Currently we only support TIFF and SVS with JPEG and JPEG2000 compression formats. I plan on supporting more file extensions (e.g. NDPI, MRXS) in the future, each with their own compression formats.
From the second sentence, "over a year and a half of preparations". The third paragraph gives a starting agreement date of 7 March 1978, and the successful flight was 16 September 1979.
Good catch! Yeah, it's about ~20 seconds right now with Flash 3.0. Definitely on the slower side.
I'm hoping to move to Flash Lite when it's out, that should help a lot. Also thinking about adding some better loading feedback so it doesn't feel quite so long while you wait.