More Seadragon for your pocket

iBing got final approval from Apple sometime yesterday and has made its way into the app store:

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/bing/id345323231?mt=8 (itunes app store link, ye be warned)

It’s cool in and of itself that MS has made another iPhone app.  There are features like voice search, multiple location view, saved locations… all the good stuff you’d want in a search app.  It also shows off the daily image from Bing.com for a little bit more sparkle in your search experience.

It is cooler still that the experience is built on top of the Seadragon iPhone app; check out the maps feature and you’ll be able to see the Seadragon goodness.  I recommend wi-fi over 3G (and don’t even get me started on Edge), ’cause AT&T is… not that great, but even over the wire, you’ll still get a usable, fluid experience.  The Bing guys have really taken our philosophy of the user never waiting to heart and shipped it.

If you’re having a hard time finding good uses for the app, the fellas over at TechCruch have a suggestion or two (mildly NSFW).

-Kevin Hanes

Out of the Box Week

I haven’t posted for a bit…it’s been Out of the Box Week here at Live Labs. Once a quarter (more or less) we all take a week away from our normal work to pursue whatever interesting ideas we can come up with. We’ve been doing it for a couple of years now, and it’s a great source of innovation, as well as being an opportunity for us to recharge our batteries and collaborate with people on other teams.

A couple of my previous Out of the Box projects have gone on to be published: Seadragon Ajax (after plenty more work by Aseem Kishore) and Infinite Canvas. Seadragon Mobile also started as an Out of the Box project, by Ben Vanik. Jeff Weir’s Colour Picker is another example. Of course some projects simply end up as features within existing products, and some just remain novelties.

We’re not the only ones in the industry doing this sort of thing. Google has their 20% Playtime, and there are lots of examples from smaller companies, such as Meebo’s Hack Day, SharedBook’s Cool Factor Projects, and many others. Even inside Microsoft, other groups, such as Office Labs, are giving it a spin.

Hopefully this is a trend that will continue…I highly recommend it for any team that needs to stay fresh and innovative.

More on OotBW: from Jeff Weir and from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

Seadragon and GigaPan

If you’re not already familiar with GigaPan, I highly recommend checking it out; they’ve got a great community of super high-res image enthusiasts.

Lately folks have been doing some interesting things with combining Seadragon with GigaPan. Jason of Odyssey Expeditions has created this Seadragon Ajax viewer for GigaPan images. It’s not perfect yet, but it shows promise.

Daniel Gasienica has prototyped a pipeline for loading GigaPan images into Seadragon Mobile: enter http://gigapan-mobile.appspot.com/feed/ as an RSS feed in the Seadragon Mobile app. He’s only got two images so far, but one of them is the Obama inauguration panorama, which is lots of fun to explore.

UPDATE (from Daniel, in the comments): Now you can view all 11′000+ GigaPan panoramas through GigaPan Mobile. Build your own RSS feed just like http://gigapan-mobile.appspot.com/feed or simply add your favorite GigaPan directly to Seadragon Mobile with the following URL http://gigapan-mobile.appspot.com/gigapan/{ID}.dzi where {ID} is the ID number of your favorite gigapan.

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.

Hard Rock Memorabilia in Seadragon Mobile

Vertigo, the folks who created the Silverlight Deep Zoom Hard Rock demo, have published a feed to get that same content in Seadragon Mobile.

Steps to rock your iPhone:
1. Install Seadragon Mobile from the iPhone App Store.
2. Launch the Seadragon application on your iPhone.
3. Click the “+” button to add content to the Seadragon app.
4. Click “RSS Feed”.
5. Type in this URL http://memorabilia.hardrock.com/seadragon.xml .
6. Click “Done” .
7. Click “All Memorabilia”.

(via)

Seadragon for your pocket

This weekend we released our Seadragon Mobile (iTunes link) viewer on the iPhone! So far the response has been fantastic, from both sides of the Microsoft/Apple fence. If you’ve got an iPhone, or if you’ve got a friend with one, check it out. If not, you can see the Channel 10 video.