Deep Zoom

This piece of software enables you to create a Silverlight application which allows you to make, essentially, an extremely large image containing smaller images within it. By extremely large I mean 4 billion pixels. Pictures can be ‘hidden’ at first until you zoom into a level where you can make out that there’s another picture there. This can continue through a number of other images. Quite a cool bit of software really. At just 5mb to download it’s far from large.

One very good example is the Hard Rock Cafe Memorabilia collection.

Community Clips

If you’ve ever seen a screencast but not managed to be able to reproduce something of quite the same quality then this is for you. You could use this to have as a demo within a presentation. Eliminating technical hitches, however I much prefer the on-the-fly style at MSFFF.

It seems a fast, easy to use, way of making a screen cast. Just a couple of clicks and you’re away. The video’s produced are small but still retain their quality. They can then be edited within Windows Live Movie Maker.

You can check out my first use of it recording some ‘gameplay’ in the beginnings of my first XNA project with @Daniel_Parker. (sorry for poor intruding sound).

 

Internet Explorer Accelerators

This is something cool. You know when you’re browsing the internet and you see an event and think that you’ll have to look up where that is on a map? Well this revolutionises that. Simply by highlighting text you’re a click away from being able to look the text up in numerous ways ranging from finding a product for sale on Ebay or even an in-window mini map of an address!

It certainly accelerates the browsing experience. I think I’ll give it a try next time I have to research something online. If the default accelerators don’t quite have what you’re looking for its easy to add more from the Gallery.