Microsoft releases first iPhone application, Seadragon

by Ross Miller, posted Dec 14th 2008 at 3:04PM

After some rumblings this past March, Microsoft has now officially joined the iPhone development community with Seadragon Mobile, a free app that lets you "infinite zoom" gigapixel-sized images. Although Seadragon is available as a Silverlight application on the desktop, Microsoft isn't bringing Silverlight to the iPhone, so don't get your hopes up -- this is probably just a custom implementation. We're itching to see if the company has any more apps in the pipeline -- we'll wish for an Office editor, but expect a Minesweeper variant.

[Thanks, Mikkel]

Filed under: Handsets, Apple, iPhone OS

Tags: app store, AppStore, iphone, ipod touch, IpodTouch, microsoft, microsoft live labs, MicrosoftLiveLabs, seadragon, seadragon mobile, SeadragonMobile, silverlight

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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Neutral

o.kruetzmann @ Dec 14th 2008 6:00PM

Hey, Microsoft...Mozilla called: they want their naming scheme back.

Highly Ranked

jordache mcqueen @ Dec 14th 2008 6:05PM

So why isn't this available on MICROSOFT windows mobile? not that i really care cause it doesn't seem worth a damn, but after watching iphoners get app after app from different companies it would be nice to at least receive a first party app for my touch pro before the damn iphoners.

Lowest Ranked

GoodWill8675 @ Dec 14th 2008 10:12PM

Were just better. That's why.

Neutral

Ray Lopez @ Dec 15th 2008 12:33AM

Or maybe Microsoft is testing the development process of an iPhone application and researching why this process is successful.

Neutral

NuShrike @ Dec 15th 2008 5:46AM

Probably because it needs a good FPU/GPU and WM is so fragmented and screwed up right now they can't even prevent vendor companies like HTC from shipping devices without video drivers (ref Kaiser).

None of the latest HTC WM devices have a decent GPU/FPU/driver because they're using Qualcomm, Microsoft doesn't ship WinCE OS with native hardware acceleration for GPU/FPU, WinCE OS doesn't ship with hardware acceleration for the latest ARM cpus available, and MS doesn't have any compilers that support the latest cpus.

iPhone with gcc, vertically integrated OS, designed all the hardware themselves, no vendor contract issues, obviously wins here.

Neutral