Torque 2014

It has been another successful year for CartoDB's temporal mapping Torque library. Even as 2014 begins to wind down the Torque maps still keep coming.

Yesterday AirAsia flight QZ8501 vanished from radar screens over the Java Sea. This AirAsia Indonesia flight QZ8501 map plots the flight path of the plane from Surabaya to Singapore. The map uses the Torque library to animate the flight of the plane from Surabaya to its last known position, when it lost contact with air traffic control at 06.24 local time.


The Torque library has also been used by the to-do list app Wunderlist for their annual productivity report. The World Productivity List uses the library to visualize where and how the application is used throughout the world over the course of one day.

Torque is often used to show a lot of flashing data on a world map. The Wunderlist maps, like many of these maps, hardly reveals any interesting geographical patterns in the underlying data. However I guess the map succeeds in its main task of demonstrating that Wunderlist has lots of users around the world.