OpenZoom SDK
After many months of hard, fun, frustrating & rewarding work, I am happy to announce the first public release of the OpenZoom SDK.
What Is the OpenZoom SDK?
The OpenZoom SDK is a free & open source toolkit for delivering high-resolution images and Zoomable User Interfaces (ZUIs) to the web and desktop. It is built on top of the Adobe Flash Platform which means you can use it in Flash, Flex, ActionScript & AIR projects equally well.
Showcase
Gigapixel Photography
GigapixelPhotography.com — Dugg almost 5000 times on digg.com.Copyright 2009, Gigapixel Photography
Alba Water
AlbaWater.com.vn — Stunning microsite for Alba Water.Copyright 2009, Alba Water
Is This Your Luggage?
Remix of the famous IsThisYourLuggage.com. Powered by OpenZoom.Copyright 2009, IsThisYourLuggage.com
Development
While the development of the OpenZoom SDK originally started in Subversion on Google Code1, I have meanwhile successfully and happily migrated it to Git and GitHub.
Having the OpenZoom SDK hosted on GitHub means you can browse the history, fork the project, watch its progress, download tags & branches or just quietly enjoy the power & simplicity of the Git version control system.
Community
The OpenZoom project has a thriving community over at Get Satisfaction with 82+ topics posted, 95+ people participating and me answering questions and addressing bugs in matters of hours.
Unless there’s something confidential about your project or you plan to ask me for my bank account for donations, I promise you’ll get a quicker answer on Get Satisfaction than by emailing me.
License
In order to encourage a broad (ab)use of the OpenZoom SDK, I’ve added two additional licenses under which you can use it. The OpenZoom SDK is now licensed under MPL 1.1/GPL 3/LGPL 3.
This licensing model was adopted from the famous Mozilla foundation and their products I love so much: Firefox and Thunderbird.
Although I’m not a big fan of lawyers either, I strongly recommend you carefully read the licensing terms of the available licenses, choose the one that suits you & your project best and consult with a lawyer if you have questions. You should never assume anything.
With the current licensing model I want to encourage all kinds of projects & products powered by the OpenZoom SDK while ensuring the constant evolution of OpenZoom SDK, including third-party improvements.
Should your project require a different kind of licensing scheme, please contact me at daniel@gasienica.ch.
Attribution
Besides publishing any source code as required by the license you chose, please attribute your use of the OpenZoom SDK by creating a context menu entry with the caption About OpenZoom... linked to http://openzoom.org/. Thanks.
Download & Documentation
Get the latest OpenZoom SDK, including source code, documentation, SWC library and 14 examples for Flash CS3, Flash CS4, Flex & ActionScript projects.
After you’ve downloaded the SDK, please read the OpenZoom SDK API documentation.
Follow
Keep up with the development progress of the OpenZoom SDK through Twitter and Facebook:
Donations
With a donation you can support the future development of the OpenZoom SDK and other OpenZoom projects. Thank you.
Stats
Footnote
[1] Thanks, Google, for not ever replying to my two emails and one tweet regarding my deep wish to get the much deserved openzoom project handle which is reserved by a #$*&#@ project on SourceForge (link purposely not included) which hasn’t even had a commit in four years.
23.08.2009
8:40
This is awesome! Congrats and thanx for the hard work!
24.08.2009
21:05
Very cool. I’ve done some experimenting on high-performance quality image resizing in Flash. I don’t have much time to contribute to OpenZoom but I’ve blogged about it and posted open source code for it that you’re welcome to borrow from. For what it’s worth.
07.09.2009
15:07
Jacob,
Thanks for your link. Your idea looks quite interesting, I’m pretty busy but I’ll have a closer look at it.
–Daniel
21.10.2009
12:31
Just a quick note to say that I’ve taken your advice and made a fork on github which patches in a way to draw zoomable images at runtime. This might not appear to be very useful, but the idea is that it allows us to visualise some very low probability events like winning the lottery. That’s the first example we implemented anyway. Can you find the lottery winner?
Not sure I’ve applied the patch at the correct level – I would have liked to define a drawing image type rather than defining a url syntax for drawings. Maybe it should happen in TileLoader rather than DisplayObjectRequest?
23.10.2009
5:56
Mike,
This is fantastic! I am really impressed on how you pulled this off. I’ve definitely thought of this use case – generating tiles at runtime through the bitmap API or other means. However, I never had the time to properly think it through. I’d imagine the most elegant way would be to have a special descriptor type which doesn’t rely on tile URLs but would rather directly return bitmaps, of course asynchronously. This will require some refactoring of the current architecture but your results certainly justify it.
Keep up the good work.
Regards,
Daniel