I’m actively looking for a better map tile provider here.
You’re getting New Orleans because it’s truly selecting from ~20 random US airports.
Stoked that you like the app!
> I’m actively looking for a better map tile provider here.
What about OSM Carto?[0] It's free and open-source.
I’ve been using them through their free api, and I got rate limited. So I’ll maybe self-host, or find a paid provider with better tiles
interesting, seems to be random. I've gotten Portland which was also not too busy but nevertheless enough to understand the beauty of it.
It’s a random assortment of ~20 US cities. I’m happy to add another one into the mix if you’d like.
If there’s an airport you want to default to, search for it and save the URL
This thing is dangerous. It's going to nerd snipe me into a new hobby.
It looks completely accurate. I could see the medivac helicopters taking off, and it matched 1:1.
I missed a biplane flying over the city. And some other low-flying planes circling mysteriously.
If I had a telephoto lens and a way to alert myself of large planes flying low (happens frequently), C-130s, F-22s, etc. I think I'd waste way too much time.
I need to avoid looking into this more.
No, lean in! Haha
I’m looking into adding better data providers so there are fewer missing planes.
Two asks -
(1) you should default to a busy airport, eg. Atlanta, which is the busiest in the world. They have an order of magnitude more flights landing and departing. It seems random, but I keep getting New Orleans which is 10-20x less busy than Atlanta. ATL, SFO, LAX, ... That said, the topographically diverse places like Anchorage are nice too, and the height maps on the textures are fantastic.
(2) Higher resolution satellite titles would be awesome. I have a high density flight path directly overhead and I'd love to see where I live on the map and know which way to look in real time, but the textures are about 10x too grainy to make out my street / neighborhood. Maybe you can download some high resolution tiles for free that won't be a big performance hit?