GEOG411 LAB: Lab 6 in the works

http://mason.gmu.edu/~jgonzalf/german_invasion_newmap3.html

hints, ideas, questions?

Map Find: Pangea and Continental Drift

Just a google search for maps of Pangea and continental drift brings up a ton of flash-based maps. Most of these maps are very basic and use only motion and shape tweens.

Here's a couple:
http://www.suu.edu/faculty/colberg/Hazards/PlateTectonics/18_Pangaea.html
http://education.sdsc.edu/optiputer/flash/pangea_4.htm

Flash Tip: Easy Timeline Controls

Gotta quick tip for you guys which I also used on the NFL schedule lab also (does it count as cheating?)

Easy way to create timeline controls
now, this trick doesnt work in every situation, especially when you have movies inside movies to make your timeline smaller, but if you have everything on the main timeline (all motions, tweens, etc), here is an easy way to add control to it.

1. Create a layer named TimelineControl.
2. On the first frame in that layer, add buttons that you want to have (stop, play, next, back, rewind, etc)
3. Insert a frame at the very end of your movie (this will make all the buttons span along the whole movie, but only uses 1 'big frame'
4. Now, back to your first frame, and say for example, we want a next button:
-select your next button
-Open the actions window (The diagonal arrow, F9, or Window > Actions)
-Type in this code:

on (release) {
gotoAndStop (_currentframe+5);
}

Thats it. You now have a next button.

This is most helpful if you want your button to move ahead or back a certain amount of frames. If you want just to move a frame forward or a frame back, on click, nextFrame(); would do the job. (and previousFrame(); )

How it works?
Actionscript is a pretty powerful yet simple programming language that follows the idea of most other object oriented programming languages (Java, C++ etc).

"_currentframe" is a flash variable that is updated by flash as the movie plays along, updating the variable to be the current frame that the movie is in. When we do _currentframe+1, we advance the movie by 5 frames, changing this to _currentframe-5 makes us go back 5 frames

Creating play and stop buttons are easy, on click or release, either do "stop();"or "play();"

Hope this helps - if you guys have any questions feel free to comment

GEOG411 Lab5: Invasion of Russia

Here it is in progress. It is still pretty rudimentary information wise, but design-wise its getting to where i wanted it to be. I must say, using CS4 motion tweens really makes it easy to change paths along the timeline quickly.

LAB 5 (IN PROGRESS)
http://mason.gmu.edu/~jgonzalf/lab5.html

Map Find: Iditarod 2008 Trail Map

It seems that I'm all about simple maps that show lots of information outside the mapping area when the map is interacted with. Take this map for example: http://www.iditarod.com/flashmap/

The map itself is very simple. The Iditarod checkpoints can be clicked for more information on them, as well as the legs of the trip. It looks like during the race itself, the map was updated constantly to show the current standings (possibly XML). Again, pretty simple, but full of information.

GEOG411 Lab 4: States Won By a Presidential Party

Done with lab 4....

I originally had more graphics and more flashy (no pun intended) but decided to make it more simple and "eloquent".

Here's the link:

http://mason.gmu.edu/~jgonzalf/lab4.html

Even played around a bit with a "?"/Info place, although its pretty basic since you have to hold the click over it.
I really liked how it turned out, although there are some things I would change/expand. Overall I was going for a very simple and neat newspaper style map without too much clutter and think I achieved that goal. The map is meant to be on a webpage with text around and not a standalone map based on its size and simple round edges (to make blending into a website with white background more smooth)

Let me know what you guys think.

SCREENSHOT:

Map Find: NIU Huskie Line

I was in Chicagoland for the weekend visiting my girlfriend and was walking around her campus. They had TVs all over campus with a nice vector map that had pictures of buses moving around it to show where the HuskieLine (their bus line) buses were at the moment.

Pretty interesting map with simple animations. Seems as though it could have been a grad students project.

GEOG411 Lab 2 &3: NFL Cardinals Schedule

Flash map one, simple idea, but difficult to show with what we were allowed to use I thought. Had to show the cardinals schedule on map, showing where they played and results - would have been easy to show if all games were away, coloring states for WIN or LOSS there, but then some states have more than one team, and then what do you do with home states?

anyways, this is what i worked out. If tweens or animations were possible, when teams played in arizona, show the team they played, and then move the graphic to the state of the team played against. not sure if it makes sense.

Also, would have been possible to do a road-trip type map, moving the cardinals along a route (next game was played) and leaving behind dashed lines like map, but this would also require tweens

Mason webspace:

http://mason.gmu.edu/~jgonzalf/

Map Find: Simple Flash Map - Secret Prisons

Simple flash map, some nicer ones on the same page also.

This map is sort of a flip-book style, adding labels and new images, along with a simple zoom. not bad and very easy to make.

http://www.mapsofwar.com/ind/cia-secret-prisons.html

GEOG411 Lab1: Presidential Election

Lab 1 of Advance Digital Cartography.!

uploaded as a .png format as it is lossless. For some reason, flash really makes the output look horrible if you publish it as a jpg. Even with compression and quality set to 100%, the image looks flat and blurry. I'm sure there is a way to make the output better, but since flash isn't meant to be an image editing software, I wouldn't expect if publishing or exporting as .jpg is less than great.

If any of you cannot view the .png file, let me know and i'll upload the .jpg version!