Esotropiart

In my "spare time" I have been brainstorming and working on a new version of EsoGallery. All the code for the PHP script has been rewritten from ground zero, with very little original code remaining. EsoGallery, when finished, should be a very robust page, combining a variety of technologies. I plan to do some tasteful experimentation with AJAX programming to get the data delivered more quickly to the screen, and a little flash to pack a little punch in presenting the artwork. After a lengthy search, I found a very nice free Flash script that does almost exactly what I am looking for, namely zooming into my artwork to provide better representations of the images. I am hoping to eventually learn Flash well enough to make my own, more customized tool (especially visually, with better buttons and such), but for now this tool will do the trick quite nicely.

To give you a taste of how this image zooming tool will be utilized on EsoGallery, I am including a sample below. The tool bar, though not ideally attractive, is pretty self-explanatory. The triangle on top of the bar is a slider for rapid zooming. You can click and drag inside the artwork to move around at any zoom level. It works much in the same way as AJAX map applications, such as Google Maps. It's a thing of beauty if you ask me! Giving credit where credit is due, I am using a tool called Zoomify EZ