[okfn-discuss] [ANN] TimeMapper - Create Elegant TimeMaps from Google Spreadsheets in seconds

Mon Oct 14 23:49:48 UTC 2013

On 14 October 2013 23:34, Rob Myers <rob at robmyers.org> wrote:

> On 14/10/13 02:42 PM, Rufus Pollock wrote:
> > On Monday, 14 October 2013, Gene Shackman wrote:
> >
> >     Looks nice, but why do you have to sign up using a twitter account?
> >     And why google spreadsheets? What if you don't have an account with
> >     either of those? For future applications can you design it so you
> >     don't need twitter or google?
> >
> >
> > Twitter: happy to have another sign in mechanism but want something
> > quick and convenient for most people that involved them already having
> > reserved a unique username. Specifically we wanted to avoid being
> > responsible, at this point, for doing the whole signup process (storing
> > passwords, doing password recovery, handling spam accounts etc)
> >
> > Re google spreadsheets: its the best simple tabular data backend and one
> > that very large number of people use. JSON and straight up CSV could
> > easily be supported but they are more complex and are more complex for
> > non-techhies to use (e.g. can't just be any CSV would need to be one
> > CORS accessible etc).
>
> Spammers can join Twitter... There are registration lifecycle managing
> libraries available. And data can be cleaned before importing by
> interfacing with e.g. Refine.
>

> I understand the tradeoffs, but those are two very closed dependencies
> for an otherwise excellent project in the Open ecosystem.

To be clear the setup has no strong dependency on google spreadsheets - you
can swap for CSV or JSON pretty easily but you will need to put those
online somewhere - there are vague-ish plans to start offering support for
just uploading data directly into the app but for those to become less
vague, someone (who is actually using the app), would need to be asking for
them <https://github.com/okfn/timemapper/issues> ... :-)

Rufus

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