It must depend on the monitor; they are readable on mine.
If we're picking nits: no consistent labeling of rivers and streams; names of bodies of fresh water seem to live at the major outflow, not near the middle. Also there's the whole level-of-detail thing: they clearly have a set of heuristics for deciding how close you have to be to an object before its label is displayed. For cities, big cities get labeled at a greater distance than small cities, for example. But the user is given no control, and finding a named object by panning around where you know it must be can be really hard: sometimes they only display the name when the object is already filling most of the screen. What good is that?
None of this stops me from playing with it for hours on end, following rivers, looking for tops of hills, zooming on weird-looking doodads.
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Date: 2006-01-13 11:21 am (UTC)If we're picking nits: no consistent labeling of rivers and streams; names of bodies of fresh water seem to live at the major outflow, not near the middle. Also there's the whole level-of-detail thing: they clearly have a set of heuristics for deciding how close you have to be to an object before its label is displayed. For cities, big cities get labeled at a greater distance than small cities, for example. But the user is given no control, and finding a named object by panning around where you know it must be can be really hard: sometimes they only display the name when the object is already filling most of the screen. What good is that?
None of this stops me from playing with it for hours on end, following rivers, looking for tops of hills, zooming on weird-looking doodads.