If you’ve ever seen an animated map on the web, or read our technical blogs for the past year, you might be familiar with Torque, CartoDB’s library for animating time-series data on maps. You can already build a range of Torque maps with point data in our Editor GUI: plotting dynamic events, social reactions, traffic patterns, categorical comparisons, and hotspots of activity.
This week, we went further, open sourcing Torque.js, and building documentation for developers to get started customizing Torque code for their projects and contributing to the library at large.
TECHNIQUE IN TORQUE
Torque’s approach to rendering spatiotemporal data relies on methods for spatial aggregation, economic encoding, and tilecube rendering. There are some great tutorials to illustrate how you can invoke Torque in the CartoDB platform.
This week, we’re launching a persistant reference page to showcase all of the resources available for working with Torque.js.
READ THE DOCS
Integrating Torque.js in your code is easy, you can learn more about it here in our docs and on our landing page.
We’ve also updated our CartoCSS docs to include properties specific to
Torque maps.
LEARN FROM SAMPLES
Our standard Torque demo illustrates the functionality in a friendly and filterable sandbox, but we also have an index of example code snippets that show the breadth of options when designing maps with Torque.js, from voronoi hacks, to bubble maps and beyond!
BUILD THE FUTURE OF TORQUE
In the future, we’ll be including animation capability for not just points, but also lines and polygons! We’re updating our docs daily, and answering issue questions where possible. This is a collaborative effort and we totally want our community involved. Creative folks in our community have built Torque projects to plot time-series data globally, pairing Torque with other services, and partnering it with other mapping libraries. We’re excited to see what’s next!
BROWSE THE RESOURCES
Looking for more info, or something specific not linked above? Check out the following links:
LIBRARY:
- Torque.js: https://github.com/CartoDB/torque
- Torque Tiles: https://github.com/CartoDB/torque/blob/master/dist/torque.js
- Non-Torque Tile Generation: https://github.com/CartoDB/torque_cube
DOCS:
- Landing Page: https://cartodb.com/torque
- Torque README: https://github.com/CartoDB/torque#torque
- Torque Spec: https://github.com/CartoDB/tilecubes/blob/master/2.0/spec.md
- CartoCSS Torque Methods: http://docs.cartodb.com/cartodb-editor.html#cartocss-properties-for-torque-style-maps
TUTORIALS:
- Intro to Torque: http://docs.cartodb.com/tutorials/introduction_torque.html
- Torque with Heat: http://docs.cartodb.com/tutorials/heatmap.html
EXAMPLES:
- Torque.js Examples: https://github.com/CartoDB/torque/tree/master/examples
- Torque Demo: http://cartodb.github.io/torque/
It’s been featured in tutorials for journalists, in partnership with other mapping libraries, in Twitter data maps; we’re so proud to make it more open to the world of cartographers and developers.
Check it out, set it up, and happy mapping !