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.