Microsoft released its first iPhone application called Seadragon Mobile last Saturday. Apparently it was broken but we can expect a complete fix coming soon if it is not already there. Meanwhile, check out the video demo of Seadragon Mobile.
The application allows user to browse large collection of graphics and photos smoothly on the iPhone, regardless of the amount of data or the bandwidth of the network. In simple words, user does not have to download the entire photo in order to zoom in to a part of it.
Users can create their own content with the Deep Zoom Composer or PhotoZoom, or browse the examples provided by Microsoft, including Photosynth collections created by the users themselves or others.
Posted in
Digital photography,
Software on December 16th, 2008.
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In its attempt to catch up with market leaders Yahoo! flickr and Google Picasa Web Abumn, Microsoft just launched its completely redesigned photos.live.com.
Here are a few highlighted improvements:
- Beautiful new views of your photos, including an amazing Slide show view.
- 25 GB of FREE storage! That’s a ton of pictures of any resolution plus there’s no more 500-per-month limit on photos.
- The photo-centric What’s New feed on photos.live.com shows you the photos your friends are sharing.
- Spaces and SkyDrive photos are now combined, so all of your photos are in one place.
- Better permissions give you greater control over who can see your photos online.
Even Though the new site is still not perfect as noted by CNET, we certainly welcome the competition that pushes the big players to constantly improve their services.
Posted in
News,
Photo sharing on December 5th, 2008.
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Not long ago, Microsoft submitted its HD Photo technology (tentatively titled “JPEG XR”) to the Joint Photographic Expert Group (JPEG) for considering as an industry standard. Now, it has been approved! Although I was a little skeptical about Microsoft’s motive, they seem to be committed to make the HD Photo as an open format. The highlights of the new format are:
- Pixel formats at 8, 16, or 32 bits per channel including high dynamic range (HDR) support using fixed or floating point representations.
- Progressive decoding architecture allows efficient decoding of an image at any resolution, quality, or any selected region by processing only a portion of the entire compressed file.
- Support lossless and very efficient lossy compression up to twice as efficient as the original JPEG format.
Posted in
Digital photography,
News on November 3rd, 2007.
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eWeek reports that Microsoft has submitted its HD Photo technology (tentatively titled “JPEG XR”) to the Joint Photographic Expert Group (JPEG) for considering as an industry standard. The HD photo technology has been under development at Microsoft for a while. It looks great on paper, offering such benefits as high quality or loss less compression, high dynamic range encoding, high performance, and small memory footprint, etc. However I am a little suspicious of the (or the claimed lack of) motives behind everything MS has to offer.
Posted in
Digital photography,
News on August 1st, 2007.
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