A bigger site map and a way back to the opening view

The map in the «Location» card now has a new command, «Back to the site», which returns the view to exactly where it was when the page opened. It exists for a situation that happens to everyone: you widen the view to work out which area you are in, you pan to follow a road or a watercourse, and at some point you no longer know how to get back to framing the land. Until yesterday the only remedy was reloading the page, with the nuisance of losing everything else you were looking at as well. The new command does not take you to a fixed zoom decided in advance, but to the precise view the map opened with, the one that frames the perimeter of that particular site: for a small piece of land it is a tight zoom, for a very large one it is wider, and in both cases it is the right one. You will find it just below the zoom buttons, in the top-left corner of the map, and the return happens with a smooth movement rather than an abrupt jump, so it is clear where it is taking you. The button is translated into all five languages of the platform, so you read it in yours. You can press it as many times as you like and it keeps bringing you back to the same starting point. It is a small detail, but it changes how the map is used, because exploring the surroundings stops being a one-way trip. You will find it under XNatura → Regeneration → Site → Location.

The «Location» card on a site page shows where the land is on a satellite map, and it is often the first thing you look at when you open a site you do not know yet. Until yesterday that map had a fixed height of a little over two hundred pixels, a measurement chosen back when the card was a narrow column sitting to one side: since it started taking up half the row, on a wide monitor that same height produced a long, squashed slit in which the land was barely visible. The height now derives from the width of the card and keeps a ratio of roughly three to two, with a floor and a ceiling that stop it becoming too short on narrow screens or out of proportion on very large ones. In practice, on a laptop the map goes from a strip to a panel about two thirds as tall as it is wide, and on a big monitor it grows further still. The difference shows most on large or elongated sites, because the perimeter used to end up compressed into a few pixels of height and reading it meant zooming in whether you wanted to or not. We fixed a less obvious but equally annoying defect at the same time: under certain conditions the drawing of the map spilled out of the box that is supposed to contain it and overlapped what sits around it. Box and content now coincide at any window width, and the page no longer produces unwanted horizontal scrolling. You do not have to do anything to get the bigger map: it adapts on its own when you open the page and when you resize the browser window. You will find it under XNatura → Regeneration → Site → Location.

Several controls live together on the map in the «Location» card: the buttons to zoom in and out, the legend, and the button used to embed the map elsewhere. Some of them ended up in the same corner and, instead of sitting side by side, overlapped: the plus and minus zoom buttons were in the bottom-left corner, exactly where the legend is drawn, and stayed hidden underneath it. The result was that in certain situations you could not zoom the map with the buttons at all, and the only alternative was the mouse wheel, which on a laptop trackpad or a touch screen is anything but a given. Zoom has now moved to the top-left corner, which was free, while the legend stays exactly where it has always been. The button that embeds the map was also resting on top of the imagery in the top right, where it covered a portion of the land and competed for the corner with the other controls: it now lives in the header row of the card, next to the satellite source label, separated from the other elements by layout spacing rather than by hand-calculated positions. The map gains back the pixels that button used to cover, and no control hides another any more. What the controls do has not changed: they behave exactly as before, they are simply visible and pressable now. No action is required on your part, and the change affects only this card, not the other maps on the platform. You will find it under XNatura → Regeneration → Site → Location.