
Microsoft Zoom.it (Bitly for Hi-res images) - matthewphiong
http://zoom.it/
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geuis
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/> ) and apparently Zoom.it is just a new
rename.

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alanh
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. :)

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statictype
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>

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callmeed
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
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
Good point re:Flickr ... my though is that it would have a much better signal-
to-noise ratio for those seeking such images ...

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photon_off
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>

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perplexes
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/Zooming_user_interface>
[http://www.amazon.com/Humane-Interface-Directions-
Designing-...](http://www.amazon.com/Humane-Interface-Directions-Designing-
Interactive/dp/0201379376)

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

~~~
city41
Actually... "Zoom.it runs on Windows Azure and enhances the experience with
Microsoft Silverlight when available."

From the "About" page.

~~~
alanh
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
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
It reverts to silverlight if you are using IE (of course, :) )

~~~
matthewphiong
As noted by RRW here
[http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/microsoft_introduces_so...](http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/microsoft_introduces_social_lightbox_zoomit_from_live_labs_and_silverlight.php)

It works on your iPad/Phone/Pod too!

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

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umsm
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...](http://code.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/javascript/v2/overlays.html#CustomMapTiles)

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

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dmd
Unicode: <http://zoom.it/zTem#full>

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alanh
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...](http://alanhogan.com/images/Coincidental_pictograms-20100806-194740.png) (though it doesn’t always look like that. <http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/A269/index.htm>)

~~~
growt
25B6 could be used as play.

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

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aneesh
<http://zoom.it/pages/api/>

"You get the Zoom.it short URL, _an embeddable viewer_ , as well as the
underlying DZI and surrounding metadata."

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alexbosworth
Pretty neat, I'm glad they didn't use silverlight

Here's mine: <http://zoom.it/ERnN#full>

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city41
Not Silverlight based, appears to be all Javascript. That's interesting coming
from MS themselves.

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joshu
I wish you could annotate in there.

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freetard
Yep <http://zoom.it/1Sma#full>

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

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city41
The iPhone uses two fingers which enables much more accurate/rapid scaling.
The mouse is a compromise in comparison, hence the added inertia.

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CamperBob
Funny, online maps work fine without inertia.

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aaronbrethorst
I just noticed the other day that Google Maps on the web recently added
flicking and deceleration. It's a nice, new touch.

