Deep Zoom Composer has been Updated: Documentation and Bug Fixes!

Yesterday, we released another update to Deep Zoom Composer, and you can download it from the following location:


dzcicon Download Deep Zoom Composer

NOTE: Please uninstall any older versions of Deep Zoom Composer prior to installing this new version.

This release was really about fixing the bugs that many of you have found as well as addressing some major shortcomings in the app. One of the biggest shortcomings was the lack of comprehensive and updated documentation….until now!

Updated Documentation
Thanks to some great work by Chris Lohr and his team, Deep Zoom Composer has some really informative (and nifty-looking) documentation in the form of a User Guide:

dzc_userGuide2 

The User Guide covers topics ranging from what Deep Zoom is to how to actually use Deep Zoom Composer to create your own content.

You can access the User Guide inside Deep Zoom Composer by going to Help | User Guide or by pressing F1.

Random Trivia The photographs used as examples inside the user guide were taken by Chris himself.

Improved Memory Handling
One of the areas we have made and continue to make investments in is memory usage. Dealing with many high-resolution images on an interactive design surface is a challenge, but Deep Zoom Composer should now allow you to compose more images than you could in the past. We aren’t quite there yet, so expect future releases to address them in greater detail.

Improved Project Support
For the past few releases, we made some major changes to our project structure and how the DZPRJ files are written and opened. Unfortunately, for some of you, those changes meant your older projects were no longer opening. We have tried to fix as many of those incompatibilities in this release, and a big thanks to all of you who have have e-mailed us your projects for testing.

If you find that your projects are still not opening, we apologize. To help us out, do e-mail your .dzprj files to kirupac[at]microsoft.com to aid in troubleshooting.

Updated Seadragon Ajax Templates
In our previous release, you got to use Deep Zoom Composer to export your content to Seadragon Ajax. The approach that was used then was to have you upload the JS libraries along with your images to the server. That was a bit messy. In this release, we are deferring all JS downloading to the Live Labs team’s seadragon.com server itself, so you will no longer have to upload a large quantity of JS files.

Numerous Little Fixes
Besides the major changes listed above, we made many little tweaks that are too many to publish and list here. Some of them are bigger such as using an updated version of DeepZoomTools.dll, and some of them are less big like the numerous wording and string changes made.

If you have any questions or comments, feel free to comment below or post on our forums :)

Cheers!
Janete, Kirupa