First Look – Seadragon On iPhone
Finally Microsoft comes onto the iPhone. My initial thought was that Windows Live would be the first with a Google like Live Suite for the iPhone, but Live Labs is just kicking ass! Seadragon is the first iPhone app available on the App Store from Microsoft. It is beautiful and iterates 1 thing for sure, Microsoft is better at coding applications for alternate platforms as compared to Apple within the given parameters.
What is Seadragon?
Seadragon provides smooth, seamless browsing of vast quantities of visual information, on wall sized displays or mobile devices, regardless of the amount of data.
Right from the shiny silver icon to the pre-loaded content, this app is promising. It brings the much acclaimed Photosynth also to the iPhone. Another good thing that I noticed about Seadragon is that it loads data quite fast even over GPRS.
The featured content is divided into 7 categories, apart from which you can add your own Deep Zoom Content, Photosynth User (thereby his photosynths) & RSS feeds of Seadragon content. Deep Zoom essentially allows you to view albums in a much better way with all pan, zoom, tilt features. A gallery with animations if I were to say, screenshot:
Seadragon makes great use of iPhone’s pinch & zoom functionality along with cool images. The animations in Asia Vacation are slick. Under space category, the Orion’s Nebula; Splitzer’s Galaxy & Carina Nebula look stunning, Orion’s Nebula on the iPhone:
Apart from this, the City Lights is another really cool looking click though. It shows the the world map in lights glowing over countries. Here is India at night:
In conjuction with Last.Fm, Seadragon features – The World Music Scene. Here is what the music scene looks like: 
Now don’t ask me about the legend as I myself am looking for which color signifies what.
Seadragon also brings maps to the iPhone. What’s the big deal considering Google already has it? Here is the Road Map View of Seadragon and that of iPhone’s bundled Map application:
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Seadragon
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Maps |
Notice the pin on the Seadragon map, that is what it shows when I allow the phone to find my location and you can see what the bundled Maps application shows. Nuff said!
All in all, this is an interesting app, much better than of the some really useless applications. Adds a lot of fun to the iPhone.
For more info on Seadragon | Seadragon on the iTunes store
~Enjoy.
Glad you like it!
You have to zoom in deep into the colour thing to see the artist names. There’s no legend, just circles with the name of the artist on it. I figure bigger the circle, more popular the artist.
I like the way the map fades in. Nicely done. Oh and neat way of circumventing Apple’s anti-competitive policy with its maps view :)
And what’s with the crappy Maps screenshot? With GPS the blue dot shows you your exact location on the map. You have obviously grabbed that just as the map is locating you as I can see there’s a blurry portion on the side meaning the map has not even loaded fully.
@Ben Venik I love the app & am looking forward to some more good stuff.
@goobi the map is loading the image but has pin pointed where ever it could & trust me I waited for Maps to load till Seadragon came along.
As for the artist map – see the original webpage of the artist map for a more detailed explanation of what the colours and sizes mean:
http://sixdegrees.hu/last.fm/
Hey Tamás Nepusz! Thanks for dropping by. I had a feeling that the colors signified genres.
“Microsoft is better at coding applications for alternate platforms as compared to Apple within the given parameters.”
Give it a break. What parameters could you possibly be talking about??
This app doesn’t work on my iPhone. It just says “content loading” forever! That’s better than nobody!
Parameters=Apple’s restrictive policy ;)
And, content loading. Sorry to say that you got a really shitty internet connection. Stop blaming Microsoft for your service provider’s incompetence.
“And, content loading. Sorry to say that you got a really shitty internet connection. Stop blaming Microsoft for your service provider’s incompetence.”
+1
This app hasn’t been made for Dial up Internet ;) I doubt any app on the iPhone is made for that :P