Tales from the Evil Empire : Silverlight

Photosynth of the President Inauguration

Bertrand Le Roy — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 00:20:22 GMT

Photosynth never fails to amaze me. Check this out!
http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2009/44.president/inauguration/themoment/

Deep Zoom without Silverlight

Bertrand Le Roy — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 20:42:00 GMT

In a move that I wouldn’t have bet a dollar on, Live Labs released a purely JavaScript Deep Zoom client. You read that right, what was so far one of the nice features only found in Silverlight is now available in an open web, standards-based version.

Of course, from a technical standpoint, Deep Zoom is just commoditizing what Google Maps made possible years ago in pure script so there wasn’t really a reason why this couldn’t be done, except smoother transitions and zooming but that’s pretty tenuous.

The great thing about this new library is that the tools to create the Deep Zoom image are exactly the same as with Silverlight: the JavaScript client is pretty much a drop-in replacement for the Silverlight client.

Embedding the viewer into a page is YouTube-easy: give the deep zoom url and it will build the code for you to embed.

MSDN on Deep Zoom:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc645050(VS.95).aspx

Everything about the JavaScript client:
http://livelabs.com/seadragon-ajax/

Embedding the viewer:
http://livelabs.com/seadragon-ajax/embed-viewer

UPDATE: Kapil created a Python-based tile-cutting application that is compatible with both deep-zoom clients, to work around the Windows-only nature of the creation tools:
http://blog.kapilt.com/2008/11/30/sharing-large-images-openlayers-gsiv-modestmaps-deepzoom-and-python/

UPDATE: Also check out this TED talk to get a glimpse of the true potential of these technologies (all that you're seeing in this talk is publicly available by the way):
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/blaise_aguera_y_arcas_demos_photosynth.html

Generating HTML from Silverlight

Bertrand Le Roy — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 05:56:18 GMT

Martin has an interesting post on the technique he uses in his Silverlight chess board to generate HTML from a Silverlight application.

The idea is quite interesting because he uses Silverlight for what it’s strong (vector graphics here) and HTML for the rest (text and hyperlinks). The generated HTML is the list of moves. Click events over this list triggers back code in Silverlight.

One consequence of this technique is that the list is very easy to style and bring in harmony with the rest of the site using regular CSS even if you have no knowledge of Silverlight. It makes for nice and easy integration of the board in a blog or any application.

http://www.bennedik.de/2008/11/slim-silverlight.html

Celebrating Silverlight 2 while following the World Chess Championship

Bertrand Le Roy — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 18:45:00 GMT

To celebrate the recent launch of Silverlight 2, let me point you to a cool app from Martin Bennedik that is basically a Chess game (re)player. It’s really cool to visualize a whole game like this:

http://www.chesscenter.com/twic/twic.html

UPDATE: Martin's post on the championship: http://www.bennedik.de/2008/10/world-championship.html