14 DAY TRIAL // A new iteration of the Deep Zoom Composer for Silverlight is now available for download. The tool went live at the end of the past week on the Microsoft Download Center and is currently up for grabs, delivering a variety of improvements compared to previous releases. Back in mid-February 2009, Microsoft requested feedback on the future development of the Deep Zoom Composers inviting users and developers to indicate what they would want to see in upcoming versions of the solution. The June 2009 preview of the Download Zoom Composer is built by integrating the input received by the company.
“Navigation Support - a common request has been around doing more with your Deep Zoom images than just being able to zoom in and out on them. In this release, we have introduced some cool navigation features which allow you to navigate between images or areas of images in a web/hyperlink-like fashion. You can also link images to external URLs as well,” revealed a member of the Expression Blend and Design team.
The Deep Zoom Composer June 2009 Preview comes to the table with enhanced memory management, and is essentially less RAM hungry, the software giant stated. This move will allow for compositions with a greater number of images because memory usage has been reduced. At the same time, the Redmond-based company has also built reporting functionality into Deep Zoom Composer. In this regard, the June 2009 Preview release is capable of indicating just what are the images that get the most “eyeballs.” Microsoft indicated that there were additional minute improvements, but that moving forward the focus would be on enhancing in the UI/styling/usability of major features added for the next iteration of Deep composer.
“First Draft of Updated Collection Exporting - we have now added the ability for you to import images, tag them directly from your image list in the Compose view, pick from a set of pre-defined templates, and export. All of this was done without you having to first place your image on the design surface. This is an area we are going to significantly improve in our upcoming releases, so stay tuned for some further updates on what we have planned,” the Expression Blend and Design team representative added.
Deep Zoom Composer June 2009 Preview is available for download here.