This is another big release on the tail of v2.14.0. A number of you have already got a preview of our heat maps capabilities and have asked (quite impatiently 😉) when the official API would ship. The answer is today ! And it's not coming alone, but alongside our new and shiny color scales, to help you bring best practices from color theory into your data visualizations.

🎉 New features

• We've added the highly awaited heat map data layer API. You can now render heat maps in just a few lines of code. The grid is automatically generated and configurable. It is also masked automatically by your space's footprint, but you can provide a custom polygon mask to use instead. Interpolation is done out of the box, with a smart confidence range computed based on the relative location of your data points, but you can also set the confidence range that makes most sense to your use-case. Heat maps come in a few configuration styles: spheres, grid, and bar-chart, with potentially more to come based on users feedback. Check out the docs for the API reference and a live demo with code, or play around with the options without code in our timeheat demo.

• The point data layer is getting better, with shapes! You can now choose which shape you want each point to be rendered as. We're starting with spheres (the historically single option), and cubes of any size. More shapes will be added based on demand. Details in the docs.

• We've added a Color utility class to smplr.js, which lets you easily create gorgeous looking color scales that are optimized for spatial data visualization. It also provides a legend component for react or vanilla javascript, and utility methods to convert css colors into the approximate color you visually see in a Smplrspace viewer when you use them. More details in the docs. Tip: that "A little context" section is a great read. Or go play with it in our colors mini-site.

💅 Improvements

• We've added a hello world example to the doc in which smplr.js is loaded from CDN.