around MapBox's hosting limitations, but the map doesn't feel terribly usable to me. The chart doesn't update on pan/zoom (at least for me in Firefox) and the raster area is a little funky, I wish it was using a standard interpolation that covered everywhere instead of selective areas.

Also, I am loading a ton of data on this page. Interactive maps are nice and I love them but it's totally not usable on a mobile network for a ton of people (ironically given the content of the map). Very curious why they are using React at all, seems like extra page bloat for just one interactive map + chart. Do they test usability on 3G networks? I did not have great load times when off wifi. I think this would be better on a stand-alone page so you can read the article without having your load time impacted by the extra JavaScript.

3 comments

To be fair, it’s a journalistic exercise not a long running webapp project, if the page loads a second later but development time is significantly reduced, it might be worth the tradeoff. The map works well for me, using mobile on wifi.
>it's totally not usable on a mobile network for a ton of people

As noted in the sections:

4. Maps aren’t truly responsive by default (but are annoying on mobile by default)

5. Performance, particularly on mobile, will need all the help it can get

As someone who worked for me used to say: "It's better than good. It's done."

Yes, the top-line emphasis on MapBox when all the actually useful work was done by other tools to get around MapBox API limitations. A little funny.