Day 2 at MIX has me talking to too many interesting people. VERTIGO’s presentation of Playboyarchive.com I’ll get to in a second, because yesterday I forgot to mention Sketch Flow. Sketch Flow is, at its heart, a collaboration feature for Blend. And the only way to really discuss it, is if you’ve seen some of the Sketch Flow sessions at MIX09.

Now that you’ve done that, we’ll continue.

The biggest benefit I see for agencies and services companies is the seamless integration, and to close the loop built in streamlined review mechanisms. Although Silverlight is a great technology and the obvious place Sketch Flow would help most, Sketch Flow will be useful for any type of web project. From presales through to design, it opens the door for rapid prototyping, with the cost of finding the best user experience drastically reduced. The documentation and auto data population features are so obvious and simple, yet dream features for developers. So big thumbs up for Sketch Flow.

Yesterday’s Live Services session had me falling off my chair. It was just too easy. If you aren’t looking at Mesh, you are being left behind… the possibilities are huge.

Second on the agenda was the VERTIGO presentation. Lots of sites developed in short periods of time, using some great Microsoft technologies such as Deep Zoom and Silverlight 3. KEXP, Rolling Stone magazine archive, March Madness, and the big one, www.playboyarchive.com. The presentation covered projects of catalogued back issues of magazines, radio station download managers, and interactive live video streaming. Such a broad consumer offering, based on the same core technology stack. The Playboy archive consists of over 2 million individual files that make up the multiscaleimage, coming in at 30GB of data. But what is even truly mind blowing, is the fact all text in the deep zoom is searchable, including the advertisements, the comics, and the articles.

To go over www.playboyarchive.com in a bit more detail (assuming you are still reading and haven’t clicked the link in the first few seconds), from the home page you click through to the DeepZoom based Silverlight application.

Then clicking on a cover takes you into an issue. Clicking on pages brings that page into full view.

And an example of searching, with full highlighting, deep linked to from the search results below.  (Just don’t ask how they afforded the army of chimps to highlight all the text.)

For those that feel dubious heading over and checking it out, the older 1960’s magazines are generally work safe for the first 60 pages, if not cover to cover.