Microsoft Unveils First iPhone Applications

• Posted: Thursday, December 18, 2008
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• Author: pradhana
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• Filed under: iPhone, Microsoft

By Jason Ankeny

Microsoft announced the launch of Seadragon Mobile, an application optimized for archrival Apple's iPhone. Developed by the Microsoft Live Labs unit, Seadragon Mobile is a free demonstration app enabling users to zoom in and out of web photos regardless of bandwidth constraints or image size, storing pictures in multiple resolutions and only delivering the elements the user wishes to see at a particular moment in time. The Seadragon technology is a component of Microsoft's Photosynth browsing program--it previously surfaced in apps like TouchWall, and it's also present in the Silverlight platform. Microsoft acquired developer Seadragon Software in early 2006.

So why would Microsoft launch an iPhone app? Microsoft Live Labs group product manager Alex Daley tells TechFlash his team wants to make sure the Seadragon technology spans across multiple devices and platforms. "The iPhone is the most widely distributed phone with a [graphics processing unit]," he said. "Most phones out today don't have accelerated graphics in them. The iPhone does, and so it enabled us to do something that has been previously difficult to do. I couldn't just pick up a BlackBerry or a Nokia off the shelf and build Seadragon for it without GPU support." [FierceMobileContent]

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