A few minutes ago, we reached a small milestone: our 1000th panorama, and it’s a beaut. See it below. We’ll soon be on our thousandth user too, which is nice. We have some big news coming up over the next week, so stay tuned.

A couple of less positive things: we appear to have a bug in the stitcher which is causing problems for Mac users with PowerPC. Intel-based Macs seem to be unaffected, as does Windows. This seems to have crept in when we updated our code-signing certificates a few days ago. We’re working on it and hope to have a solution soon.

Update: The PowerPC problem is now fixed. G3, G4 and G5 users rejoice!

Likewise, there is a problem with signups for users with Yahoo email addresses. The Yahoo servers don’t seem to be playing nicely with our password emails, with a lot of them still trying to be delivered. We’re in contact with Yahoo and trying to get it resolved. In the meantime, either try to sign up with a different address, or if you use a Yahoo address and you don’t receive a mail, contact us with the username and email that you used to sign up and we’ll sort it out for you.

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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