New UI Design

I've redesigned the UI for the main map page. Please try it out:

http://travellermap.com/new.html

I've tested in Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Internet Explorer 8/9/10, and on iPhone and iPad - yes, you now have full UI control on touch-based devices.

Please let me know if you have any issues with the page. If you notice any glitches, it'd be nice if you check with the "classic" page as well to see if you've discovered a long-standing bug or something new with the UI.

Let's shake those bugs out!

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Client Code Update

I've just pushed a set of updates to the client files - the HTML, JavaScript, and CSS that makes up the pages. This affects the main page, the iframe page, and the touch page. These now all share common logic which will make updates easier. The visible changes are:

• Intermediate levels are used when zooming in with the mouse wheel. This may mean that the "Scale" field in the control panel will go blank, but if you're using the wheel you probably aren't using the drop-down.
• When zooming, the previous image tiles are used until the new tiles load. Combined with the previous, this means zooming is much smoother. 
• The credits display at the bottom of the page (which shows credits, sector data, world data, and one-click generators for LBBs and Posters) now [EDIT: Based on feedback in the comments]  tracks your mouse hover coordinates updates on click/doubleclick/drag rather than just what's centered on the page.
• When you zoom by double-clicking or using the wheel the mouse position is retained, so you can "zoom in" on something that isn't centered.
• Added Facebook and Twitter buttons next to the Google Plus buttons.
• The "you are here" and overlay URL parameters from the iframe API can be used on the main map page. 
• Tweaked the [-] and [+] buttons in the control panel to be the same size. Yay for −

Note: I only tested as far back as IE8. According to analytics, I have a small number of IE7 users. If they report problems I may be able to fix it, but only if they complain. My testing on browsers other than IE,  Chrome and Safari (iOS) has been limited, but Firefox and Opera are usually pretty well behaved.

As always, let me know what I broke and I'll try and fix it quickly.

EDIT: Remember to mention which browser+version and which operating system+version you're using, too.

...

In other news - no progress on the outages. I've found and fixed a couple of bugs with cached state handling but I still see the service going down when usage is high. I have monitoring set up now so that as I make changes I can have a higher confidence that they haven't made things worse.

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PNG and DOM

Two hopefully invisible changes today, but scream if anything breaks:

• I've changed the map to generating PNGs by default instead of GIFs. This is to work around a bug in embedded WebKit (seen in the Second Life Viewer 2.0 Beta) where it may not display GIFs correctly.
• I've rewritten the event handling code for the map to more correctly manage DOM events, in both the W3C and IE models. This is to try and make dragging work correctly in the IE9 Platform Preview (I'll test tomorrow), clean up the code (this was my first interactive web site!), and as a side effect it fixes mouse wheel support in Chrome.

I've tested in IE8, Safari (Win), Firefox 3.6 (Win), Chrome 4 (Win), and Opera 10 (Win). Looks good, but I'm nervous and ready to roll back if anyone sees any issues.

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