Appraise Release, Friday 11 October 2024

We've just pushed a new version of our development appraisals tool, Appraise.

The focus of this release was small tweaks and simplifications after the launch: now people who aren't us are using it, we're learning what works, and what doesn't.

New Features

No new features in this release.

Enhancements

• Some content tweaks, including renaming 'AONBs' to 'National Landscapes' and fixing an ambiguity with brownfield land.
• Titles are rendered in descending order of size, which means if you have an overlap you can always select the smaller title.
• We've removed the "What development are you interested in?" page entirely – it wasn't being used, and now the form is quicker to fill in.
• Substations have been moved into their own 'Infrastructure' section
• The distinction between 'ALC grades' and 'Provisional ALC grades' isn't that meaningful, so we've merged them into one
• Ditto 'World Heritage Sites' and 'World Heritage Sites (Buffer Zones)'
• Selecting a search result now changes the zoom to an appropriate level

Bug Fixes

• Some visual fixes to the result page graphs
• Flood zone overlap is now calculated relative to the site's 27700 projection, not the standard mercator projection, which was causing some inaccuracies.
• The map no longer tilts when you zoom in
• Some appraisals were generating with errors, which was causing an infinite refresh loop. This has been fixed.
• Postcodes were always displaying as 'Unknown' - now we see them, in all their glory