My Take on Neatline

To be completely honest, I can’t say that I am a big Neatline fan. I think that it has a lot of potential and the idea is really good, but I couldn’t help but to feel that the execution seemed to be somewhat lacking. Maybe it was just me, but I found that the lack of usability of Neatline made it so slow to create and to read that it really took away from the whole experience. For example, when zooming in and out on the map everything seemed to break. The map would turn blank and glitch around and any dots you made seem to shoot around randomly before relocating to the correct space. The inability to type in addresses is also a little frustrating but it isn’t too hard to find them on google earth and then just find that location in Neatline. The process of adding in new points felt tedious also as there are so many different options and it is not super clear or easy to understand what they all do. Finally, the fact that each exhibit you make isn’t privately yours but rather just added to a running list of exhibits that you need to sort through because you can’t even search for your own.

For all of the criticism that I have for Neatline I do think that it is a really good idea. The ability to visualize anything using both geography and a timeline could certainly be useful, and the fact that you can add a title, images, text, etc… to each spot you create makes Neatline very versatile and able to convey a lot of information.

In the future I know I will have to use Neatline, so whether I like the tool or not, I need to get used to it. I won’t, however, be using it for my research project this time as what I am researching does not fit well into a timeline or geographical points.