Behind the Scenes

I’ve posted a little more detail on the making of Seadragon Ajax and the making of Seadragon Mobile on my other blog, for those who are interested.

Seadragon Ajax on the various browsers

Because Seadragon Ajax is based on the standards of the web, its core functionality works on all modern browsers: Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Opera, Chrome and probably even others. And as far as we know, we work on every OS that’s supported by a particular browser.

Of the above browsers, we officially support (e.g. we’ll prioritize bugs on) the most recent and stable versions of the mainstream browser/OS combos: IE 7 (Win), Firefox 3 (Win/Mac) and Safari 3 (Mac). We’ve also been working with the IE team to support IE 8 beta 2 as much as possible, and we’ll support IE 8 when it’s released.

But while Seadragon Ajax functions on all modern browsers, it doesn’t function the same across the board. You may have noticed this already, both in performance and in “beauty”. The main reason for this is in the way we render.

Seadragon Ajax and cross-site scripting

When loading Deep Zoom Images with the Seadragon Ajax Library, you have to be aware of the browser’s cross-site scripting security restrictions. There are three main options:

And tomorrow, the world!

Seadragon Ajax was just released and already people are doing interesting things with it. One fellow in particular, Nicolas Boonaert, has started a couple of projects. SeaJS is an intellisense helper for doing Seadragon Ajax development in Visual Studio. He’s also started work on using Seadragon Ajax to view Virtual Earth (you can see his first post about it, in French). Cool stuff!

Seadragon Ajax Released

We’ve just released Seadragon Ajax, a JavaScript-only Deep Zoom Image viewer. I’m excited to see what people come up with to do with it!