Via VirtualEarth has just listed ShowTimeMaps.com in their Gallery!  Hopefully, this will improve our visibility and get us to the point where we can go national that much sooner!  Via VirtualEarth is a great resource for anyone wanting to learn how to use the VirtualEarth API.

You can now click on a linked movie time to purchase tickets!  That means that you can now purchase tickets for over 50 theaters in LA via www.showtimemaps.com.  Unfortunately, our ticketing partner currently only provides online ticketing for 2 Austin theaters, but show times are still available for the other Austin theaters. 

We will be adding new features to the site over the next couple of weeks.  How far we go with the new features will be determined by how much interest the site generates, so pass the site along to your friends, and let's build a buzz!

Help us go national by making www.showtimemaps.com your destination for finding theaters, show times, and tickets fast!  Want to help spread the word?  Check out these helpful hints!

Now you can.  The panels on the page now collapse and expand when clicking on the heading.  They used to do this when we were using Virtual Earth's panel implementation, but then we switched to the transparent PNG backgrounds for the sake of a better look and feel, and we finally got around to adding back this functionality.  We hope you like it.

Here's a list of some of the latest tweaks to the site.  Some are in the behavior, some are in the code.

• Fixed a bug in the movie list that was loading it once for every movie (oops).  Should be faster and smoother now.
• If you select a movie in the movie list, and then adjust your search area, you used to have to reselect the movie to see the info.  Now, if that movie is still available in your new area, it will automatically be reselected once the new movie list loads.
• Instead of telling user's outside of LA and Austin to "come back soon", they now have a link to a page where they can invite us to offer the service in their area.
• Added an optional email field to the feedback page, so that we can respond back directly to the submitter.
• Added a link to a verrrry basic "Advertise with us" page.  Don't worry, advertising will not take over this site, the way it has with so many other movie time sites.  We have some cool ideas that will provide some good value to both the advertiser and the user without sacrificing the usabilty of the site.
• Added google adsense ads to the page.  That will likely be temporary.
• Pulled out all Virtual Earth-specific code from the main js file.  Wrapped the Virtual Earth api in my own wrapper class, to make it easy to support other map apis.
• Moved Virtual Earth js and css references into the VE-specific file, so that only one file has to be included to select the map api.

As of today, the movie times for Los Angeles and Austin will be updated daily and include 7 days worth of showtimes!  Ability to buy tix should be available early next week!  If you live in Los Angeles or Austin, it's time to start telling you friends that there's only one place to check movie show times:  www.showtimemaps.com.

We've removed the footer blue bar completely, and we've swapped the navigation links and the search bar.  This makes a better use of space, and should provide for a better user experience.  We also got the Microsoft^© Virtual Earth^TM logo appearing in the bottom left-hand corner.  You can also submit feedback about the site, by clicking on the Help link at the top-right, then selecting Submit Feedback About The Site.  Any second now, we'll have live show time data.  Stay tuned....

We went through the main js file today and implemented two simple techniques to (hopefully) improve performance.  We traded our javascript concatenation for the Atlas Sys.StringBuilder, and we 'cached' some of our objects.  Here's an example that incorporates both techniques:

We changed something like this:

for (var i=0; i < someArray.length; i++)
{
   var s = someArray[i].Name + someArray[i].Rating;
}

to:

for (var i=0; i < someArray.length; i++)
{
   var s = new Sys.StringBuilder();
   var movie = someArray[i];
   s.append(movie.Name);
   s.append(movie.Rating);
}

We've added some new pushpin styles that will hopefully match the site a little better.  Favorite theaters show up as stars on the map now.  Also, we've added a Help section to the navigation that provide a Quick Tutorial and a form to submit a missing theater.