Slashdot Mirror

Meaning that they have already got a library for this build in?

Essentially, yeah -- this kind of zooming is a built-in function of Silverlight. They call it Deep Zoom and here's a bit of an article about it with some code/markup examples linked if you're curious.

Here's another interesting example of the concept in action -- obviously you'd need Silverlight or Moonlight to view it.

None of this is anything you couldn't do with another technology -- it's just that Silverlight makes it fast/easy to throw together as a developer. I've never had a project that would make a particularly good use of this feature (or Silverlight at all, actually), but a giant map of the sky is pretty much the perfect case for it.

Emailed (I had already send Democratic Convention an Email months ago). I suggest everyone complain to such sites whenever they are encountered.

To: webmaster@hardrock.com
cc: customer_care@hardrock.com
Subject: Website is broken

Are you aware that by using Silverlight ONLY on your http://memorabilia.hardrock.com/, you have completely shut out many thousands of users, including me?

It is insulting to get a message that it is so "easy" and only takes a "second" to install Silverlight, when that is simply not true. I can't do that on my Linux home computer. Nor my OpenSolaris based laptop. I also can't get to the site on my Nokia N810 tablet nor on my Wii. In fact, I don't own a SINGLE machine here or at work that can view your site because you selected to use Silverlight.

I hope you give serious consideration to changing your site so everyone, no matter what Operating System they use, can easily view your site!

I have FF 2.0.0.14 and all I get is a black screen at http://memorabilia.hardrock.com/

So I followed the link to http://memorabilia.hardrock.com/ - even installed the Silverlight plugin, against my best judgment just to check out this "new and exciting" technology... and it just looks like fairly high rez images. While that's all fine and dandy... it's nothing spectacular to me.

Not to mention, when I went from http://memorabilia.hardrock.com/ to http://www.slashdot.org/ Firefox crashed. Way to go MS. Thanks for reaffirming my feelings about how fscking horrible every piece of software that comes out of your company is. /rant

So I followed the link to http://memorabilia.hardrock.com/ - even installed the Silverlight plugin, against my best judgment just to check out this "new and exciting" technology... and it just looks like fairly high rez images. While that's all fine and dandy... it's nothing spectacular to me.

Not to mention, when I went from http://memorabilia.hardrock.com/ to http://www.slashdot.org/ Firefox crashed. Way to go MS. Thanks for reaffirming my feelings about how fscking horrible every piece of software that comes out of your company is. /rant

I have to admit, some of the Silverlight sites I've seen so far have actually been kind of cool - the one that sticks out to me is the Hard Rock Memorabilia site at http://memorabilia.hardrock.com/

at least the Deep Zoom technology Microsoft has baked into Silverlight looks pretty cool - and it's already PC and Mac cross platform with Linux (via Moonlight) promised. I couldn't work out from the mobile announcements if it would be available on WinMo and S60 straight away, and I guess we'll have to waiting on the iPhone until Jobs gets his act together.

Watching the demo at the MIX conference for http://memorabilia.hardrock.com/ I was amazed how easy it was to zoom in and out through what would have been pages of data in a traditional sense, and hard to handle even with Ajax.

The live site is pretty cool, but the video at http://www.visitmix.com/blogs/News/Mix-Keynote-Hard-Rock-Demo/ shows that there is even more cool stuff waiting in the wings.... now we can design in the X, Y and Z planes with fractal page layouts. My head is already starting to spin!

I love the fact that in only a few months since 1.0 was released it's already gaining enough traction that people are advertising for skills and there's enough metrics to compare to Flash which has been around for 9 years. Makes me suspect a lot of the naysaying comes from Adobe fanboys!
What I've seen on Silverlight2 in the couple of days since the announcement it's great. Some of the demos in the keynote (there was a 3D car thing and did you see the http://memorabilia.hardrock.com/ sites that's gone line) and playing with some of the code samples it looks like it's going to be really easy to pick up.... my background is VB and then C#/.Net and I don't have to dumb down or reskill like I do every time I need to do something in Flash.

When our waitress showed up, her clothes reminded me of the place Jennifer Aniston's character worked. I asked her if she had to wear 15 pieces of flair.

She apparently had no idea what I was talking about. I was so disappointed. :-)