Janete Perez on the Expression team has written up intros to some of the new features in the June 2009 Deep Zoom Composer release. Check them out:
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Infinite Canvas is relocating
June 11, 2009My Infinite Canvas web app has been running on AppJet, which has been delightful, but they’ve just announced that they are discontinuing hosting on July 1st. I’m looking into where to move it to and how to make it as smooth a transition as possible. I’ll update here once it’s been sorted out.
UPDATE: Looks like I’ve successfully moved it to JGate, which has taken up the AppJet torch. Take a look and see what you think; it should be identical. Once I’m happy with the transfer I’ll turn editing features back on again.
Peacock: Zooming in the Aviary
May 12, 2009
A lot of people are doing things with zooming on existing data, where the zooming is a purely exploratory feature. You see fewer examples of creation tools in a zooming context. I mean, Photoshop lets you zoom in and out of its canvas, but in terms of zooming UI, it’s pretty rudimentary. Prezi is a good example, and even my Infinite Canvas counts, simple as it is.
The folks at Aviary are doing some amazing things, bringing creativity apps to the web. In terms of zooming interfaces, check out their Peacock, which has a zooming canvas for you to lay your effects patches onto. Interestingly enough, unlike Prezi or Infinite Canvas, the zooming canvas is just a behind-the-scenes organizational tool, rather than the image itself.
Also of note, since it’s a web app, they’ve got the community built in, including the easy ability to derive new works off of other people’s creations, and to track and explore the “family tree” of any work (much like AppJet). This distributed collaboration model seems to be gaining steam, and I definitely see it as the future of creativity.
Deep Zoom on Linux: Moonlight 2.0 preview
May 6, 2009
So Silverlight works on Windows and Mac (though unfortunately not PowerPC Macs), but what about Linux? The Moonlight project is in fact just that, and they’ve now released a preview of Moonlight 2.0, which has all the features of Silverlight 2.0 including Deep Zoom. Check it out to see Photosynth, Hard Rock Memorabilia, and all your favorites running in Linux. They even have an entire development tool chain in Linux, so you can not only view Silverlight sites, but also create new ones. It’s just a preview at this point, so don’t expect it to be perfect, you know the drill.
Cool Things in Seadragon: World Digital Library
April 22, 2009The World Digital Library is a collection of significant primary documents from countries and cultures around the world. The folks over there have put them online (as of April 21st) to both promote cultural understanding as well as to provide a resource for educators and scholars. They’ve also utilized Seadragon Ajax to do so, and the end product is really, really cool.
Simply select a world region that you want to explore and you’ll be taken to a page containing all of your “search results” and a pane on the left to help you narrow down the items you have available to you. Picking an individual item will give you a general description and all of the item’s particulars, such as creation date, author, location etc. One more click on the item will send you into the Seadragon Ajax portion of the site, where you can zoom and pan around the item to your hearts content. There’s a ton of interesting documents and photos to peruse here, so if you’re having a hard time choosing, start with a personal favorite of mine, the iconic photo of pea-pickers by Dorothea Lange.
The images do suffer from some pixel drift, though this is a product of using Kapil’s Python script for image conversion to DZI. It is also worth noting that this same gentleman did development on the WDL site. They’ve also changed the Seadragon Ajax UI buttons, but that’s to incorporate a “next” and “previous” button for documents that have multiple pages. It’s a wonderful site, and I suggest you check it out.
Hyper-Photos
April 16, 2009Jean-Francois Rauzier is a French photographer; his website is slick his photographs are well shot, and he shows an eye for composition. Of particular note are his “Hyper-Photos”. These are large images set in a Flash viewer that allow for zooming and panning around a large scene.
The controls are a little wonky; moving the mouse around pans you, you can only zoom in by clicking and zoom out is a ctrl-click. Further, all of the zooming is done around the center of the image, not the mouse. The entire experience is marred because of this constant movement by panning, but there is a delightful saving grace. There are “hot” areas all over the image that you can click on for a detail shot. There are a lot of them in the apartment buildings in the foreground; take some time and drag your mouse around the image.
Jobs in the Zoomosphere
April 14, 2009Working on a zooming project and need some expertise? A Twitter account has been set up to connect those with the jobs and interested parties with related skills.
Not a whole lot of activity going on as of this writing, but as the economy and zooming pick up steam it’ll be good to have all like minded individuals in one area. Swing on by, leave a message if you’ve got a job opening and if you haven’t yet, check out the zooming group.
Cool Stuff in Seadragon: World Wide Music Scene
April 8, 2009You may have already seen it on the Seadragon Ajax Gallery, but Tamas Nepusz has an even cooler version on his personal site.
Some of the features include things like being able to search for a particular band or by last.fm user. I also enjoy that each band has semi-transparent album art for a background, though it’s a bummer when an artist occludes another (like when you search for Death Cab for Cutie, or Jeff Beck).
It’s encouraging to see images of this size (300 megapixels) being created in the first place, but it’s infinitely cooler when they get iterated on. I hope experiments like this inspire people to fill up the canvas that we are trying to provide.
psychoPEDIA
April 1, 2009In their own words: “PsychoPEDIA is a NYC-based independent culture network that offers an inside-look at budding movements and standout subjects within the worlds of music, film, fashion, art and sports”. I’m not sure exactly what that all entails; apparently though, part of it is a bunch of interesting news stories and videos.
Of interest to those of us in the zooming UI space is how the content is laid out on the site. Initially, you are given a grid of icons, but click on one and the background changes and the icons slowly disappear, leaving only a single row. Then, whoosh, you are being panned rather swiftly to a new background image where a video plays or an article of news is shown. Each piece of content occupies its own space in the site, and each time you go to it, you are arriving at the same “place” and panning past the same set of items. It’s an interesting way to lay out a site and would be fun if done with free, or semantic, zoom to navigate around the canvas. Even as it is, it’s good to see sites using a canvas as a metaphor for how their sites are laid out.
Royksopp – Remind Me
March 27, 2009Royksopp is an award-winning, electronic musician duo from Norway that have been around for over a decade. Their hits have gotten critical acclaim and have been featured in a few different advertisements as well. The band is an artistic success as well as a commercial one; their songs are pretty good too.
A few months back, we posted about the Kinetic Typography phenomenon: taking a sound file (generally a famous movie clip) and physically representing it over an infinite canvas. Royksopp’s video for their song Remind Me is very similar, though they have an interesting twist. The entirety of their video is created out of moving infographics and it uses zoom in an infinite canvas. My favorite effect is their use of an object on screen as a pivot point to transition to a new scene. Check out Remind Me and some other videos in this area when you get the chance.
This song and music video were done in 2002, an eternity ago in the software world. It serves to remind us that we should be looking for software innovation, not in other applications, but in places like video games, movies and music videos.
