zoom zoom!

For me, following Aza Raskin on Twitter (@azaaza) has always presented a bit of a dilemma. On the one hand, you can usually count on links in his tweets to point either to deep insights into human/machine interactions or jaw-dropping demos of bleeding-edge web technology. On the other hand, they present a risk much like that which Alice faced when she followed the White Rabbit. Falling down one of Aza’s links can cost countless lost hours and cause terminal befuddlement for those of us whose day jobs aren’t writing code.

At first glance his recent tweet that a Javascript zooming library had been updated to support Firefox 4 looked like a pretty high-risk link to follow. Being a bear of very little brain, and one for whom most of my post IBM 7090 code-cutting education has been auto-didactic, I feared losing hours to back-filling my spotty Javascript knowledge just to understand how to replicate the demos in a real-world project.

But Zoomooz.js turned out to be a pleasant surprise. It’s an easy-to-use library that enables some useful on-screen manipulation. As a test, I tried applying it to a recent comic strip I did for a password project at Mozilla. Zoomooz quickly, and simply, made presenting an awkward image on the web much more engaging. Click the image and take a look.

It works on the modern standards-based browsers, Firefox (3.6 and 4beta), Safari, Opera and Chrome. IE doesn’t work, but maybe the forthcoming IE9 release will.

UPDATE: The latest version of Zoomooz.js works with IE9. The Zoomooz library now also powers another project of mine: Simple HTML5 Slides with an anonymous slide sync server.