Design with Silverlight

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.

A compact client side script that gives a feeling like going through an old shoebox of photos - you see the corner of an old memory peeking out from beneath the others, lovingly grab it from the pile, and hold it up to take a closer look.

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