Photography for Real Estate has a nice example of another Flash panorama viewer. Pano2QTVR is a paid-for app for Windows that can, among other things, create SWFs of panoramas. The big thing that these have over the CleVR Viewer is support for cubic panos. It’s pretty slick and the fullscreen stuff is good, though ours is unfinished at the moment, so will improve. Of course, what it doesn’t include is stitching and the sharing support (nor is it free). This leads on to another thing I wanted to mention: I have no problem with linking to our competitors – CleVR is free, so it’s not losing us money, and I don’t want anyone to think that this blog is just a place for me to push the CleVR stuff! So, please do add comments with examples of exceptional panorama software, whether viewers or stitchers.

Incidentally, the Photography for Real Estate blog has quite a few other interesting posts about panoramic photography, so it’s well worth a look.

While CleVR is mostly web-based, the Stitcher has always needed to be a desktop app. This is for a number of reasons. Primarily it’s because it needs access to the local filesystem so that you can import your photos. Also, it is processor intensive, so runs best as a native app.

However, it also needs to be tightly-integrated with the server, so that it can handle the uploading, authentication and similar. It also needs to be cross-platform, as we don;t have the resources to develop separate apps for Mac, Windows (and possibly Linux). The current system is pretty good – we use Java Webstart which allows us to launch from the browser, while giving us the access we need to the filesystem and native libraries. However, I’ve never been totally happy with it, and am always looking for a better solution. Luckily, there seem to be some on the way.

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While I was writing the CleVR viewer and hotspot editor I often found myself running up against limitations of Actionscript. One of the ones that bugged me the most was the inability to export jpegs from BitmapData. Luckily, it seems that some of these limitations will be addressed in Actionscript 3, and an excellent demo at ByteArray.org illustrates exactly the solution I was looking for. Bring on Flash 9!