Time slider

Play and scrub the whole map through time. One shared control at the bottom of the map drives every participating layer - points appear and disappear as their timestamps enter and leave the current window - and, when live weather is enabled, the same slider drives the weather's forecast time.

Enabling it

  1. Open Map controls from the ribbon and switch on Time slider.
  2. For each data layer that should follow the slider, open the layer's edit pane and set its Time column - the column holding each row's timestamp (ISO text, date, or epoch seconds/milliseconds all work). An optional End time column turns rows into intervals that stay visible while the window overlaps them.

The slider's range is worked out automatically from the participating layers' data. With no timed layers at all, the slider runs from now to +48 hours and drives the live-weather forecast instead.

Window modes

  • Current step only - show the rows whose time falls in the current step (the default).
  • Cumulative - show everything up to the current time (good for build-up stories).
  • Sliding window - show a fixed-length window (set the length in hours), good for rolling activity.

Playback

Press play to animate; pick a speed from the dropdown (1x plays the whole range in about 30 seconds). The keyboard works too: space plays and pauses, the arrow keys step, Home and End jump to the range ends. Times are shown in your local time zone, with UTC in the tooltip.

The slider appears in the published viewer and embeds as well - published maps play through time exactly like the editor.

KML files with TimeStamp tags carry their timestamps into the shapes layer automatically (the column is called timestamp after import).

Live weather

When the slider's position is ahead of now, any live-weather surface on the map (World Effects weather, weather and wind layers) follows it as the forecast valid time, in 6-hour steps out to +48 hours. Scrubbing forward answers "what is the forecast for tomorrow lunchtime" in one gesture.

Notes: the slider filters natively rendered layers (icons, circles, heatmaps, geometry, shapes). Clustered icons and 3D column layers do not time-filter yet. Vehicle-tracking layers keep their own playback clock.