typpo / ancient-earth Goto Github PK

Such a fantastic project!

I'm an Earth Science instructor, and we have been using a Google Earth based exercise by a group from JMU for a few years now. The requirement to use Google Earth Pro is yearly becoming more restrictive as students are purchasing more tablets or Chromebooks for use in the classroom instead of PCs or Macs at the same time our equipment budgets are decreasing due to more students technically having "devices." However, showing locations of ancient mountain ranges, fossil species, and ancient glacial coverages among other datasets in their exercise is really powerful for introducing students into the history of the plate tectonics revolution.

Not being familiar with how everything is rendered in js, would you have any suggestions about how to use the georeferenced points and polygons in this KML format to this project or thoughts about how difficult displaying this type of information would be on the current ancient-earth setup?

Someone complained about it skipping things.

Put the years in URL hash. Don't add history state.

Steps to reproduce:

1. Search for a place name to get a pink dot somewhere
2. While the globe is rotating to that place, click and drag to try to rotate somewhere else
3. Notice the globe gets super jittery and refuses to cooperate.

Also,

1. After the auto-rotate is done, rotate somewhere else.
2. Change the "years ago" using the arrow keys or the dropdown.
3. The globe tries to rotate back the selected place and doesn't allow interrupting it.

It might make sense to have clicking interrupt the auto-rotate to allow the user to go where they want. And/or maybe make the auto-rotate a lot faster. If that's not what you want, then maybe click and drag should be disabled during auto-rotate so it doesn't get super jittery.

Since the place locations almost always change between epochs, the auto rotate makes it hard to get a sense for the movement of the continents over time, especially if you tap the right or left arrow multiple times in a row quickly. Maybe there could be a toggle button to disable "auto-rotate to place location" just like there is to disable the globe rotation.

On some platforms and browsers, zoom is hypersensitive.