Hi folks, here is another v3.5 viewer update from WebRotate 360. We also included a download link below to our latest stable limited beta script (build 122). As usual, just copy the imagerotator folder that you will find in the zip below and copy it over the one you have in your 360 viewer integration. And if you would like to apply this to your current SpotEditor installation, just find the imagerotator.zip under Program Files (x86)/WebRotate 360/SpotEditor (or ask us for updated Mac app if you’re on OS X), and then again just overwrite the imagerotator folder inside the zip with the one included in this download.

Updated list of features and fixes coming in 3.5:

• Full-screen option in JavaScript mode. As you probably know, we're discontinuing Flash support going forward with the 3.5 release and the only feature we were lacking in pure JS mode was the full-screen capability. Well, this became possible thanks to the recent enhancements in Firefox, Chrome, Safari and also to some extent in IE and Opera (the last two ones will show a full-browser view vs full-screen that we usually expect from Adobe Flash). This demo below uses a separate high-res image set in the full-screen mode (the same images that are used for the deep zoom), but you can also use your main set of images for the full-screen. This will remove the initial loading while in the full-screen mode and you can even pass a different xml configuration as a viewer parameter so that your full-screen can use completely different images and viewer settings.
• Support for responsive websites - now you configure your 360 views to stretch horizontally and vertically with the layout of your responsive websites that scale with the browser window or a mobile screen.
• Simple APIs that allow controlling most of the viewer functionality from your own script, allowing you to have your own control interfaces, override hot-spots, and more.
• Multiple 360 views on the same page. Many of you have asked about it and now it's done!
• Out-of-the-box v3.5 integration in Magento, BigCommerce, OpenCart, PrestaShop, WordPress.
• Revised SpotEditor.
  
• jQuery plugin support. It's now possible to use the 360 viewer as a generic jQuery plugin.
• jQuery 2.x support. jQuery team has released a slimmed down version that drops support for obsolete browsers and some of the functionality that we relied on in the previous releases. v3.5 has been updated to work nicely with the most recent jQuery releases.
• Inertia or gradual slowdown during drag release. There's also a couple of settings in SpotEditor that will allow you to adjust how fast and responsive the inertia should be.
• New hot-spot type to effortlessly create video hot-spots based on youtube videos.
• New hot-spot mode to allow configure the popups to always appear in a predefined (configured) position regardless of where the hot-spot indicator (those small circles) is positioned on a rotating product, helping you create a greater variety of professional looking 360 product spins.
• New hot-spot behavior that you can use to force the hot-spot activation on mouse click instead of hover / touch mode we had relied on before.
• New rotation mode that works on mouse hover vs mouse dragging with the left button pressed.
• Two more standard 360 viewer skins and one mobile skin with less controls and larger graphics.
• Support for custom mouse cursors that also includes a couple of free ones that you can play with.
• This release addresses the issue with Firefox white image flashing during rotation which was caused by this Firefox bug and was most prominent in the latest FF 17 releases. Similar issue in the latest Opera has been also addressed.
• The hot-spot issue on Android stock browser and Android Chrome where hot-spots wouldn't stay up under certain conditions is also fixed.
• Would like to see something else in 3.5, please let us know!
  

Please note that not all of these features will be available in the free version of WebRotate 360 Product Viewer going forward. We're also adding a slimmed down paid edition that will have some of the features but will not include more advanced options such as API's, multiple on-page 360 views, advance hot-spot modes, etc that will be only available in PRO+ and Enteprise. Pricing for PRO+ and Enterprise will be revised as well. Though all clients who have purchased PRO or Enterprise before the official v3.5 release will get the full-featured upgrade, so hurry up and get PRO today - we will be definitely releasing v3.5 in the next several weeks :)

Download limited build 122 » (scripts only / no software)

Demo 360 Spins »

Just ahead of the full 3.5 release of the next iteration of our WebRotate 360 Product Viewer, we would like to make available a limited 3.5 release to help addressing some of the pressing issues in our previous viewer releases, and specifically:

• Firefox 17.x-18.x image flashing issue caused by this Firefox bug.
• Popup hot-spots closing immediately after opening on some Android devices.
• Support for multiple viewer instances on the same web page (existing PRO customers only).
• Rotation inertia support (can be disabled in xml config if needed via the useInertia setting; please see included sample).
• Integration as a jQuery module (see included html for a sample).

If you urgently need any of these, please don't hesitate to download and test this limited 3.5 beta release.

To apply to your existing installations, just overwrite the contents of your imagerotator folder with the one included in this download. No changes to your existing xml should be necessary.

IMPORTANT: this new version doesn't support Adobe Flash, so if you are still using Flash mode via our previous 360 viewer releases, this drop will not work for you.


DOWNLOAD LIMITED BETA »

[DOWNLOAD LINK WAS UPDATED TO BUILD 122]

PS: here's a little bit more information (and a quick demo) about the upcoming 3.5 release: First Preview of Beta 3.5

Follow this simple guide to integrate WebRotate 360 Product Viewer into your Facebook pages. Once integrated, your Facebook visitors will be able to see extra tabs such as these ones on Pepsi's Facebook page. These tabs can be clicked on and expanded to show your 360 view presentations embedded inside your Facebook pages. It's important to understand that the Facebook tabs only allow embedding content that you host on your own or third-party servers.

Step 1 - Visit Facebook Developer page

Login in Facebook using your Facbook account, and visit this page: https://developers.facebook.com/apps

Step 2 - Create new Facebook App

Select Create New App in the top-left corner and give your new app a unique name. You can leave namespace field empty. Also for the purpose of this guide, we will use your own web hosting so you can skip on the Heroku hosting offer at this time.

Select continue, enter the Security Check Requirements and then Submit your new application. Once loaded you will see the Settings page for your new application.

Step 3 - Configure Basic Information

Since this application will only be used on your own Facebook page, you can skip most of the information on the Basic Info tab and proceed directly to the Page Tab section as is.

Expand the Page Tab section located on the bottom of the Settings page. Give your tab a name and select an image that will show on your Facebook page once this tab is finalized. The image can be a nice 360 arrow graphic with your product or showcase. Set Page Tab Width to wide (810px) to give your interactive content more space inside the Facebook page.

Step 4 - Create You 360 Content

Create your 360 view using WebRotate 360 SpotEditor inlcuded in the free download and copy a published folder via FTP to your server. To learn more about SpotEditor, please refer to this video tutorial.

Note the location of the auto-generated html page created by SpotEditor and ftp'ed to your server and enter the URL to this html file on your server under Page Tab URL and Secure Page Tab URL under Page Tab section on the Settings screen (use https:// instead of http:// at the front of the URL secured URL).

If you don't have an SSL certificate configured on the server where you are hosting this 360 view, the integration will still work for those visitors who don't have secured browsing enabled in Facebook, which is most of the Facebook users at this time. But you should consider configuring an SSL certificate to ensure this Facebook integration will work for everybody going forward.

Verify that the URLs point to your 360 view and select Save Changes.

Step 5 - Add New Page Tab

Now that you have finished with the configuration of your Facebook Page Tab, you can use this URL below to add the new tab to your Facebook page. But first you will need to replace YOUR_APP_ID with the APP_ID that Facebook assigned to your application (you can see it in the image above under Step 3).

http://www.facebook.com/dialog/pagetab?app_id=YOUR_APP_ID&next=http://www.facebook.com

Copy this URL and paste it into your browser and then select your Facebook page where you want to integrate the new tab. It should look like this:

Just a quick announcements - our brand new viewer Support Forum is now live. It's frighteningly empty right now but we are determined to make this board one heck of a helpful resource for all of us involved in using and developing this product. We hope that it will help gathering a wealth of information and various tips and tricks that otherwise go unnoticed or lost and can be a cause of frustration for those folks who are just starting with this technology.

We are ready to jump right in and make it work for you and share everything we know. Guest accounts are enabled, so don't hesitate to start a conversation!

Thanks to rmlowe for this great Flickr image of the Roman forum.

The title pretty much says it all - finally after some delays and broken promises we have something to offer to our Mac users! It doesn't look like your usual slick Mac app yet (coming later), but it gets job done and that's what matters. So if you are a Mac user, you can now create 360 views quickly and efficiently with our SpotEditor for Mac (beta) and benefit from the variety of unique features for 360 product photography and 3D modeling / CGI that we offer in WebRotate 360 Product Viewer.

Download SpotEditor for Mac (beta)

There are two prerequisites that you will need before SpotEditor can run on Mac which the app will warn you about if they are not installed already:

1. X Windowing Layer (X11), which is often already installed on older Mac machines under Applications->Utilities or bundled with Mac Install DVD (and also required if you run apps such as GIMP, Matlab or OpenOffice for example) but may need to be downloaded and installed manually if you are running newer releases of Mac OS. The XQuartz project provides this free software and you can download the most recent version of X11 app on their website here.

2. Free Mono Framework build 2.10.9_12 that you can download from Mono website using this link. To learn more about Mono project, please visit this page.

Simply unzip SpotEditor.app.zip on your desktop and you are ready to go (checkout this video that shows the software in action).

The very first run of SpotEditor may not be successful (due to a known issue with X11 on Mac) - simply run it one more time and it should be starting fine from now on.

We're looking forward to any feedback concerning this release as we want to ensure that Mac users have the tools they need.

There have been a few requests recently for a video tutorial for SpotEditor, and so we finally have our first video or rather a demo that shows SpotEditor v3 in action (switch to HD if you have enough bandwidth).

You can download the software on our 360 viewer download page.

This is just a quick announcement ahead of the official release of our first WordPress 360 Viewer Plugin. You can download the Beta module now! Or just click the image below.

[March 27, 2013 - New WordPress Integration for WebRotate 360 Product Viewer has been released. Visit this page for more information]

Follow these steps to install the plugin:

• Unzip and copy the webrotate360 folder from the archive to your wordpress/wp-content/plugins folder.
• Login to your wordpress admin and select Plugins on the left.
• Navigate to the webrotate360 row in the Plugin view and select Activate.
• Go to you page or post and you should see there a new section called WebRotate360 Configuration just below the page / post edit box.
• Switch to HTML mode on the page / post edit box and choose the right location for your 360 view within your layout, and add an empty <div> element with the id being webrotate360, and then style the div accordingly (width, height, borders, etc). You can use the following sample for a quick test: <div id="webrotate360" style="width:600px; height: 450px; border: 1px dotted #cecfd2; position: static"></div>
• Navigate to that WebRotate360 Configuration section below the post and enter a full URL path to webrotate360 viewer configuration XML file on your server that you would need to upload to your server by copying 360_assets folder that SpotEditor creates during publishing. The field looks as follows on our (local) server for a test 360 view: http://localhost:8080/wordpress/360_assets/sample/config.xml
• Publish or update the post / page and the viewer should show up inside this div you added in the HTML view.

There's one limitation at the moment that is mainly applicable to posts (not pages) in that you can't have more than one 360 view at any time on the same page (like in the blog view with multiple full posts on the same page one after another).

Let us know if any questions or suggestions!

There has been some new development with Chrome browser in that their latest releases do not want to load local xml files using asynchronous requests when testing pages locally on your computer and we do rely on such requests in our 360 viewer to load viewer configuration files. This is of course not an issue when files are accessed / loaded online from your webserver or from your local webserver (ie localhost / 127.0.0.1).

Chrome has a special key that they give developers and testers to avoid this issue in their local testing. This is very simple to add to your Chrome also. Just go to your desktop where you launch Chrome, then right click on the Chrome icon and then on the Shortcut tab you will see the Target field - just add the following to the end of the path in that field:  --allow-file-access-from-files  
 
Mine for example looks like this : C:\Users\...\chrome.exe --allow-file-access-from-files

This is a bit more convoluted on Mac OS which we haven't tried yet but you can see what's involved in this post.

Here's another free theme that we can use for your 360 product viewer. Existing customers may request it free of charge too. The name of the theme is Grey2.

Just ping us if you want to use it.