by Playfuls Staff |
29th March 2007
First there was Apple’s iPhone. Then there was Google’s mobile software platform. Now it’s Microsoft with ZenZui and a new mobile browser, called Deepfish.[more]
Clearly, the next big Internet bubble after the dotcom and the Web 2.0 is the mobile Web bubble. Software and hardware giants are heading towards our mobile phones, and everyone can figure out why, since there are a lot more mobile phones out there than there are PCs. And with technologies like UMTS, CDMA or HSDPA more and more available even in countries where the “wired” broadband is still in its infancy, it’s clear that the mobile Web is leapfrogging at an accelerated pace.
No wonder that Apple’s iPhone is intended to be a “breakthrough Internet device”, without any keyboard whatsoever, in order to facilitate the visualization of rich HTML pages, with zooming in and out. Now Microsoft shows off with its new
ZenZui Zooming interface, which also tries to bring the best out of web pages built for mobile phones.
But the Redmond behemoth didn’t stop here. After unveiling the new Windows Mobile 6.0 at 3GSM in Barcelona this winter, they are now “enriching” it with the latest invention coming out of the Live Labs, called Deepfish.
According to Microsoft, Deepfish is a new type of mobile information browsing experience, aimed at preserving the rich layout and full form of documents on mobile devices while providing novel ways of effectively navigating that content on small screens. Deepfish's unique interface enables you to zoom in and out of page, quickly getting to the areas you are interested in without screen length after screen length of scrolling. And because the layout is preserved, navigation menus, lists of search results or news headlines, and other elements that might have been bent so thoroughly to fit the usual single column layout that they were no longer legible can now be browsed simply and easily. A consequence of Deepfish's multi-resolution approach to browsing pages is that it loads a thumbnail of pages initially and then only what is needed for more detail when requested or in the background as you browse the initial the view, resulting in substantially quicker load times for most pages.
Of course, Deepfish will only be available for Windows Mobile-powered smartphones, requiring at least WM 5.0.
Deepfish runs on the technology borrowed from Sea Dragon, which is an incubation project at Microsoft resulting from the acquisition of Seadragon Software in February. Its aim is nothing less than to change the way we use screens, from wall-sized displays to mobile devices, so that visual information can be smoothly browsed regardless of the amount of data involved or the bandwidth of the network.
If this sounds a little vague, consider the following four "promises" of Seadragon:
1. Speed of navigation is independent of the size or number of objects.
2. Performance depends only on the ratio of bandwidth to pixels on the screen.
3. Transitions are smooth as butter.
4. Scaling is near perfect and rapid for screens of any resolution.
Dr. Gary William Flake, a Microsoft Technical Fellow and the founder and director of Microsoft Live Labs, said that : “With the Deepfish technology, we capture the full layout of the page and deliver it to the mobile device, resulting in an experience similar to that on the desktop.
Deepfish provides users with a full "as-designed" view of virtually any Web site on their mobile device and looks as you would expect it to on your desktop, allowing much more of the Web to be easily viewed on a mobile device than is possible today. The interface lets users zoom in and out on the parts of a Web page that interest them in an intuitive way, making it easy to use these large-screen formatted pages on a mobile device. On current mobile browsers, it can typically take up to a minute or more for a Web page to render, however the Deepfish architecture only loads the user-specified portion of the page, providing much quicker page-load times, as detailed information is only retrieved as needed or in the background.”
