Design with Silverlight

If you get a chance, check out the DeepZoom application that was done for TechFest. You can find it here.

The DeepZoom app contains a collection of posters that were put together by various researchers to describe their projects. There's some pretty interesting stuff in there. One of the ones I find especially interesting is Headlight, which is the 3rd poster down in the right hand column.

I was fortunate enough to be able to take Headlight for a spin, and it's a pretty slick add-on to Composer. The projects are very similar to Composer - you import images and lay them out, but you also have the chance to add tooltips, menus, and links to the items in the collection before doing the export. There is even an option to enable some metrics for items in the collection. The team working on the Headlight project doesn't have a public-facing site just yet, but keep this one on your radar - it might change the way you view ads.

I've had some time to experiment more with DeepZoom, and was able to provide the Expression Composer team with one of the projects that was causing me problems.

If you nest enough images, the images become "small" enough that the encoder doesn't know what to do (and in my case, did nothing). I have found that this seems to occur for me once I get to about 4 images or so, but only if they are overlapping. If I scale the images and position them next to one another, Composer will export the files as expected.

This led to a different problem, however. When placing the images next to one another so that each is smaller than the previous one, by the time I'm zoomed in on the last of 9 images, it's blurry and illegible. This one seems to be more of an issue with the rendering engine, because the JPG the multiscale image control is using looks great. It *looks* like you're zoomed way in on an image, but it's not resolving to the smooth version.

These kinds of issues are to be expected with pre-release software, of course. I'm really excited about this feature though. There's a ton of possibility there - I'm looking forward to updates as they become available!

Like everyone else, I was deeply interested in the DeepZoom feature that introduced at MIX.

I spent some time playing with it, and at the moment, it looks to have some limitations. Granted, it's a preview release (Expression Composer), and I'm probably not doing the software any favors by choking it up with a half-dozen or so high-res photos, but it seems really hit or miss. I can lay out all of my photos in the main display, export it, and it works fine.

When I start scaling the images down and positioning them in order to create the "zoom" effect, once I get past 3 or 4 images, the software just stops updating the output file. It *says* it's exporting, but it doesn't actually seem to *do* anything.