We just pushed out our last big batch of Rowboat improvements and fixes before the end of the year.

Fun fact: the most long-lived issue that we managed to close in this time was one that had been open for 2 years and 4 months. Feels good to finally get that one resolved!

This year we celebrated the holidays by gathering together our favorite cozy winter treats and comfort meals to share with our friends and families.

You can visit the charming animated cookbook Paul put together to read, print, and share our recipes: https://www.fathom.info/holiday/25/

If you're feeling nostalgic, you can also revisit the last few years of Fathom holiday gifts here: https://www.fathom.info/holiday/

Wishing you all a joyful holiday season and a happy new year!

We are beyond excited that our collaboration with the Sabeti Lab and IGH to develop an outbreak detection and response framework has been awarded the MacArthur Foundation 100&Change grant!

Congratulations to the entire Sentinel team — we look forward to continuing our work building much-needed tools for pandemic prevention.

You can read the full announcement here: https://www.macfound.org/press/press-releases/sentinel-awarded-100-million-to-prevent-pandemics

We just launched a desktop version of Rowboat!

* Open much larger files (offline!)
* Own Desktop as a one-time purchase.
* Use a double-clickable app that’s even faster than the web version.

Browser or desktop, your data never leaves your machine.

Read more: https://www.fathom.info/notebook/251106/

A big part of exploring data in Rowboat is using filters to see what different subsets of your dataset look like.

One of our favorite examples is a dataset of about 60k OkCupid profiles from the Bay Area in the early 2010s (You can find it here: https://rowbo.at/xq4sku34). It’s extremely fun to filter by column and try to find your “soulmate” (or “anti-soulmate”). You can always clear filters, or use undo/redo to flip between recent views.

We’ve also made it easy to filter within a single column if a global search feels too broad. For instance, in this UFO sightings dataset https://rowbo.at/uzu782mq), you might want to check how many sightings happened on July 4th—especially the ones described as “fireballs.”

To do this, just open the Find tool (top right) and filter the “datetime_time” column with “7/4” to see every sighting that happened on the Fourth of July.

We recently made a round of visual updates to Rowboat to make it even easier to spot geographic regions where data is more highly concentrated.

Explore the coordinates of major world cities and instantly see the bright hotspots of densely populated areas.
Get quick insights into global trade by plotting shipping routes of 500+ commercial vessels.
Locate regions of the world most likely to be impacted by volcanic activity.

To get more out of your own geographic data, head to www.rowboat.net

We updated Rowboat’s Chrome extension to open HTML tables and links to .csv, .tsv, and .xls spreadsheets in your browser with a simple right click.

Just locate the dataset you want to examine, right click, and select “Open Table in Rowboat” to start exploring.

You can install the Chrome browser extension here: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/open-in-rowboat/injppghgfcmocpondoaeppohnolebali

For those who don’t use Chrome — Firefox and Safari extensions should be arriving in the coming weeks!

While many of us were still blearily snoozing our morning alarms, Mark and Chase were out there hitting the pavement.

In our latest blog post, Chase gives us a lesson in wet-bulb temperature calculations, conversing with coworkers while running, and the perks of opting out of the MBTA for your morning commute.

You can read more here: https://www.fathom.info/notebook/250813/