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.
Easier Embedding
One of the key features of Timetric is that we let you embed our data into your own site. We want to be the place to go when you’re looking for data to view and analyze, but we reckon that when it comes to layering interpretation over the top, the best place for that is on your own blog or website.
To make this easier, we’ve put a big ‘Share this series‘ button on the pages of all public series, which when clicked will reveal:
The immediate benefits are that you now have access to the code which will give you a sparkline (a common request!), and that either bit of code can be quickly copied to your clipboard using the little button at the side (thanks to Tom Preston-Werner’s Clippy). We don’t plan to stop here though — look out for more advanced features over the coming months!
For some high-profile examples of our graphs in the wild, check out the fascinating Guardian Data Blog:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2009/mar/01/government-borrowing-economy1
http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2009/mar/02/unemployment-and-employment-statistics-economics
New search and new graphs!
We’ve just added a couple of new features to Timetric which we think you’ll find useful. Up until now, it’s been a bit tricky to get a quick overview of the data in an area; you’ve needed to save all the series to your dashboard individually before you could plot them against each other – which meant you had to be logged in! – and, on top of that, the different sorts of search we had (by tag and by free-text) weren’t as well integrated as they could have been.
Well, we’ve changed all that.
Take employment data as an example:
Search results for "Employment" on Timetric
Two big changes here – firstly, there are sparklines, so you can get a feel for all the data in front of you immediately; secondly, you now get all the relevant tags at the top of the page on every search result, so you can immediately start filtering through the search results to find what you’re interested in. Let’s say that’s the utilities sector.
The stars on the right here, if you’re logged in, immediately save series to your dashboard; they’re gold for each series you’re already watching. But the bigger change is on the left; if you check the series you’re interested in…
Selecting series in Timetric search results
and then hit “Overlay” or “Versus”, which you’ll find at the start and end of the search results page:
you can start making plots straight from search results.
Transportation employment's much more seasonal in Alaska than in Alabama.
You can even get the embed code to put a graph into your blog straight from there:
And that gives us a chance to mention another new feature which a few of you’ve been asking for – if you hover your mouse over the points in this graph, you’ll see each measurement in the scatter plot labelled with the time it comes from.
The big changes to graphing here are actually under the covers, though: after this, we’ll be able to make some really exciting improvements in the near future.
Improved Embedding
Amongst the changes we made to Timetric at the start of this week were some improvements to our embeddable plots. Infosthetics made a couple of requests for features that we had planned, but didn’t have time to implement before our public beta.
We aim to please, so now we display the title of the series on the vertical axis, and there’s a handy link back to the series on timetric.com.
The only problem is that getting this to work required a couple of changes to the embed codes you paste into your blog. New embeds will get this automatically, but if you’ve got any existing graphs embedded in your site, you’ll need to re-embed them using the new code to see these changes. We’ll continue to support the old style indefinitely, so don’t worry if you don’t feel like updating!
Timetric’s New Graphing Tool
As the observant amongst you may have noticed from the last post, we have a new graphing tool on Timetric.
When we launched our private beta, we needed a graphing package quick-smart, so we bought-in a third-party solution to tide us over until we could find time to build our own.
Over the last month or so, we’ve been building a replacement from scratch, the results of which look a little something like:
Average surface temperature anomaly: Global (before smoothing)
For this initial release, the big changes are under the hood. We can now handle significantly larger data sets, up more than 20-fold from around 5000 points to over 100,000! (For the more technically-minded, this is largely due to the switch from interpreted Actionscript 2, to bytecode-compiled Actionscript 3.) We were also able to add a fun new feature: full-screen mode. While sounding rather frivolous, it’s actually surprising useful, especially when there are a lot of data points. To find it, right/ctrl-click on the graph.
Our overlay plots have also seen some attention. The biggest complaint we had for our old version was that when you overlaid series which varied on very different scales, you couldn’t really make anything out. Our new version supports multiple y-axes to make things better. Try click the check-box below!
ECB exchange rates: Euro vs. GBP and ECB exchange rates: Euro vs. USD and ECB exchange rates: Euro vs. JPY
As always, if you have any comments or suggestions, please get in touch!