5 ms·

Microsoft Zoom.it (Bitly for Hi-res images)

79 points by matthewphiong 16y ago

perplexes 16y ago
This is great! It reminds me of Zoomworld, described by Jef Raskin in his book The Humane Interface, and even the Demo picture on the front page demonstrates some of those ideas. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zooming_user_interface http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zooming_user_interface http://www.amazon.com/Humane-Interface-Directions-Designing-Interactive/dp/0201379376 http://www.amazon.com/Humane-Interface-Directions-Designing-...
mattmiller 16y ago
Thats pretty cool. First one to come up with a site that shows a bunch of examples wins a bunch of easy traffic.
rokhayakebe 16y ago
I don't see any embed link. That would be great.
- aneesh 16y ago
  http://zoom.it/pages/api/ http://zoom.it/pages/api/ "You get the Zoom.it short URL, an embeddable viewer, as well as the underlying DZI and surrounding metadata."
- jambo 16y ago
  They display an embed link under the image on the short-url page, if you create one, but not for the images on the home page slideshow/demo. I agree, it's confusing and masks the functionality. E.G. NASA's Visible Earth Night Lights: http://zoom.it/333 http://zoom.it/333
- alanh 16y ago
  I love how the embed API is a <script> tag whose src= attribute is the URL of the zoom.it image page, with ".js" appended (and a height dimension). Love it. Very simple.
umsm 16y ago
This is pretty cool. I designed something similar for my previous employer that took a very large image of a map and scaled it and sliced it into squares. The resulting images were then used as a custom map with the Google Maps API. http://code.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/javascript/v2/overlays.html#CustomMapTiles http://code.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/javascript/v2...
joshu 16y ago
I wish you could annotate in there.
- freetard 16y ago
  Yep http://zoom.it/1Sma#full http://zoom.it/1Sma#full
geuis 16y ago
This is very interesting from a technical perspective. Its all being done with js and xhr requests. Its powered by Seadragon( http://seadragon.com/developer/ http://seadragon.com/developer/ ) and apparently Zoom.it is just a new rename.
- alanh 16y ago
  Careful. It’s not just a rename. It’s quite possibly the first evidence that Microsoft can actually release a useful, minimalistic, non-Passport-requiring, tiny, beautiful, non-.aspx-exposing, cross-browser web service. :)
- eagleal 16y ago
  Something like this would be quite useful with a real-time source/feed of images/video. Or connect remotely to your home camera and spy on your neighborhood. Seriously though, there should exist an implementation like this (at least from security firms or NSA/CIA).
- thingsinjars 16y ago
  As far as I remember, Microsoft moved continued development of Seadragon AJAX from the Live Labs team to the ASP.NET team last year. It's interesting to see Live Labs continuing on the consumer side.
niallsmart 16y ago
Independent of the product's merits; it's fascinating to see a large corporation experiment with the concept of "MVP".
city41 16y ago
Not Silverlight based, appears to be all Javascript. That's interesting coming from MS themselves.
avar 16y ago
Look Microsoft, you can create useful dynamic web services without requiring Flash, I mean Silverlight.
- city41 16y ago
  Actually... "Zoom.it runs on Windows Azure and enhances the experience with Microsoft Silverlight when available." From the "About" page.
  - alanh 16y ago
    I don’t have Silverlight and it runs just fine here. (Yup, it’s all in my DOM!) Using Silverlight when installed is fine by me — theoretically, it’s going to run faster than having a browser scale tens of images tens of times a second.
    - city41 16y ago
      I do have Silverlight installed and I couldn't seem to get the site to use Silverlight. Still all DOM as far as I could tell.
      - city41 16y ago
        It reverts to silverlight if you are using IE (of course, :) )
        matthewphiong 16y ago
        As noted by RRW here http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/microsoft_introduces_social_lightbox_zoomit_from_live_labs_and_silverlight.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/microsoft_introduces_so... It works on your iPad/Phone/Pod too!
      - deleted 16y ago
        [deleted]
- WalterGR 16y ago
CamperBob 16y ago
The artificial inertia is pretty annoying. Have these guys ever used an iPhone in their lives?
- city41 16y ago
  The iPhone uses two fingers which enables much more accurate/rapid scaling. The mouse is a compromise in comparison, hence the added inertia.
  - CamperBob 16y ago
    Funny, online maps work fine without inertia.
    - aaronbrethorst 16y ago
      I just noticed the other day that Google Maps on the web recently added flicking and deceleration. It's a nice, new touch.
- statictype 16y ago
  I found it to be a nice touch. Do you find the artificial inertia in iPhone scrolling annoying? I think they both add a little 'flavor' to the UI experience.
  - CamperBob 16y ago
    I think the key difference is that the iPhone uses inertia only for deceleration. Acceleration should always feel snappy and instantaneous; the relationship between the mouse pointer and the image should be nailed until the user lets go of the button.
callmeed 16y ago
I've had an idea for an image/bit.ly service for a while ... it goes something like this: - You upload a high/low res image - You have to specify one of the creative commons or other standard licenses - There's a short URL, API, geo-tagging, and sharing/embedding options - Attribution is stamped on the image and included in the embed code The idea is that journalists/citizen-journalists (and possibly artists/creatives) can share work and include much more explicit usage/attribution rules. News wires have access to a constant feed of good images. Thoughts?
- kes 16y ago
  I like the idea, and I apologize for having nothing more productive to say other than 'sounds quite a bit like Flickr.' Flickr has all of these features. Their main purpose is to host photographs, but with the rise of info-graphics (good stuff and bad stuff here) and other forms of picture-media, there could be a good place for a service to take up this new market segment.
  - callmeed 16y ago
    Good point re:Flickr ... my though is that it would have a much better signal-to-noise ratio for those seeking such images ...
photon_off 16y ago
As it turns out, there are already a couple of sites similar to zoom.it [1]. However, it should be interesting to see if zoom.it gains substantial traction, and how. I suspect that the fact it's Microsoft releasing something lightweight and useful will make this an interesting news story. This is seeming to be confirmed by Twitter showing a steady stream of links to it, and its gaining a lot of buzz on social media sites. But, we'll see. It's possible that there just isn't enough demand for this type of thing, yet. [1] http://www.moreofit.com/similar-to/zoom.it http://www.moreofit.com/similar-to/zoom.it
statictype 16y ago
Seadragon was created by Blaise Aguera y Arcas. He works at Microsoft and has done some pretty cool stuff. His TED talks: http://www.ted.com/speakers/blaise_aguera_y_arcas.html http://www.ted.com/speakers/blaise_aguera_y_arcas.html
alexbosworth 16y ago
Pretty neat, I'm glad they didn't use silverlight Here's mine: http://zoom.it/ERnN#full http://zoom.it/ERnN#full
dmd 16y ago
Unicode: http://zoom.it/zTem#full http://zoom.it/zTem#full
- alanh 16y ago
  Wow, all those glyphs and still no padlock or play/pause/fast-forward symbols! * That’s a very cool one, dmd. Would be even better if (like ZoomWorld), sections were labeled in huge text, and more information were available next to each symbol. * Edit: There is a glyph that could stand in if you use your imagination. ꉩ "YI SYLLABLE NGO" http://alanhogan.com/images/Coincidental_pictograms-20100806-194740.png http://alanhogan.com/images/Coincidental_pictograms-20100806... (though it doesn’t always look like that. http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/A269/index.htm http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/A269/index.htm)
  - growt 16y ago
    25B6 could be used as play.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]

79 points by matthewphiong 16y ago

This is great! It reminds me of Zoomworld, described by Jef Raskin in his book The Humane Interface, and even the Demo picture on the front page demonstrates some of those ideas. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zooming_user_interface http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zooming_user_interface http://www.amazon.com/Humane-Interface-Directions-Designing-Interactive/dp/0201379376 http://www.amazon.com/Humane-Interface-Directions-Designing-...

mattmiller 16y ago

Thats pretty cool. First one to come up with a site that shows a bunch of examples wins a bunch of easy traffic.

rokhayakebe 16y ago

I don't see any embed link. That would be great.

aneesh 16y ago
http://zoom.it/pages/api/ http://zoom.it/pages/api/ "You get the Zoom.it short URL, an embeddable viewer, as well as the underlying DZI and surrounding metadata."
jambo 16y ago
They display an embed link under the image on the short-url page, if you create one, but not for the images on the home page slideshow/demo. I agree, it's confusing and masks the functionality. E.G. NASA's Visible Earth Night Lights: http://zoom.it/333 http://zoom.it/333
alanh 16y ago
I love how the embed API is a <script> tag whose src= attribute is the URL of the zoom.it image page, with ".js" appended (and a height dimension). Love it. Very simple.

umsm 16y ago

This is pretty cool. I designed something similar for my previous employer that took a very large image of a map and scaled it and sliced it into squares. The resulting images were then used as a custom map with the Google Maps API. http://code.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/javascript/v2/overlays.html#CustomMapTiles http://code.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/javascript/v2...

joshu 16y ago

I wish you could annotate in there.

freetard 16y ago
Yep http://zoom.it/1Sma#full http://zoom.it/1Sma#full

geuis 16y ago

This is very interesting from a technical perspective. Its all being done with js and xhr requests. Its powered by Seadragon( http://seadragon.com/developer/ http://seadragon.com/developer/ ) and apparently Zoom.it is just a new rename.

alanh 16y ago
Careful. It’s not just a rename. It’s quite possibly the first evidence that Microsoft can actually release a useful, minimalistic, non-Passport-requiring, tiny, beautiful, non-.aspx-exposing, cross-browser web service. :)
eagleal 16y ago
Something like this would be quite useful with a real-time source/feed of images/video. Or connect remotely to your home camera and spy on your neighborhood. Seriously though, there should exist an implementation like this (at least from security firms or NSA/CIA).
thingsinjars 16y ago
As far as I remember, Microsoft moved continued development of Seadragon AJAX from the Live Labs team to the ASP.NET team last year. It's interesting to see Live Labs continuing on the consumer side.

niallsmart 16y ago

Independent of the product's merits; it's fascinating to see a large corporation experiment with the concept of "MVP".

city41 16y ago

Not Silverlight based, appears to be all Javascript. That's interesting coming from MS themselves.

avar 16y ago

Look Microsoft, you can create useful dynamic web services without requiring Flash, I mean Silverlight.

city41 16y ago
Actually... "Zoom.it runs on Windows Azure and enhances the experience with Microsoft Silverlight when available." From the "About" page.
- alanh 16y ago
  I don’t have Silverlight and it runs just fine here. (Yup, it’s all in my DOM!) Using Silverlight when installed is fine by me — theoretically, it’s going to run faster than having a browser scale tens of images tens of times a second.
  - city41 16y ago
    I do have Silverlight installed and I couldn't seem to get the site to use Silverlight. Still all DOM as far as I could tell.
    - city41 16y ago
      It reverts to silverlight if you are using IE (of course, :) )
      - matthewphiong 16y ago
        As noted by RRW here http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/microsoft_introduces_social_lightbox_zoomit_from_live_labs_and_silverlight.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/microsoft_introduces_so... It works on your iPad/Phone/Pod too!
    - deleted 16y ago
      [deleted]
WalterGR 16y ago

CamperBob 16y ago

The artificial inertia is pretty annoying. Have these guys ever used an iPhone in their lives?

city41 16y ago
The iPhone uses two fingers which enables much more accurate/rapid scaling. The mouse is a compromise in comparison, hence the added inertia.
- CamperBob 16y ago
  Funny, online maps work fine without inertia.
  - aaronbrethorst 16y ago
    I just noticed the other day that Google Maps on the web recently added flicking and deceleration. It's a nice, new touch.
statictype 16y ago
I found it to be a nice touch. Do you find the artificial inertia in iPhone scrolling annoying? I think they both add a little 'flavor' to the UI experience.
- CamperBob 16y ago
  I think the key difference is that the iPhone uses inertia only for deceleration. Acceleration should always feel snappy and instantaneous; the relationship between the mouse pointer and the image should be nailed until the user lets go of the button.

callmeed 16y ago

I've had an idea for an image/bit.ly service for a while ... it goes something like this: - You upload a high/low res image - You have to specify one of the creative commons or other standard licenses - There's a short URL, API, geo-tagging, and sharing/embedding options - Attribution is stamped on the image and included in the embed code The idea is that journalists/citizen-journalists (and possibly artists/creatives) can share work and include much more explicit usage/attribution rules. News wires have access to a constant feed of good images. Thoughts?

kes 16y ago
I like the idea, and I apologize for having nothing more productive to say other than 'sounds quite a bit like Flickr.' Flickr has all of these features. Their main purpose is to host photographs, but with the rise of info-graphics (good stuff and bad stuff here) and other forms of picture-media, there could be a good place for a service to take up this new market segment.
- callmeed 16y ago
  Good point re:Flickr ... my though is that it would have a much better signal-to-noise ratio for those seeking such images ...

photon_off 16y ago

As it turns out, there are already a couple of sites similar to zoom.it [1]. However, it should be interesting to see if zoom.it gains substantial traction, and how. I suspect that the fact it's Microsoft releasing something lightweight and useful will make this an interesting news story. This is seeming to be confirmed by Twitter showing a steady stream of links to it, and its gaining a lot of buzz on social media sites. But, we'll see. It's possible that there just isn't enough demand for this type of thing, yet. [1] http://www.moreofit.com/similar-to/zoom.it http://www.moreofit.com/similar-to/zoom.it

statictype 16y ago

Seadragon was created by Blaise Aguera y Arcas. He works at Microsoft and has done some pretty cool stuff. His TED talks: http://www.ted.com/speakers/blaise_aguera_y_arcas.html http://www.ted.com/speakers/blaise_aguera_y_arcas.html

alexbosworth 16y ago

Pretty neat, I'm glad they didn't use silverlight Here's mine: http://zoom.it/ERnN#full http://zoom.it/ERnN#full

dmd 16y ago

Unicode: http://zoom.it/zTem#full http://zoom.it/zTem#full

alanh 16y ago
Wow, all those glyphs and still no padlock or play/pause/fast-forward symbols! * That’s a very cool one, dmd. Would be even better if (like ZoomWorld), sections were labeled in huge text, and more information were available next to each symbol. * Edit: There is a glyph that could stand in if you use your imagination. ꉩ "YI SYLLABLE NGO" http://alanhogan.com/images/Coincidental_pictograms-20100806-194740.png http://alanhogan.com/images/Coincidental_pictograms-20100806... (though it doesn’t always look like that. http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/A269/index.htm http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/A269/index.htm)
- growt 16y ago
  25B6 could be used as play.

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]