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.