Everything Old Is New Again

Oliver Breidenback at O’Reilly’s “Inside iPhone” blog notes the release of Seadragon from Microsoft, a new iPhone app:

Seadragon is a viewer for ultra-high-res images. Imagine a contact sheet with all your 15,992 iPhoto library pictures filling the iPhone screen. You start to zoom in, zoom in, zoom in until a single photo fits the screen. Then you zoom in more and another bit until one pixel fills the screen. Quite impressive

Maybe I’m just jaded, but then I’m a guy with I don’t know how many copies of old xRres disks from my old Director bundles and a long memory:

Shockwave for xRes

Objective

Shockwave for xRes enables users to view, pan, and zoom large image files on the web quickly, based on xRes technology. Shockwave for xRes is basically a CGI script for Windows NT and Unix web servers that is available free for downloading in the Macromedia Developers Center. The Mac plug-in and Afterburner are available for end users; however, Mac web servers are not supported yet. The CGI scripts for Macintosh web servers and Windows 95 web servers are still under development. Microsoft Internet Explorer is currently not supported. Considering the fact that this is a beta plugin, there is no direct support from Macromedia Technical Support, and the user must rely on the information available on the web.

Copyright 1996 Macromedia Inc.

Last updated: September 26, 1997

Created: Before June 25, 1997

As if anyone needed the dates to know that was from a while back when the page has words like xRes, Afterburner, and Windows 95 on it.