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 !