“Microsoft Live Labs today becomes the first group inside the Redmond company to release an application for Apple’s mobile phone,” Todd Bishop reports for TechFlash. “Seadragon Mobile is a free demonstration program meant to test the viability of the high-tech Seadragon photo-display technology on mobile platforms.”
Bishop reports, “Seadragon is best known as a core technology behind Microsoft’s Photosynth photo-browsing program. It’s designed for zooming smoothly in, out and around photos over the Internet, regardless of bandwidth constraints or image size. Seadragon’s technological trick is to store images in multiple resolutions and deliver only the bits needed to present the view a user wants at any given moment.”
“So why release an iPhone version? Alex Daley, group product manager for Microsoft Live Labs, said the Seadragon team wants to make sure the technology works well on everything from a wall-sized display to a mobile device,” Bishop reports. “‘The iPhone is the most widely distributed phone with a (graphics processing unit),’ Daley explained. ‘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.’”
Bishop reports, “The iPhone presents a dilemma for Microsoft more broadly, because it competes with the mobile phones that use the company’s Windows Mobile operating system.”
MacDailyNews Take: Microsoft’s Windows Mobile “competes” with Apple iPhone as Jabba the Hutt “competes” with Usain Bolt. As in, not much (especially since only one of them actually exists).
Bishop continues, “Seattle-based Seadragon Software was acquired by Microsoft in early 2006.”
Read more in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Readers "Cathy V." and "iWill" for the heads up.]
MacDailyNews Note: Microsoft’s “Seadragon Mobile” is available via Apple’s iTunes App Store here.
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