Microsoft unveils its first iPhone app
Published: 15 Dec 2008 08:25 GMT
Engineers in Microsoft's Live Labs have released the company's first application for Apple's iPhone — even before making it available on Microsoft's own mobile platform.
Seadragon Mobile, which was added to Apple's App Store on Saturday, is a free image-browsing app that allows users to quickly 'deep zoom' images while online, and is intended to demonstrate what is possible with a mobile platform.
Seadragon is the backbone of Microsoft's Photosynth, which allows users to take a grouping of photographs and stitch them together into a faux 3D environment.
Other iPhone apps are reportedly in development at Microsoft: the company's Tellme unit was expected to release Microsoft's first iPhone app in the form of a voice-activated search for a variety of phones, including iPhone and BlackBerry. A Microsoft representative in September told ZDNet UK's sister site, CNET News.com, that a public version of that program is likely to be released in a few months.
Microsoft explained why the iPhone version of Seadragon has been released before a Windows Mobile version is available. "The iPhone is the most widely distributed phone with a [graphics processing unit]," Alex Daley, group product manager for Microsoft Live Labs, told TechFlash. "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."
Credit: Microsoft releases its first iPhone app from CNET News
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