Some online services are more interesting than the others, and today’s Zoom.it could be considered anything from “pointless” to “outstanding,” but this has nothing to do with the fact that some people hate Microsoft, while others love it. Being able to zoom into various images isn’t something new, but with Zoom.it, at least you won’t have to download them and then do the zoom thing using your favorite image editor…
When it comes to using Zoom.it, everything’s pretty straightforward: you add the link to the image you want to mess with, press the Create button, wait for a while, and finally enjoy the results (or not, depending on your taste and the image used). Hey, there’s even more to this – you also get a short URL to share with your friends and you can even embed the viewer directly onto your own site!
Obviously, programmers won’t get much out of Zoom.it, at least as I described it so far, so let’s add a cherry on top of this cake: a web API, located at api.zoom.it, for programmatic access to Zoom.it, is also available. It supports both XML and JSON (as well as JSONP) and “exposes the underlying Deep Zoom Image and surrounding metadata, which you can use to power your own apps and experiences.” Pretty cool, huh?
It seems that, no matter if they like it or not, the people from Microsoft started to mess with the Web-related stuff more and more, and I can’t say this is a bad thing – at least not until they become the dominant player on the market, and I don’t see that happening anytime soon… 😉
