Microsoft’s first-ever iPhone application has been released — and is receiving accolades and complaints from those who have played with it. The application is Seadragon, a photo viewer that handles large numbers of photos – or allows the user to zoom in to an individual photo. The Seadragon browser application was first released last summer by Microsoft’s Live Labs, and came from Microsoft’s acquisition of Seadragon Software in February, but Microsoft has now ported Seadragon to the iPhone. Seadragon is a free app in both its browser based and mobile form.
Interestingly, the mobile version of Seadragon is not available yet for the Windows Mobile platform, but we’ll have to take a wait-and-see attitude on that. Rumors are that Microsoft will be making a major mobile phone announcement at the Consumer Electronics Show, which begins Jan. 8. The latest intel is claiming that Microsoft will not announce the much-discussed Zune phone (though some still believe it will) but will instead be announcing Zune Mobile, a set of services and a development platform that allows users to buy music from their Windows Mobile devices.
In the meantime, Seadragon is here now — and it is by most accounts pretty slick. It aims to improve how media is presented on screens, from wall-sized displays to cell phones. Its developers want to ensure that graphics and photos are smoothly browsed, regardless of the amount of data or the bandwidth of the network. The browser-based version of Seadragon is built on AJAX, but it has hooks into Silverlight for those who want to manipulate photos with the applications Deep Zoom feature. However, Computerworld has noted that the app is proprietary and that the Deep Zoom feature is broken on the iPhone version.
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