Forget Internet Explorer for Windows Mobile, Microsoft has borrowed technology from Sea Dragon, the imaging engine behind Photosynth, and has released a new web browser dubbed DeepFish. The idea behind Deepfish is giving the user the ability to view websites on their mobile phone just as they would view them on a desktop or laptop. Instead of changing the layout of the web page so that it fits onto the screen, which can make load times slower and majorly hinder the usability in finding content, DeepFish first presents the user with a general page layout of the whole site. From there, the user can use a resizable “zoom box” to zoom in to the page for a closer view. Zooming back out is just as easy. In DeepFish, the forward and back buttons can be used for navigating between the different views of the same page. Thanks to Sea Dragon’s multi-resolution view, this can all be done very quickly because DeepFish breaks down the larger web page into tiles which allow zooming. As well, a “queue map” feature speeds up the whole navigation when the user is already zoomed in on a section of the page. It’s free and available right now (but availability is limited) for any Windows Mobile version 5.0 and up device. “The code is actually written to be potentially cross-platform. But because we ship these rapid prototypes in live labs, we’re shipping it just for that operating system for now,” concluded Alex Daley, Senior Product Manager at Microsoft Live Labs. Download: DeepFish Source: NeoWin
