Two and a half weeks ago, Redbug finally made the move to the Murata Business Center in Carlisle, PA. We have some new contact information:

Redbug Technologies, Inc.
453 Lincoln Street
Suite 102
Carlisle, PA 17019

Phone: 717-703-1168
Fax: 717-249-5444

We are still getting settled in here, but overall we are quite happy with our new headquarters. This summer is shaping up to be pretty exciting with the announcement of a new product, Mapwing Creator. Also, my sister, Julie, has joined the Redbug Team. She is going to be building tours of the different places she visits. Check out her blog at http://www.redbugtech.com/weblogs/julie.php.

Next week, I'll begin regularly updating my blog again, so stay tuned!

Since our big move, there has been renewed focus on Mapwing Web Viewer. Right now, the Web Viewer requires a PHP loader file to help process our virtual tours. This is because Flash and Actionscript 2 do not support binary data loading. PHP is great, and it gets the job done. But, as we have seen, some web servers do not have PHP installed.

Thankfully, we have developed a solution this problem, and later this summer we will be releasing a version of Mapwing Web Viewer that does not require PHP. In fact, if you can display a Flash SWF file in a web page, you will be able to place Mapwing virtual tours on your web site!

The second advantage to removing PHP is that we can now offer a local Flash virtual tour. In other words, you can export a tour that can be viewed either on a web page or opened from a disc or hard drive. This tour format will only require viewers to have Adobe’s Flash Player 7 (or above) and a web browser. According to Adobe, over 97% of computer users worldwide already have Flash Player installed, and nearly all of them are Flash Player 7 or 8.

This makes Mapwing Creator and Mapwing Creator Pro two of the most flexible applications for creating virtual tours. While the creation software is presently Macintosh only (Mac OS X 10.3 and above), Mapwing tours can be viewed by all major operating systems: Windows, Macintosh, and Linux. Cross-platform compatibility is made possible through Flash.

The new version of Mapwing Web Viewer will have other enhancements including an improved help system, a more intuitive design, and several more that I will discuss in the coming weeks. The new version will probably ship as v1.6 alongside Mapwing Creator ($39) and Mapwing Creator Pro ($295) later this summer.

It’s been a long time coming, so I am happy to report that beginning with version 1.6 Mapwing Creator, Mapwing Creator Pro, and Mapwing Viewer will all be Universal Binary applications. In other words, they will run natively on Apple’s new line of Intel based Macs.

Mapwing has been built using Apple’s Xcode developer tools since day one. This made the jump to Universal Binary pretty easy. In fact, it was only this week that we ran our software on a brand new 20in Intel iMac. After only an hour of tweaking, the Mapwing apps were running great.

For those with Intel Macs, be sure to check out 1.6 when it releases!

One thing that has been frequently suggested is the ability to connect Mapwing virtual tours together. Right now, Mapwing Creator Pro can build a tour with up to 1000 points. That’s pretty substantial, and I’m not aware of any user reaching that limit. However, a virtual tour of that size can become difficult to manage. For example, if a section of it is updated, the entire virtual tour must be uploaded to the web server.

Enabling Mapwing tours to be linked together solves this problem along with several others. First, it enables one to build a tour of an infinite size, everything from a home to an entire city...maybe even larger! Second, it helps make tours more modular and maintainable. For instance, Redbug built a tour of Dillsburg, Pennsylvania. We have also shot several tours of buildings in Dillsburg. By linking tours together, we can keep these as separate files while maintaining a singular virtual tour experience.

In order to accomplish tour linking, we will be adding a new type of hotspot. The Tour Hotspot will enable a user to specify a region on a view that, when clicked, will load another Mapwing tour. The hotspot will require users to specify what tour file is being linked as well as a startup point, view direction, and map zoom level for the linked tour.

Tour linking will come with an added bonus - hyperlinking directly into a virtual tour. What exactly does this mean? Well, consider how Google Maps enables users to get a URL directly to a location. Mapwing tours will soon have a similar behavior. Using Mapwing Web Viewer, content creators and end users will be able to retrieve a URL that describes their present location in the tour.

This is going to allow Mapwing users to do some pretty amazing things. One of the most notable is integrating their virtual tours into services like Google Earth. Using Google Earth, people are already uploading 3D exteriors for specific buildings on the planet’s surface. Many of these are done using an application called Sketchup. Soon, they will be able to shoot first-person virtual tours for their locations. Then link to these from Google Earth. This way someone can zoom in and see a building modeled 3D, then click on it to explore a walkthrough Mapwing tour of the location. Pretty cool, huh?

We think so too.