We still need to polish up the user interface, and it performs slower than we'd like, but tonight we were able to throw together a Twitter search visualization using Atlas. Try it out...

Search

Cindi Trainor of Citegeist.com has used Yahoo Pipes and Atlas to visualize her personal Twitterverse. It's a map that shows the location of all the folks she follows on Twitter.

Here's Cindi's Twitterverse. Eclecticlibrarian has posted a screenshot of hers on Flickr.

Want to see your own Twitterverse? Put your Twitter username in the form below.

Twitter username
Go

An updated version of the NPR Station Finder map is now live.

Here's a link to a post we made back in April 2007 detailing our initial involvement with this project.

There are a variety of ongoing initiatives across the web designed to help phase out IE6.

• 37signals has phased out support for IE6
• DearIE6 allows Twitter users to post goodbye messages directed at the aged browser
• End6.org, StopIE6.com and StopIE6.org provide scripts that developers can use to alert their users that it's time to upgrade

Despite all these efforts, IE6 continues to plague the web and still accounts for 12% of traffic on Atlas.  When we employeed the StopIE6.org script on Atlas we received a great deal of email.  We instructed many of these users to upgrade to IE7, but a good portion have corporate policies that don't allow this upgrade path.  Presumably these folks are stuck with internal web applications that only work in IE6.

Based on feedback from IE6 users we've removed the StopIE6.org script. We've done a little bit of work to ensure the page loads for IE6 users.  Most of the features work in IE6 but the majority of them don't look as nice as they do in IE7, Firefox 3, Safari 3, or Google Chrome.

If you're running Windows Vista under Boot Camp on the brand new MacBook Pro you're crazy like a fox.  We're doing the same thing and it's frustrating as hell.

If you've noticed the sound crackle every 30 seconds you can disable the WLAN Autoconfig service with these instructions. Make sure you follow the "command line method" so you can continue you use your current wireless connection.  Next time you need to connect to a wireless network you'll have to enable this service.  What a hack!  We've decided to live with the sound issue for now.

The trackpad is completely unusable.  A few tips that help.

• Right click is three-finger-click.
• Double click is two-finger click.
• There's a "tap to click" option in the boot camp control panel (not under Windows Vista's mouse control panel)

We released a new feature in Atlas tonight. You can now search for YouTube videos by location and keyword using our map.

If you're asking yourself, "wait, didn't you have this already?" then you're a pretty keen observer.  Back in August we rolled out an Atlas feature that displayed the most recently geotagged YouTube movies.  This new hotness allows you to search for the videos you want from the location you specify.

It's also pretty neat to simply see all the videos from your area by leaving the optional search field empty.

Try it out @ http://atlas.freshlogicstudios.com/?Videos

It's been a while since we've talked about Fresh Logic Studios - Scripts (our JavaScript framework designed for .NET gurus).

Along with JsUnit tests, which helped us uncover and fix a variety of bugs, here's a list of what's new:

• The new Media.SoundPlayer class works pretty much like its .NET counterpart. We've tried to code for many browser/OS combinations (bgsound in IE, Quicktime on Mac, etc).
• The new Convert class contains static methods to handle converting to/from base 64 strings.
• The new StringBuilder class shares a similar syntax to its .NET counterpart. Turns out array based JavaScript StringBuilders are slightly slower than plain string concatenation in the more modern browsers with highly tuned JavaScript engines (like Google Chrome).  StringBuilder might work out better in IE6 though :)
• We know array based JavaScript StringBuilders are sometimes slower than string concatenation because we profiled it with our Diagnostics.Stopwatch class. If you've never used the .NET Stopwatch class you should give it a look. It's not exactly rocket-science, but it's handy.
• New String.Join method.
• New DateTime.DaysInMonth and DateTime.IsLeapYear methods.
• New Drawing.Point methods including Add, Subtract, ToString
• New Drawing.Size methods including Add, Subtract, ToString

What portion of the .NET Framework should we implement in JavaScript next? Let us know.

Turns out, you've been able to geocode videos when you upload them to YouTube for some time now.

We thought it would be a perfect feature to add into Atlas.  You can find YouTube alongside a bunch of other goodies under the "feeds" menu (or access it directly though http://atlas.freshlogicstudios.com/?YouTube) and you can enjoy the web's best videos right inside of Atlas... like this little dog from Texas:

We want to hear what you have to say about making Fresh Logic Studios' products more useful.

We've setup feedback.freshlogicstudios.com to capture your thoughts and allow our users to vote on their favorite ideas. We've added a few ideas of our own to get the ball rolling, but we're interested in what consensus will emerge from the community.

After after all those emails you've sent about adding Safari support for Atlas, or increasing the amount of storage on Folders, or making our products available for free here's your chance to decide as a community what we should tackle next.

So, what are you waiting for? Head over to http://feedback.freshlogicstudios.com/ and let us have it!

A while back we made a change to Atlas that added shaded contours to our road maps.

Last night we rolled out a change to the Atlas toolbox that allows you to easily turn this feature on or off.

The new toolbox contains a caret menu that allows you to select either the traditional flat style road map, or the road map with shaded contours.  What's the difference?  Take a look at these maps of the Grand Canyon for a comparison.

Flat:

Shaded:

Try out the new changes @ http://atlas.freshlogicstudios.com