Mapping

I remember interviewing with the Apple Maps team years ago. That group had an interesting distinction: various products / projects within Apple needed Maps integration, but those individual teams lacked the necessary expertise, resulting in the Maps team having one-or-more of its members assigned to assist. While the Apple Watch product was still top secret, that team, internally, tried to implement turn-by-turn directions, failed, and then looped in the Maps team get it done.

I find myself, once again, rendering a map from scratch. It always starts out fun-and-easy, and then next thing you know I'm reading about the Visvalingam-Whyatt variant of the Coverage Simplification algorithm. I could probably import a library and call some .nowConvergeSimplifyThesePolygonsPlease() function, but I'll instead implement it "clean room" style.

Basically, when I'm panning around the map, the frame rate sucks. If I simplify all of the polygons (for the various states and countries), the frame rate goes way up. I don't need a perfect depiction of each political boundary; just something that more-or-less looks right AND that lines up with its neighboring polygons. And that's the rub.

That should be a nice, clean line between two states. However, because each state is a separate polygon, my very naive simplification algorithm tends to cause adjacent polygons to cease bordering each other perfectly.

I may let AI take a stab at the solution, to see how it performs. I had a computational geometry book in storage that I wish was here in my office.