14 DAY TRIAL // Concomitantly with the launch of Expression Studio 3, and following the release to web of Silverlight 3, Microsoft has launched the first final version of the Deep Zoom Composer. The solution is designed to allow users to prepare digital images for the Deep Zoom feature in Silverlight 2 and 3. July 22nd marks the availability of the gold bits of Deep Zoom Composer. In this first half of this month, Microsoft made available and updated a version of the tool labeled Release Candidate. It was the first and only RC build of the Deep Zoom Composer.
“This release pulls together a lot of the ideas that we had been previewing to you in bits and pieces for the past releases – some for over a year,” a member of the Expression Blend and Design team revealed. “The Deep Zoom technology in Silverlight can be used to do a lot more than just allowing you to zoom in on high resolution images. Deep Zoom Composer makes it possible for you to create, without writing a single line of code, interactive content involving slideshows, inline navigation, web links, tooltips, and more.”
In the RC of Deep Zoom Composer, Microsoft debuted a few features added on top of what the tool initially brought to the table. In this sense, Deep Zoom Composer for Silverlight 3 allows users to create menus, brings support for slideshows and permits the addition of links into Deep Zoom content. But, of course, there are additional new features.
“Analytics Tracking – this release of Deep Zoom Composer enhances the support for analytics tracking we exposed in our earlier release. Specify tracking URLs that will silently get called when you zoom in on an image or region. Don’t worry, we made all of this fairly customizable,” the Expression Blend and Design team representative added.
With Deep Zoom Composer for Silverlight 3, Microsoft also delivered an enhanced DeepZoomPix Player. The Redmond company explained that the improvements introduced to Deep Zoom Composer had been integrated into the online DeepZoomPix service. In this context, all Deep Zoom content that has been expanded with interactivity capabilities will retain all functionality even after it is uploaded to DeepZoomPix.
“With this release, we made it extremely easy for you to go from having a Deep Zoom composition to something you can edit in Expression Blend or Visual Studio. Based on a lot of your feedback, we expanded our default list of templates to include more templates that contain source files,” the Expression Blend and Design team member stated.
On top of the new features added, Microsoft has tweaked the graphical user interface of Deep Zoom Composer. However, changes are far from an overhauling. In fact, they can be described much better as subtle UI modifications. The Redmond company also plans to update the online documentation associated with the tool.
“Support for Smooth Streaming – Smooth Streaming is an extension available to IIS web servers where you can easily stream content using adaptive streaming. Deep Zoom Composer now allows you to export your images into a form that is optimized for use on servers enabled with the smooth streaming technology,” the Expression Blend and Design team representative noted.
Deep Zoom Composer is available for download here.
Expression Blend 3 + SketchFlow RC is available for download here.
Silverlight 3 RTW (3.0.40624.0) is available for download here.