We released a bunch of updates to PythonAnywhere today :-) Short version: we’ve made some improvements to the iPad and Android experience, applied fixes to our in-browser console, added a bunch of new pre-installed packages, done a big database upgrade that should make unplanned outages rarer and shorter, and made changes required by EU VAT legislation (EU customers will soon be charged their local VAT rate instead of UK VAT).
Here are the details:
iPad and Android¶
- The syntax-highlighting in-browser editor that we use, Ace, now supports the iPad and Android devices, so we’ve upgraded it and changed the mobile version of our site to use it instead of the rather ugly textarea we used to use.
- We’ve also re-introduced the “Save and Run” button on the iPad.
- Combined with the console upgrade we did earlier on this month, our mobile support should now be pretty solid on iPads, iPhones, and new Android (Lollipop) devices. Let us know if you encounter any problems!
User interface¶
- Some fixes to our in-browser consoles: fixed problems with zooming in (the bottom line could be cut off if your browser zoom wasn’t set to 100%) and with the control key being stuck down if you switched tabs while it was pressed.
- A tiny change, but one that (we hope) might nudge people in a good direction: we now list Python 3 before Python 2 in our list of links for starting consoles and for starting web apps :-)
New packages¶
We’ve added loads of new packages to our “batteries included” list:
- A quantitative finance library, Quandl (Python 2.7, 3.3 and 3.4)
- A backtester for financial algorithms, zipline (Python 2.7 only)
- A Power Spectral Densities estimation package, spectrum (2.7 only)
- The very cool remix module from Echo Nest: make amazing things from music! (2.7 only)
- More musical stuff: pyspotify. (2.7 only)
- Support for the netCDF data format (2.7, 3.3 and 3.4)
- Image tools: imagemagick and aggdraw (2.7, 3.3 and 3.4)
- Charting: pychart (2.7 only)
- For Django devs: django-bootstrap-form (2.7, 3.3 and 3.4)
- For Flask devs: flask-admin (2.7, 3.3 and 3.4)
- For web devs who prefer offbeat frameworks: falcon and wheezy.web (2.7, 3.3 and 3.4)
- A little ORM: peewee (2.7, 3.3 and 3.4)
- For biologists: simplehmmer (2.7 only)
- For statistics: Augustus. (2.7 only)
- For thermodynamicists (?): CoolProp (2.7, 3.3 and 3.4)
- Read barcodes from images or video: zbar (2.7 only)
- Sending texts: we’ve upgraded the Python 2.7 twilio package so that it works from free accounts, and also added it for Python 3.3 and 3.4.
- Locating people by IP address: pygeoip (2.7, 3.3 and 3.4)
- We previously had the rpy2 package installed but there was a bug that stopped you from importing
rpy2.robjects. That’s fixed.
Additionally, for people who like alternative shells to the ubiquitous bash, we’ve added fish.
Reliability improvement¶
We’ve upgraded one of our underlying infrastructural databases to SSD storage. We’ve had a couple of outages recently caused by problems with this database, which were made much worse by the fact that it took a long time to start up after a failover. Moving it to SSD moved it to new hardware (which we think will make it less likely to fail) and will also mean that if it does fail, it should recover much faster.
EU VAT changes¶
For customers outside the EU, this won’t change anything. But for non-business customers inside the EU, starting 1 January 2015, we’ll be charging you VAT at the rate for your country, instead of using the UK VAT rate of 20%. This is the result of some (we think rather badly-thought-through) new EU legislation. We’ll write an extended post about this sometime soon. [Update: here it is.]