We’ve got a big round of updates to release today, all made possible thanks to a great new member of our team, Zach Wener-Fligner. Zach has been working to make DataPress easier to use for geo data.
You can download the new release on our Google Code page.
We think this release is going to be a huge usability improvement for DataPress. Please let us know if you have any thoughts, feedback, or bug reports!
Automatic Geocoding
You’ll never have to look up latitudes and longitudes again! DataPress can now automatically geocode addresses in your data in the background. We utilize the Google geo-coder in the background so approximate addresses will resolve too. Here are examples of values that will “just work”:
- 32 Vassar Street, Cambridge MA 02139
- Massachusetts
- 02139
- Mexico
Here’s how it works:
- Create a map visualization as you normally would
- When selecting your Location Field, pick a property in your data that contains an address and then tell DataPress that this is an “Address” field.
- When you save your Exhibit, DataPress will Geocode all of the data in the background and cache the results in its database.
That’s it! When you load your map, everything should just work. We double-check the freshness of the geocoding cache every time a user loads your map, which means if the data changes (you’ve added a new address, for instance) we will automatically add its lat,lng into the cache the first time someone tries to view it.
Reordering Views
One of the problems in past DataPress versions was that it was difficult to re-order views. We’ve added drag and drop functionality so that you can drag your list of views into the order in which you’d like to see them.
Auto-Detecting Data Types
DataPress currently supports Google Spreadsheets and “Exhibit-Style” JSON files. DataPress now auto-detects these two data types, so we’ve removed the requirement that users tell us what kind of data they are linking to. We may add this back in the future if we add new data types. Let us know what you think.
Author: Ted
About Contributor(Cyberworldukltd): He has torture tested cell phones and smartphones for industry leaders like CNET and InformationWeek. He remembers when 4G was just a screen on PowerPoint presentations and is fascinated with the amount of innovation out there. Marin has spent a lot of time with BlackBerry and Android but he finally broke down a bought an iPhone 4S to see what all the hype’s about. He also has too many tablets.
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