Deep Zoom Composer Released!

Hi everyone,
To coincide with the official launch of Expression Studio 3, we have released the first final version of Deep Zoom Composer as well. You can download it from the below location:


dzcicon Download Deep Zoom Composer

As always, please uninstall all existing versions of Deep Zoom Composer before installing the new version.

What’s New
This release pulls together a lot of the ideas that we had been previewing to you in bits and pieces for the past releases – some for over a year! The following sections describe a few of them in some detail.

Easily Create Interactive Deep Zoom Experiences
The Deep Zoom technology in Silverlight can be used to do a lot more than just allowing you to zoom in on high resolution images. Deep Zoom Composer makes it possible for you to create, without writing a single line of code, interactive content involving slideshows, inline navigation, web links, tooltips, and more.

slideshows

In our latest release, we really tied a lot of the loose ends together to create something that makes it really easy for you import your images and quickly add some of the functionality described earlier. You can learn more about some of these features by reading Janete’s blog posts on these features: Slideshow Support, Creating Menus, and Adding Links.

Analytics Tracking
This release of Deep Zoom Composer enhances the support for analytics tracking we exposed in our earlier release. Specify tracking URLs that will silently get called when you zoom in on an image or region. Don’t worry, we made all of this fairly customizable:

impressionProfie

Expect to see us blog more about this feature really soon.

Improved DeepZoomPix Player
The enhanced player Deep Zoom Composer uses has been ported over to the online DeepZoomPix service. You can now upload your Deep Zoom creations and view/share them with others while maintaining any interactivity you may have added to your images.

Below is a simple example of a Windows 7 wallpaper slideshow uploaded to DeepZoomPix directly from Deep Zoom Composer. Click on the image to see the example live on the DeepZoomPix site:

dzc_images 

Go Further (Easily) with your Exported Content With this release, we made it extremely easy for you to go from having a Deep Zoom composition to something you can edit in Expression Blend or Visual Studio. Based on a lot of your feedback, we expanded our default list of templates to include more templates that contain source files:

export_templates

The templates with source files range from ones that do everything for you such as our Behaviors and Classic templates, but one of our templates is nothing more than an empty project containing just a simple Silverlight Application + WebSite containing just your exported images.

To learn a bit more about our new exporting features, check out Kirupa’s two blog posts on this topic: Extensible Templates in Deep Zoom Composer and Improved Collection Support in Deep Zoom Composer

Revamped UI
One of the first things you may notice by looking at Deep Zoom Composer is the more refined look:

newUI

We took quite a number of design cues from the work our excellent designer on Expression Blend, Billy Chow did. We hope these subtle UI changes make it easier (and possibly more fun!) for you to work with your content.

Online Documentation
To make it easier for us to provide you with direct access to more frequently updated content, we have decided to point users to our online documentation which can be found here. The documentation on our new features has not been published yet, but it will soon. In the interim, you have the links to blog posts we have written posted above.

Support for Smooth Streaming
Smooth Streaming is an extension available to IIS web servers where you can easily stream content using adaptive streaming. Deep Zoom Composer now allows you to export your images into a form that is optimized for use on servers enabled with the smooth streaming technology:

smoothStreamingSupport 


We will continue to blog more about some of these new features, so keep watching this blog for original content or links to content on either of our blogs.

A Big Thanks to You All
It wouldn’t be fair to conclude this post without saying how grateful we are to all of you who have provided us with feedback and requests on things you would like to see. You all rock.

Of course, Deep Zoom Composer also wouldn’t be possible without the talented work of some brilliant colleagues spread out across Microsoft’s Israel Innovation Labs, Seadragon, and DeepZoomPix teams:

aboutDialog

See you all in our blog comments or on our forums.

Cheers!
Kirupa & Janete