A Planning Maplication from the City of Dublin, Ohio

I discovered this application featured on the ArcGIS.com gallery pages the other day, and it's a great app with some very interesting features and capabilities. The application was was created by the city's GIS and planning staff to make community plans more widely available. According to the detailed description of the application:

This maplication includes graphic concepts and design recommendations developed for nine geographic areas as part of the Land Use Plan. Click an area plan title in the legend to zoom to a specific plan on the map. Hover over the icons on the map to see design recommendations and illustrations. Use the 'swipe' or 'spotlight' tools to view aerial imagery behind an area plan. Access the published versions of each area plan by clicking the PDF link in the legend.

What caught my eye in the thumbnail preview on the ArcGIS.com gallery was that the map didn't look like your usual map, and appeared more like a drawing. That was indeed true, as once I opened the app I found georeferenced plan diagrams on top of the aerial imagery basemap. The next thing I noticed was that it offered some very nice tools that let me examine the plans in the context of current geography. This is a really great idea, and a great app that was a snap to use.

A swipe tool enabled me to slice back and forth between the plan and the underlying imagery. The yellow arrow below points to the swipe line, and you can see the high resolution imagery underneath the plan:

A clever spotlight tool, with an adjustable spotlight size, let me peek through the plan to the underlying basemap. The yellow arrow below points to the spotlighted area:

You can enjoying the app yourself by opening it from the Dublin community plan maplications page.