14 DAY TRIAL // On August 1, 2008, Microsoft introduced an update to the Deep Zoom Composer solution designed to permit users to take advantage of the Deep Zoom features of Silverlight 2.0 Beta 2. Just a few days later, the Redmond company made available for download a new Deep Zoom Composer update in an effort to deal with a few issues that survived the initial release at the start of the month. Deep Zoom Composer is by all means a Beta/preview version, and as such, end users should expect to inherently run into trouble. However, Microsoft is hammering away at the product.
"To address many of the issues you all had with the PhotoZoom functionality, we have released an updated preview version of Deep Zoom Composer," revealed Janete Perez, and Kirupa Chinnathambi from the DZC team. "Be sure to uninstall your current version of Deep Zoom Composer before attempting to install the latest version. The issues we fixed revolve around making the log-in screen more clear and ensuring uploads do not time out."
The new release of the Deep Zoom Composer is intimately connected with the PhotoZoom website, but users have to own an account in order to upload and share/embed content. Additionally, even with the August 1 version, Deep Zoom Composer was hit with log-in and upload issues related mainly to getting large images on PhotoZoom. As a response Microsoft has tweaked the upload timeout making it possible for large images to be transferred over slow connections to the website.
"Because we released the updated version so quickly after we released the last one, do check to make sure you are running the latest version. You will know if you have the latest build by going to Help | About and seeing the build date, 3 August 2008. Overall, this update is designed to make using PhotoZoom via Deep Zoom Composer usable. We think this is a great feature that makes Deep Zoom Composer more approachable by non-technical users, so please let us know if you continue having any difficulties, and we will be glad to take a look," Perez and Chinnathambi added.
Deep Zoom Composer Beta is available for download here.