There’s a great article over on Tucows about how to use CleVR to create and share panoramas. In fact, I’d go as far to say that it’s better than our own documentation! Go and take a look, and if you like it then Digg the article.

The hotspot editor on CleVR.com has now been updated so it’s the same as the one in the new Stitcher. It looks quite similar to the old one, but it’s a rewrite done in Flex instead of Flash (if you don’t know what that means, don’t worry). It is however pretty much bug-free now: the old one could be a bit unstable at times. Now that it’s running off the same codebase as the Stitcher, any remaining bugs should be fixed quickly. As ever, comments and bug reports are appreciated.

If you haven’t tried adding hotspots to your panorama, give it a try. If you’re logged-in, you’ll find a button on the panorama page to edit them. Hotspots let you add another level of interactivity to your panoramas. You can create areas within the panorama that can be clicked to give more information or to move to another location. You can display text, images or even Flash files such as Youtube movies. Links to other locations lets you move around an area - for example, you could click on a doorway to move to a panorama inside a building or in a different room.

I’ve just pushed out an update to the CleVR Stitcher which is probably the biggest improvement yet. Loads more features, loads of bugs fixed and a much nicer interface. You will find all the details here: CleVR panoramic photo Stitcher. As always, it’s totally free. Let me know what you think.

I decided to enter it into the Adobe AIR Developer Derby. It’s hard to judge its chances, but I’d love to win that squishy stress ball. If they’re going on innovation, I’d say they’d be hard-pressed to find an AIR app that is pushing the boundaries more than this. In terms of using AIR technologies, we’re using almost all of them! We’ll wait and see…

Today I committed the latest load of updates to CleVR in time for our official launch. Tell your friends, tell your family, tell your enemies! I’m happy to see that our launch has already been picked up by several sites, including MetaFilter and my favourite photography blog, Photocritic. I’m rushing about like crazy at the moment fielding feedback and trying to patch up bugs as they appear. Please bear with me as we get into our stride as we get our first load of heavy traffic. One issue that has come up is the Hotspot Editor, which has a few strange bugs which I’m trying to fix. I’ll get the update out ASAP, but in the meantime most of them can be fixed by reloading the page.

I’ve been shamefully lax in updating this over the past couple of months. The reason is that I’ve been working on a big and exciting upgrade to the site. When this goes live in the next week we’ll be ready to properly launch the site. I’m very glad to see how many new users we’ve had even at this pre-release stage. Hopefully when the new features are in place it will be even more useful and we’ll have a lot more sign-ups and a lot more of you creating panoramas.

Watch this space!

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!