For what it’s worth, the current UX does nothing for me. I’d much rather see a dot swarm than one dot a hundred miles wide that says “50”. At least right now, at even modest zoom levels, these summary dots are the size of entire states.
Yes, restarting fixed it! Odd, but harmless.
Thanks!
Hmm. I’d be curious to see some screenshots, if you’re ok with sharing. Could send them via DM if you’re not keen on dumping them in a public thread.
Here’s what mine look like for Japan this year:
I find them genuinely very informationally valuable. It tells me where the most visits are (or on Places tab where the most places are), and I can then zoom in to the highest number clusters to get more detail progressively disclosed.
Yeah, I get what you’re saying. I might even agree, at the closer-in zoom levels.
This view, on the other hand, does nothing for me:
Curious. Because that screenshot does something for me. Though perhaps that’s just in the sense that it tells me something about a stranger - providing information that you already know and have full clarity on.
Yeah the more you zoom in the higher the information utility, I think. I’m finding that the full year views, fully zoomed out in initial state, after often “well that’s just meh”.
My first step on switching to year view and paging to a specific year is to swipe the sheet down and zoom in the map to an area I’m curious about. Then the counts start to tell interesting stories.
I wonder whether it’ll be a similar experience for others - that’s two of us already that find the fully zoomed out year view low value.
Though then what would the initial state be instead? It… can’t really be anything other than fully zoomed out. Which is disappointing - if the unavoidable initial state is a low information value state.
I like the fully zoomed-out initial state, in theory! I just find that for me, the massive roll-up number icons obscure more than they evoke. For contrast, a map I made some years ago:
And I have bad news for you; the initial map is even worse as soon as you start crossing hemispheres:
(“Sorry, new users can only put one embedded media item in a post.” 
)
Sheesh. That’s going to turn one post into three. Sorry. 
(cont.)
And I have bad news for you; the initial map is even worse as soon as you start crossing hemispheres:
This is especially bad because that’s the maximum that the map can be zoomed out. And because it’s a full-height map (mostly covered by the UI), the widget thinks it’s displaying most of the world, when it manifestly is not. 
At this point it would be better to start zoomed in on something, anything, where activity has actually occurred – but I know this is not trivial.
(cont.)
For contrast again:
For me, those dots show where things have happened much better than one big number covering the whole of Europe – but I acknowledge that this may just be preference!
Heh. Now try fitting that on an iPhone in portrait mode 
I think that’s where @zzGordon’s Arc Reader can really shine. There’s so much more you can do visually on desktop size screens.
Yeah that’s a known bug (well known to me, and painfully so), with no fix yet. The map is told to zoom so the content falls within the visible viewport, but if the content is too tall Mapbox just gives up on the request, and centres the content as though it’s a full screen view instead.
One thing on my todos to do quite soon is to make it so that in monthly and yearly timeline views the content sheet automatically slides down, giving you the ~full screen view by default. There’s nothing in the content sheet yet for those views anyway.
That wouldn’t fix the Mapbox viewport issue, but would at least make it less painful and in our faces, buying me time to figure out how to work around that bug properly.