The development of Drone Scene continues!

Drone Scene
95

I’ve just pushed a few more updates to Drone Scene.

Nothing too spectacular this time I’m afraid, so we’ll consider this more of an interim release :blush:

• Bug fix: Locations with lots of content caused the info balloon to keep closing itself

– Reported by @Dvdjo and @macspite

  • When you clicked on a location marker pin on the map and the pin contained a lot of textual information, it would flash up the info balloon and instantly close itself again :scream:
    – We now insert some scroll bars inside the info balloon to allow any size of content inside the balloon

• Bug fix: Validate all drop down lists when adding a Location

  • A bug came to light last week whereby you could add a Location to the map without actually selecting a Region or a Category from the drop down lists :scream:
    – We now validate all form entries

• Performance: Resize uploaded images on the fly

  • Most people upload original-sized photos from their drone when adding a location
  • Drone Scene only ever displays a very small thumbnail view of a photo yet we were still presenting the full size image - squished in to a tiny box
  • This meant we were sending 40MB+ images to your browser in some cases :scream:
  • We now resize all uploaded images on the fly
    – There is a performance impact here though. Adding a new location to the map will now take approx 0.8s long than usual :grimacing:

• Increase map max-zoom level from 18 to 20

  • Not technically requested by anyone but something I picked up on in an unrelated conversation with @macspite (so thanks, Robert!)
    – We previously only supported zooming in to level 18 on the map
    – You can now zoom in to level 20
  • Note: The Open Street Map satellite map tiles that we use don’t actually offer a higher resolution tile than 18x (boooooo…)
    – Which means for zoom levels 19 and 20 you’re are essentially just zooming in on a lower resolution sat image
    — Which in turn means not much advantage in detail when viewing a Satellite base map, but a 2x advantage in detail when viewing a Road map :+1:t2:

• Update the site “favicon” icon to match the new logo

  • This is the icon that gets displayed when bookmarking / adding to your browser favourites
    – Apologies in advance, various browsers cache this icon differently and you might not pick it up for anything up to 28 days from now :grimacing:
  • Thanks Dave @OzoneVibe for the updated icon

• Removed all Weather functionality

  • Did you even know we had a Weather button? :man_shrugging:
  • Every single time the map panned or zoomed in or out we instantly fetched the weather for that location that was now visible in your “viewport”
    – This was an expensive API call that 99% of people were never even using
  • Not many people will care about the weather in a location (right now) while they’re browsing the map and looking for somewhere to fly
  • You’d normally only be interested in the weather in that location on the day you wish to fly there
    – At which point you’d (rightly) use your existing favourite/trusted weather app anyway - not Drone Scene :man_facepalming:

As ever, shout if you have any suggestions for future development, we’d love to hear them!

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