We’re very sorry about the recent downtime. This was due to some problems on our primary server that required a trip to the datacentre. It should be all working again now. Please contact me if there are any further problems.

I’ve been trying to track down the source of a bug in the Stitcher. The issue was in the welcome screen, which has states for logging-in, creating a new account etc. The problem was that whenever the login state had been active, moving to another state would throw an error, The supplied DisplayObject must be a child of the caller. After much trial and error I worked out that it was down to the ControlBar that held the login buttons. It seems that the issue is that when Flex adds a controlbar, it doesn’t actually add it as a child of the container in which you place it. This means that when you then try to remove it, it’s in the wrong place. It seems to be related to this bug, which was apparently fixed last year. I’m going to have to produce a minimal version and see if I need to submit a bug report and/or patch.

Anyway, after changing it to use an HBox it’s working. I’ve uploaded a new version of the CleVR Stitcher with that fix and a few others. You can install it from that box in the sidebar (unless you’re reading this via the feed).

We’ve just launched a new customer support and discussion community, powered by Get Satisfaction. This should be a great way for us to answer users’ questions, as well as for users to ask each other. Hopefully it can also be used for discussions about panoramic photography in general. Head over to our support page for more details, or go straight to the Get Satisfaction community.

The CleVR Stitcher uses EXIF tags embedded in the source images to calculate how the images should be warped before stitching. There is a hopeless lack of standardisation in these tags, so we have to use several different techniques to support photos from different camera manufacturers. Sony is the worst, as they do not provide enough information to enable us to make the calculation. This means that we have to use a different method to make an educated guess. However, a bug in the previous version of the Stitcher meant that Sony images would not stitch at all. Thanks to a bug report by user benbreeze this is now fixed. I have also fixed another bug in the self-updater. You can upgrade to the new version here.

All of the panoramas on CleVR, as well as swfs and thumbnails are hosted on Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3). This has always been very reliable for us, but today they’ve been having a major outage. Currently it has been down for around 90 minutes, and they’re not giving an estimate of when it will be fixed. We have moved everything to our other servers, so things should be working fine. However, some people may experience issues where the old DNS information has been cached by their servers. Please bear with us, and it should update within an hour or so. Of course, if Amazon fix it then it will start working before that.

For those who are interested, the status information from Amazon can be found here.

If this image works, then Amazon s3 is working again:

Update 1510 UTC: Seems it’s all up again now. We’ll switch back to S3 in a bit when we can be confident it’s staying up.

Earlier today, new panorama uploads were not working. This is now fixed. Sorry for the inconvenience!