Cross-posted this to Designer News, but just wanted to share it here as well as I just finished building and deploying this morning. Ever since Marvel announced their API, I've been looking to find something to build using it. A friend of mine is big on MeteorJS, so I decided to combine the two - using Meteor, the Marvel API, and the Google Maps API, I put together this interactive map that lets you explore the world of the X-Men based around key locations in their history and the stories based there.
Oh man, thanks for the link! Super excited about that.
I like the idea of individual characters, I could see having locations with different colored markers for their origins/birthplace. That wouldn't be super super difficult to build out, either, as there's a lot of information there to pull from.
Someone else in another comment suggested doing locations based on events/alternate timelines, which sounds pretty similar to this idea, and also could be very cool. Just a matter of doing research - the Marvel API is great for single data points (i.e. character, series, single comic), but gets super overwhelming (and a little useless for this kind of thing) when you search for an event or the like. But yeah, definitely doable as a Phase II kind of thing.
Agreed entirely - there's a set of Google Maps utility tools that Google put out that tie into the API and I'm actually using the markers with labels one to show the markers as it is now. They also have a library that can cluster markers. From my initial research, those two can't exactly work alongside each other (due to conflicts), but I'll certainly look into possibilities of combining them for a better experience.
Haha I know, I know - I tried to get a few different domain names before settling on this one. Fingers crossed that there's enough context around the link (and whatever metadata those filters need) to make sure it doesn't get ignored/blocked.
Yeah, I actually just changed it to a simple zoom with no pan about an hour ago. I was using an interval to adjust the zoom function with the Google Maps API, but everyone said it seemed super choppy. Unfortunate, because I was hoping that would be a cool effect, but don't want to let something like that get in the way of a good user experience. So now just panning to the location at your current zoom level when you click a marker, hopefully that's smoother!
