The map and the day view

Checking whether your area is covered

The map opens on coverage, because that is the first question anybody asks and the map is the only thing that answers it. Regions we cover are drawn as shapes; everywhere else is blank.

Rather than hunting for one, use the box at the top: type a city, address or ZIP, or press the locate button to use your device's position. Three answers are possible.

Covered: Names the region, and then lists what it actually carries: the signals that are live there, and separately any that are supported but have not been seen yet. That distinction is on the coverage answer on purpose, so you find it out before building a watcher on a signal we do not yet have rather than after a fortnight of silence.
Not covered yet: Names the nearest region we do cover and how far away it is. Coverage follows county lines, so a miss can be a couple of streets wide and "not covered" on its own would read as "not covered anywhere near you".
Several regions have a place by that name: Wilmington is the principal place of two different counties in two different states. Rather than guessing, we ask which one you meant.

Under the map, regions opened in the last few weeks are listed. The footprint grows, so a "no" today is worth re-checking.

Opening a region

Click a region on the map, or use the dropdown at the top right, which is grouped by state and is the keyboard path. Either one switches the page from coverage to that region's activity.

The region is in the URL, so the view is a link and the browser's Back button returns to the coverage overview.

Paging day by day

Inside a region you get one instrument, and it is the same one a watcher uses.

A 30-day histogram, stacked and coloured by signal. Click a bar to jump to that day. The window scrolls as you page, so you can keep going back past its edge.
A day stepper with the date in the middle. Clicking the date opens a picker. Back goes as far as the region has events; forward stops at today.
A freshness line saying how many events that day carried and how recently the newest one landed.
The map and the feed for that day, side by side. A row leads with the address, because the place is what you act on; the signal is on the second line.

Days are UTC days, everywhere in the product, which is what keeps the map, the watcher and the digest all describing the same twenty-four hours.

The signal filter

The chips under the histogram filter what is on screen, instantly, without fetching anything: the day is already loaded, so it behaves like a lens rather than a query.

Three rules, the same on every surface that shows chips:

Only signals that occur here get a chip. A region that publishes permits and violations shows two chips, not thirteen with eleven permanent zeros.
Everything present starts on, which is the unfiltered state without needing a separate "all" button.
The last chip on cannot be switched off, so you can never end up looking at an empty screen with no obvious way back.

Which chips exist is decided by the whole 30-day window rather than by the day on screen. A signal with nothing today but activity last week keeps its chip, or paging back to the day it fired would be impossible: the control you needed would not be there to press.

Opening something from the map

Every dot on the day map is a record, coloured by signal. Clicking one, or clicking a feed row, opens that record's page, with a link up to the property it happened at.

The map stays where it is while you do that: it does not re-frame around each day's points, because a region does not move, and returning from a record puts you back on exactly the day and filter you left.

The region, the day and the active chips are all in the URL. So "Bexar County, last Tuesday, demolitions only" is a link you can paste into a message, and it opens for a colleague exactly as it looked for you. They will need their own account, and it must be one with an active plan.

What browsing costs

Nothing. Every region we cover is browsable day by day on every plan, as far back as we hold events. The metered act is activating a property, which is a different thing: assembling everything on record at one address.

So the sensible way to use the map is to browse freely, and spend an activation when a specific place is worth the whole picture.

If the map does not draw

The map needs to load a mapping SDK from Apple. A corporate proxy, a strict content blocker or an offline moment can stop it, and then the page shows its controls with nothing underneath.

Everything the map does has a second path. The region dropdown selects a region without it, the coverage box answers by name, and the day view, chips and feed all work as normal. If the map is persistently blank on a normal connection, tell us which browser and extensions you are running.