KEY POINTS:
A long time ago, I lived in Holland (no, I'm not Dutch, but some of my best friends are). There was a thriving squatting scene back then.
While anyone with experience of London and its squats may conjure grime and cold at the word 'squat' back then there was a kind of tacit understanding that in the Netherlands, as such an overcrowded country, it was wrong to speculate on property by keeping it empty, so under certain conditions moving into certain properties was ... kind of tolerated.
The first 24 hours was the most dangerous, with owners having the right to evict 'krakers'. If they got through this period, they started to get rights which progressively put longstanding squatters in enviable positions.
Despite that, I was amazed when I visited friends in a newly squatted building to find workers busily reconnecting the gas, power and telephone lines.
"But it's a squat!" I yelped.
"Ja, but the council and services can make money from our power use and phone calls. So as soon as we're in, they come and reconnect everything."
The Dutch are particularly pragmatic, 'tis true, but so are the employees of Microsoft, it seems. Despite Microsoft's CEO Steve Ballmer's disdain of the iPhone - he has stated the iPhone had "no chance" of gaining serious market share, presumably up against the Windows Mobile platform - Microsoft has just released its first application for its rival mobile device operating system.
While Ballmer made it clear last year that Microsoft would stick with Windows Mobile, Apple's 'whole widget' approach seems to garner significant advantages.
Advantages enough for Microsoft engineers to take notice, anyway. Good engineering is good engineering, no matter who pays the tab, after all.
(Apparently large numbers of them attended an iPhone developer meeting held in Seattle recently.)
Seadragon Mobile uses Microsoft's Seadragon technology to smoothly zoom and browse large images - up to multi-gigabyte images, in fact. But why isn't it on Windows Mobile? Why has it been made available - free, what's more - for iPhone?
Alex Daley, group product manager for Microsoft Live Labs, told TechFlash's Todd Bishop that Seadragon Mobile just wouldn't be possible without the iPhone because it's the most widely distributed phone containing a graphics processing unit. The firm of Seadragon is being 'curated' (Ars Technica's word) by Microsoft's Live Labs since its purchase in 2006. The new Mobile iPhone app is a free demo meant to test the viability of the high-tech Seadragon photo-display technology. It lets you zoom smoothly in, out and around photos over the internet, regardless of bandwidth constraints or image size.
Seadragon stores images in multiple resolutions then delivers only the versions needed to present the view a user wants at any given moment.
The stated goal for Seadragon is to change the way people can use displays, from wall-sized down to cell phones.
I installed Seadragon and, over Grey Lynn 3G, it functioned perfectly, allowing a rather incredible degree of zooming-in from the linked image libraries. I looked at Nasa's night-lights pictures of the world plus the Asia collection (there are many others available). They first display a gallery, then you can zoom in and flick through the images up closer to see what's available, and finally inspect individual portions of images in great detail. It's pretty impressive, especially for a freebie.
Apparently other iPhone apps are in development at Microsoft's Redmond campus in Seattle. According to CNet, Microsoft's Tellme unit is expected to release a voice-activated search for phones, including iPhone and BlackBerry.
It must be 'live and learn' over there - especially 'learn' whatever Apple can do well today may one day be done better by someone else.
As Daley told Tech Flash, the goal "is to test whether this is really viable on the mobile platform in a way that we haven't been able to test before. The fact that we can give it away and share it with other people so they can validate that for us is great."
That's an oblique compliment for the App Store if ever I heard one.
