When you consider heat maps, you may literally think of an application that is used to visualize heat distribution across the planet, which is definitely an appropriate use case. You can, however, adapt the heat map effect to convey other properties, such as the relative quantity of any data type within areas. The more intense the 'heat', the more dense the information underneath.
For example, imagine a map that reflects how many users are currently online, playing your favorite game. We can specify locations with a weight
attribute, which is indicative of the amount of players online for that geographic location. This is the scenario we'll go with for this recipe and can be seen in the following screenshot:
The source code can be found in ch03/ch03-heat-map
.
