![]() David was interested in the potential market this would open up, and began instructing me on the basic algorithm the processing software used. Zoomifyer seemed like a natural match, but our server environment was Unix, and the image pre-processing software was written for MacOS X and Windows.Īfter discussing our interest, and our predicament, with David Urbanic, president of Zoomify, I suggested writing a version of the pre-processing software in a cross-platform language and releasing it under an open source license. We wanted an easy way to allow users to zoom in on the detail of the relatively high resolution, but otherwise normal, digital photographs we were taking of the process. I became aware of Zoomifyer in 2004 when I was working on a content managed Web site to instruct costume designers about stitching garments. Its a conceptually simple approach that works surprisingly well. It can do this because of a second piece of software that pre-processes images on the server, splitting them into tiles at various scales that the Zoomifyer viewer can then asynchronously request as needed to render the image in the browser. And I mean really high resolution images–files Gigabytes in size. Basically, Zoomifyer is a Flash based image viewer that allows you to quickly view high resolution images over the Web. Until its officially published, you can see a pre-print version of the article in PDF format from Cornell’s DSpace repository, which describes the software in gory, but largely non-technical, detail. I’m a little proud of it, partially because it was a project that stretched my abilities as a programmer at the time, which is always a rewarding experience, and partially because of the few projects I have released open source to date, its the only one that people have actually used. ![]() I recently wrote an article, due to be published in this month’s Information Technologies and Libraries (ITAL) journal, about a project I started a few years ago called Zoomify Image. But as usual, I sorely underestimated the time it would take to research and write that post, and combined with an unusually heavy work schedule lately, I am scrambling to create another lame post this week. That post is going to focus on basic user authentication and account management and take an introductory look at the django-registration contribution, and so, the post should also have more general applicability. I’m working on the next post in my series exploring Django, social networking applications and related technologies and issues.
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