A couple of months ago we finished the Microsoft Local Impact Map, a Silverlight app highlighting all of the progressive and wonderful things Microsoft does around the world. Today we launched a new look at the same data, presented on Microsoft Surface.

Microsoft Local Impact Map: Surface Edition from Stimulant on Vimeo.

Aside from being a cool multi-touch, multi-user, 360-degree application, this one is technically interesting because it shares so much with the Silverlight app. It uses the same data classes and hits the same web services as the RIA, but presents the data in a completely different way.

Whereas the web app is pretty much a single-user experience, we hope that the Surface version allows people to literally sit around the table and share an experience and a discussion about the stories and data in front of them.

It will be installed at Microsoft facilities around the world shortly. Look for it next time you’re on campus!

So much for the latest attempt at keeping a regularly-updated blog. I’ll try to get back on the wagon.

Things have been busy at work and extremely dull otherwise. Since my last real post, we’ve started and finished a little Silverlight thing for MSN. We got some very silly content, very little direction, and very little time, and made something pretty cool out of it. It’s a pretty good example of how the team comes together. Should launch before Christmas.

Now I’m ramping up on a much larger and less silly Silverlight thing, as well as some other Surface experiments.

Last week I attended the “Silverlight Partner Summit” in Redmond, which was fun because I ran into some friends and colleagues, and also because we got a bunch of details on Silverlight 3, which is looking to be pretty exciting. I started using Silverlight because I was being paid to, and that’s changed some with v2, but I think v3 will be the one that really gets me to prefer it over Flash for most projects. I think I won’t be the only one.

After that I went straight to the airport to head to the SF office for the Stimulant holiday party. Nathan took some pictures, but I kept my camera in my pocket as usual. My job was to set up Surface to be party friendly — removing most of the SDK apps and adding our stuff to the launcher, including ToneGrid, Xray (demo video to come, someday), and the photo booth app that Darren made just for the party. Surface was a big hit, as were the Stimulant-green cocktails served throughout the night.

Now I’m back in Seattle, where everyone’s panicking about cold weather and snow, and I’m trying to get my head around the wacky math required to do anything interesting with Deep Zoom.

I had a couple of excellent tech support experiences this week. I had a weird connection issue with Digsby that was easy for me to reproduce, but tough to explain. I sent a bug report through their tool and expected it to vanish into a bug tracker somewhere, but I actually got a helpful response from someone there and managed to sort out a workaround. Digsby is the best.

I also managed to trigger a really weird edge case in the Surface SDK’s ScatterView control. The issue was difficult to describe, but I did my best in a post to the Surface Community site. Surprisingly, someone got back to me and was eager to help. I worked up a simple test case and got it looked at by people who work on the SDK. Awesome.

Aside from triggering weird bugs, this week I’ve been working on one of the controls that will be in a future version of the Surface SDK. I’m just doing pretty production-level stuff, porting the design to sensible XAML code, but it’s cool to actually contribute to the source code of the product.

The image above is a photo of something I’ve been working on for the past few weeks in my spare cycles. More to come on that soon. (Art by Michael Paulus.)

The weekend’s been kind of blah, but the highlight was last night’s screening of Let the Right One In. If you like vampires, go see it. I didn’t know anything about it going in, and I think that might be the best way. Don’t watch the trailer online; I did just now for the first time and I think it sort of ruins it.

Obvious idea: Theaters should offer to sell you the DVD of the movie as you leave the theater. Just swipe your credit card on the way out and it’ll get shipped to your billing address whenever it’s released.

I’ve been struggling to find motivation to do things, so it’s been a pretty unproductive week. I kind of half-heartedly worked on the physics engine some, followed all the PDC announcements pretty obsessively, and tried to teach myself a few things. On Friday I pulled up though and made a proof-of-concept which shows how to use a mobile device as a secondary display for Surface. Hopefully I’ll get to refine that a bit more this coming week.

I’m not much of a Halloween person, but the weekend was alright. Friday was drinking too much with friends, Saturday was sleeping a lot to recover from Friday, and Sunday was a great brunch, a trip to the gym, and now some quality coffee shop time.