API improvements
As Dan alluded to yesterday, this week we made a new API release.
Previously our API was basically only let you add and retrieve data. This has been useful to a whole lot of people, but there’s much more that you can do with Timetric.
The new release involves several features. There’s a bit of improvement to existing functionality to make life a bit easier when uploading data; but more excitingly, we’ve opened up access to even more of the capabilities of the timetric platform.
Search endpoints
When building applications on top of Timetric, one of things we’ve been asked for is the ability to retrieve lists of relevant data. This might simply be to get hold of all of your own series, or it might be a list of tagged series, or it might be a complex search query.
For all of these, we’ve exposed search endpoints that let you do powerful queries across our data. You can search through the full text of our titles and descriptions, over tags, and by user. This means you can build much more useful interactive interfaces on top of Timetric. In fact, these are exactly the same endpoints that timetric.com uses internally when you browse our data.
Calculated series
Through the timetric.com website, you’ve always had the ability to build model calculations, and to filter series. We’ve now exposed this at the API level as well, so you can build these models and filters programmatically.
Cross-domain requests
If you’re a web developer, you’ll be all too familiar with the headaches of restrictions on cross-domain requests. In many cases, there are perfectly good security-related reasons for them, but these restrictions make writing some web applications much harder than it ought to be.
Fortunately, the newest generation of browsers (Firefox 3.5, IE8, and Safari 4) let you make secure cross-domain requests directly — so long as the server supports it (see https://developer.mozilla.org/en/HTTP_access_control). Since this is such a useful feature — for us as much as anyone else – we’ve enabled it so you can use it too, and build much more exciting Timetric mashups in modern browsers.
Easier uploading
And finally, we had feedback from several people about ways in which we could make pushing data into the platform through the API a bit easier. The details are probably uninteresting unless you like constructing HTTP messages yourself (which I do, but it’s not everyone’s cup of tea!) so I’ll simply point you at the new documentation. In short, you can POST data directly, rather than having to multipart-encode it.
So …
If you’re a developer, get out there and play! We’re always happy to get any feedback – positive or negative!
New Dashboard
Yesterday we rolled out an exciting update to the Dashboard, which now looks something like this:
More important than the lick of paint, though, is all the new stuff you can do with it! Though it might sound boring, the Dashboard is all about lists. The old Dashboard had only one — a list of series you’ve ’starred’. We’ve added two others: ”My Series” for series you’ve created yourself and “Recently Viewed” which shows you the last few series you’ve looked at. Soon we’ll let you create your own custom lists too.
Now that you have all those series at your fingertips, you’ll want to compare and analyze them, right? Just select the ones you’re interested in, and click ‘Build’, ‘Overlay’ or ‘Versus’ at the top!
Talking about building… If you’re a developer, you can now build models through our API as well — Toby’ll be blogging about that very soon.
Timetric’s New Logo
It’s been a busy month in Timetric Towers, so this post is waaay overdue, but I really want to highlight the excellent new logos designed for us by Kate Abbass (@kateabbass).
