Apple iPhone’s popularity and recognition have again been acknowledged. Apple’s key market rival Microsoft Live Labs has lately announced the release of the Seadragon application for iPhone. This is the first Microsoft application for Apple’s mobile phone released by the group. Microsoft has admitted that due to the popularity of iPhone, Microsoft has no choice but to utilize this platform to testify to the excellence of their photo-browsing technology.

“The iPhone is the most widely distributed phone with a (graphics processing unit). Most phones out today don’t have accelerated graphics in them. The iPhone does and so it enabled us to do something that has been previously difficult to do. I couldn’t just pick up a Blackberry or a Nokia off the shelf and build Seadragon for it without GPU support”, explained by Alex Daley, the group product manager for Microsoft Live Labs.

Seadragon Mobile is available for free at the iTune App Store. This program will let users browse and zoom smoothly in and out on high quality (giga-pixel) images over the internet with near zero transition times regardless of bandwidth constraints via their mobile phone. iPhone users can enjoy this technology to get a super close view experience on 50 sample photos or images that come along with this application. iPhone users can also use this Seadragon Mobile to zoom around the 2D images that make up Photosynth collections, although not the full 3D Photosynth “synths” themselves. In addition, people who create and upload Seadragon “Deep Zoom” images online will be able to use the Seadragon technology to view them.


By using the Seadragon Ajax wizard, you can get Deep Zoom functionality without having to write code.