I have recently seen a lot of comments in regards to the ww Map Manager being hard to navigate. Please post your suggestions for how you feel it can be improved. I am listening 
Hi Mike:
While this is not a high priority for me, below is a little brainstorming.
- Group the countries into continents so there are fewer initial choices.
- Put the countries with the most common users at the top of the list
- Create a quick list by allowing users to copy certain map choices into one select list. I will typically need only fewer than 10 maps ever.
(Also, this is the first “reply” I have done on the new forum software. Your subject did not copy into the Subject field, so I manually pasted it. I even went back and made certain I was clicking on “post reply” and not “new topic”.}
PatrickB.
I don’t think the subject is supposed to auto-copy on replies. I checked some other phpBB boards, and they did the same thing.
Edit: The weird thing is that the subject copies when you click the “Quote” button, instead of the “Reply” button.
Yup that is correct… posting a reply means the subject of the posts is left blank… but when you’re quoting it puts in the person’s posts as well as subject… that’s the way the forum works.
… and now we are way OT. Go us :thumbright:
lets go a little further off topic… lol… besides that’s the sign that a forum is getting active… topics end up going off topic :-P;-) LMAO
Bump
Anyone else have ideas on this topic?
I like the idea of shrinking the groups down to Continents, the current list is very long. I would also like to see the Maps link on the interfaces bring up a short list to select from; such as Map History, Map Manager, Map List rather than the long window that now comes up.
I maintain the Map History with a text editor but having an option in Map Manager to do that would be good. And if Map History were renamed User Maps, or Personal Maps or something like that it would solve another request.
If you’re looking for enhancement ideas have you considered how great it would be to add tags for the Moon Rise and Moon Set times. :lol: :twisted:
Yeah, I think the main problem is information overload. Even though they’re grouped by category, it would be easier to use the Manager if it were a treeview or something similar. Continental grouping should probably be the top-level display.
Another thought might be the mechanism for gathering user favorites – while a “recent” list is handy, it might be more useful to allow a user-created menu of favorites. Maybe the Maps menu could have three submenus for Favorites, Recent, and All Maps (in that order of priority). Then “all” would be subgrouped again by continent, and finally by region if it’s a big continent.
I guess it should probably leave out the areas that are incontinent. 
I would like to have the maps tab load in the same window as the rest of the data. Most of the time I want to see the same radar map as before, and would like to have it visible after one click.
Having to navigate the entire list of maps takes a long time, so I think a menu of “favorites” would be the way to go & make for easy switching.
Do you ever click on Map History? The item below the Map Manager title. Would you click on it if it were at the bottom of the list rather than the top? Would you click on it if it were bold or a different color?
I personally have edited my Maps.ww file to eliminate many of the maps that I never use. It is after all just a comma delimited file. When I click on Maps, I get a short list:
Map Manager
Map History
North America
Pacific Ocean
United States
West Hemisphere
West Pacific
World
I have been very careful not to install the new list of maps with each successive release of WW and I have made a backup copy of both my modified file and the original.
I like Landroid’s idea which would result in even a shorter menu, something like:
Map Manager
Map Favorites
Map History
All Maps
Map Favorites would be user definable and would not change
Map History would function as it does now and show recent maps whether in the Favorite list or not, and
All Maps would show the complete list distributed with Weather Watcher and any items that were added manually using Map Manager.
I would also suggest that the History show only the 5 or 10 (perhaps a user definable number) most recently viewed maps.
Whatcha think, Mike? Any of that sound good or workable? :icon_smile:
There are some great ideas in this thread. Keep 'em coming… I’m watching
How about automagically removing those maps that don’t include the current city/zipCode.
I don’t know how easy that would be to implement. Looking at a 1600 Doppler image has a lot of zip codes and cities. I doubt Mike wants to go through and associate every city and zip to those images.
I sure as heck wouldn’t.
:-s I don’t understand. Are you referring to Active City entries? I don’t see zip codes associated with any of the maps. Can you give an example?
EdP, it sounds like it’s just an idea… not fully worked out at this point :icon_smile:
That would be nearly impossible to do since I included maps from all over the Internet. Some weather providers do separate their maps by zip code (e.g. WeatherBug), so we are not talking about the impossible here.
One quick suggestion for the map viewer… duplicate the drop down list of maps within the map viewer.
Although sometimes it may be convenient to open multiple map windows, it is a major pain to have to go from the map viewer back to the main application window to select a new map. Maybe you could just duplicate the drop down list of maps within the map viewer window. Then, if I want to open multiple maps in different windows, I could still select them from the main application window. But if I want to just reuse the same map viewer window to view multiple maps, I could select the first from the main application window to open the map viewer window and then open subsequent maps from within the map viewer window.
Computer_Guru, thank you for your suggestions. The new map feature is going to have a similar function.