I've been wanting to work with Deep Zoom for quite a while, but sometimes the hardest part about working with a new technology is finding a reason to use it. Well, I found one. I've scoured O'Reilly's website and downloaded every cover to every book still in circulation (not really - I wrote a computer program do it). I then stitched them all together and wrapped it up in a Silverlight Deep Zoom application. This post is an introduction to a series of tutorials that will demonstrate, step-by-step, how to build the example application below.
Want an even better experience? Check it out full screen.
In case you don't already know, Deep Zoom, which is based on Microsoft Lab's Seadragon, was integrated into version 2 of Silverlight. Essentially the technology gives developers the ability to display incredibly high resolution images without the client having to download the entire picture. For example, the images that make up my example above take up about 140MB.
Anyway, I'll be posting tutorials over the next couple of weeks that will dive into every aspect of this application. From writing a program to download every cover from O'Reilly's website, to stitching them all together in Deep Zoom Composer, to creating the final Silverlight application.
07/10/2009 - 10:17
If this works, it must be PC only because I'm not seeing it.
Silverlight 3 on OS X
07/10/2009 - 10:29
Yeah it works on PC with Silverlight 3. It looks like there might be an issue with Macs right now.
07/10/2009 - 11:13
This was compiled using Silverlight 2. It looks like there's an issue with Silverlight 3 on a Mac running Silverlight 2 apps.
10/22/2009 - 09:03
i like it very much. thanks for sharing !
02/10/2010 - 11:12
This works for me in Safari and IE but does not work in FireFox. Any ideas or has someone else run into similar issues?
Even the demo on this page, only zooms in in Firefox but you cannot zoom out. Looks like the mouse wheel related events are not getting fired.
02/12/2010 - 12:55
In FF 3.5.5 the line
"Want an even better experience? Check it out full screen."
is hidden behind the black app rectangle. A few pixels of this text are visible to the left of the bottom left corner, which allowed me to select the obscured text.
02/12/2010 - 13:23
Same issue occurs in Google Chrome 4.0.249.89.
02/12/2010 - 13:25
Same issue occurs in Opera 9.63
02/12/2010 - 13:31
But in Opera 10.10 the text displays correctly (and the zooming works too).