Tuesday, February 17, 2009

Virtual Tour Viewer beta available

by StefanOlson via Stefan Olson's Blog on 2/17/2009 4:57:15 PM

I'm sorry it has taken so long, but the beta version of the virtual tour viewer for WPF is now available.  It demonstrates the splash screen that we have developed along with targeted commands, the Silverlight WPF library and the WPF panorama library we have written.  To download the tours, click here.  The available tours are all evaluation versions, the full versions can be purchased from our website www.palacevirtualtours.com

It has taken longer than expected because we have been busy working on our core product, HyperText Studio, a WYSIWYG help authoring tool. We are finishing version 5.1 which supports Windows Vista and Windows 7.

I would love to make the Silverlight version of the virtual tour viewer available, but unfortunately I have been unable to find an affordable tool to provide obfuscation functionality for Silverlight.  For the WPF product we use .net reactor (http://www.eziriz.com/) but they don't have a Silverlight compatible version yet.  I suspect one may not be too far away as there are references to version 4 of .net reactor on their website.  If anyone knows of an affordable tool for doing obfuscation for Silverlight, please let me know.  As soon as I can get an obfuscator that works I will make the Silverlight version available so people can see it for themselves.

We are continuing to work on preparing the Silverlight WPF library and targeted commands for release.  Unfortunately it is quite a big job to prepare the demo application, so I'm not sure what the timeframe will be.

The panoramas are only available in the Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle tours (in the Grand Staircase room in both tours).  They use the panoramas that were released on the royal web site on Friday.  If an Internet connection is available, the panorama is downloaded from the Internet and made available in the tour.

The virtual tour viewer uses a slightly updated version of the splash screen code that we have previously made available.  I will be adding that update to the splash screen page in the next couple of days.

We'd love to your feedback on the virtual tour viewer, feel free to contact us via the comments on this page or via e-mail.

If there are things you see in the tour that you would like an explanation on how we implemented it, please let me know.

If you have not installed the .net framework 3.5 on your computer the installer will attempt to download the appropriate files from our website to install it on your machine.  However because InstallAware, the maker of the installation program we use do not provide 64 bit versions of the framework, it will not be able to install the framework on vista or x64 windows 7 x64, so in this case it is a substantially better idea if you're able to install the .net framework before installing the demos.  If anyone knows of an installer that does provide x64 versions of the framework installer (and better support!), please let me know.

Known issues in the WPF Virtual Tour Viewer

Because of the complexity of fixing these issues, it's very unlikely these will be fixed before the release, apart from the icon.

• The mouse wheel doesn’t work correctly on the picture control
• Clicking on the Search button in the description tab will display the find box, but you are not able to put the focus in the text box. This may be a .net framework bug, but I haven’t yet investigated
• It is not possible to see either the caret or the selection in the find box on the main toolbar. Unfortunately the .net framework doesn’t allow you to customize either of these settings so I will have to write my own textbox from scratch (or hopefully this will be fixed in the .net framework 4.0)
• The icon needs to be redesigned
• Printing a description currently produces a blank page.

Download links

Buckingham Palace Virtual Tour (48Mb)

Windsor Castle Virtual Tour (32mb)

Versailles Virtual Tour (59mb)

…Stefan