Keith’s Amusing Musings

Happy Independence Day, America!

One of the more interesting Deep Zoom examples I have seen since Hard Rock Cafe Memorabilia, the Deep Zoom Obama Fan Site is also a great homage to presidential hopeful, Barack Obama. Consisting of over 12,000 individual pictures uploaded by Obama supporters, this massive composite in Senator Obama’s likeness provides a sense of his broad appeal and the universality of his message.

Fan sites like these tend to go away as quickly as they appear so I recorded a short video—about 70 seconds—showing the site in action.

[Warning: The following video may contain embedded ads. I am helping beta test Microsoft’s ad publishing platform. Hide the ads by clicking the ‘X’.]

I finally got around to updating my blog to comply with the Beta 2 release of Silverlight 2. This affects anyone who wants to view any new or existing posts containing Deep Zoom content. You must upgrade to Silverlight 2 Beta 2 (or later) to see this content.

Click here to check what version of Silverlight you have installed—you will need 2.0.30523.6 or higher.

You will know everything is working if you can see the galleries in any of these posts. Otherwise, click the “Install Microsoft Silverlight” badge in any of those posts to upgrade today…it only takes a few seconds.

Here is a Deep Zoom gallery of the photos I took during our Memorial Day trip to San Diego. I made a few changes to this gallery to make it easier to navigate. This includes a full screen mode and dedicated buttons for zooming and resetting the gallery to a default state.

One gotcha you should know is your mouse wheel will not function in full screen mode. I’m not sure if that is a bug or security safeguard. You can still click and shift + click to zoom or use the nifty buttons at the bottom.

Enjoy!

I wanted to share the pictures from my first trip to China (Beijing, Xi’an, Shanghai) and Korea (Seoul). I decided to employ the latest hotness in Web-based, high-resolution image visualization: Silverlight Deep Zoom. It is something you have to see to fully appreciate. Here’s what you need to do to get started:

Installation

1. Install Silverlight 2 (currently in Beta but it’s safe and will auto-update).
2. Return to this page and hit F5 to refresh.

The above steps only need to be done once. If you see the images below, you already have Silverlight installed.

Navigation

1. Pan around the image by click-dragging (like Live/Google Maps).
2. If your mouse has a wheel: Use the wheel to zoom in/out for more/less detail.
3. If your mouse does not have a wheel: Left-click to zoom in, hold down Shift then left-click to zoom out.

I hope you enjoy the photos and Deep Zoom. Let me know what you think.