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Animate the Heck Out of Your 360 Product Images With Our New GIF Support

August 07, 2014
As promised last week, we just released a new build (764) of WebRotate 360 Product Viewer 3.5 featuring our new animated GIF publishing.

So why did we add animated GIF publishing? There're two main reasons..

Often you would want to quickly share a draft of your 360 product spin with your client or your boss and there's no easier way to do that than just to publish your 360 view into an animated GIF and attach it via email as a normal image. With the high quality GIF publishing that we introduced in the software, this is a very handy tool for 360 product photographers and their clients.

Second is, of course, the social sharing and product marketing for everybody involved in 360 & 3D product views. The popularity and wide support of animated GIF format on the web makes it so conventent to market your products or your services by just sharing your work via animated GIFs. And if you haven't heard, Twitter just announced last month that they had started supporting animated GIFs in their timeline, and Google+ has been supporting it for a while now. So imagine sharing a complete spinning product view of your newly released or stocked product by simply sharing it on G+ or Twitter or in your blog post by just uploading your 360 view as a simple GIF image.

All watermarking, batch crope & resize, image filters, levels, etc is applied to your animated GIFs in exactly the same way as with the javascript 360 product spins in our software. Playback speed control, image quality, rotation direction and the bounce effect are also supported and work and configured using the same controls as our usual 360 degree views.

Also in this build:

1. Reload API was finally included in the publishing API template. Now supports callback parameter so you can be notified when reload is complete. And you can also pass an image index to the reload call to load and show a specific image first upon reload. This can be quite useful when "re-loading" extra colors of the same product in-place as the product would remain at the same angle / position upon reload in any case.

2. Also introduced our new Empty skin which is basically just that, an empty skin with no toolbar controls or anything else other than the 360 degree images. We hope that the users of our new API will find it helpful as they create their own user interfaces and don't need to worry about the default graphic elements that come with our skins.

3. We had an issue where there was a limit to the maximum crop that could be applied to the images and which was equal to the quarter of the 360 image width or hight and which didn't always work for some photographers (as they don't want to bother about the amount of crop left on the images during 360 degree product photography). So now you don't have that fixed crop limit as you can finetune it with the small arrow on the crop panel as per this image.

Other recent features and additions in v3.5:
PS: project and configuration files are backwards compatible so your older 3.5 projects should open and work fine. Also, you don't need to reinstall X11 or Mono if using Mac - just copy SpotEditor app to your Applications or Desktop. If you have purchased the product before, please re-download and reinstall using v3.5 download links you should have received from us previously.

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Control Your 360 Product Spins With Our New API

July 15, 2014
New build (606) is now available! With this new update, we finally release the first version of our API (JavaScript programming interface).

This API allows overriding most of our built-in 360 viewer functions so you can now control your 360 product spins using your own page elements via your own script. Just hide our default toolbar controls and reimagine your own design and interface they way you like.

And it's very simple to use - just publish your 360 spin using our new publishing template called JavaScript API and play with the simple calls that we have already hooked up for you:
- zoomToggle
- hotspotToggle
- startLeftArrowRotate
- startRightArrowRotate
- stopArrowRotate
- playbackStart
- playbackStop
- playbackToggle
- openFullScreen
- getCurrentImageIndex
- showImageByIndex
- showImageByDelta
- showFirstImage
- showLastImage
- jumpToLabel
- playToLabel
Also in this build:
- Fixed viewer touch control on hybrid Windows 8.x touchscreen devices that allow control via mouse and "touch".
- Fixed intermittent issue with FTP uploads where on occasion it would stop uploading if large image files were used.
UPDATE - August 7th, 2014: build 764. More new features and fixes:
PS: project and configuration files are backwards compatible so your older 3.5 projects should open and work fine. Also, you don't need to reinstall X11 or Mono if using Mac - just copy SpotEditor app to your Applications or Desktop.

DOWNLOAD
New WebRotate 360 Product Viewer Build (3.5.1.550 Beta)

June 20, 2014
Happy to announce the new build (550) of our 360 product photography software with a couple of interesting additions. If you have purchased the product before, please re-download and reinstall using v3.5 download links you should have received from us previously. If you haven't received the links for v3.5 PRO downloads, please email us to support at webrotate360 dot com or purchase the PRO license here. If using the free version of the product, please download the new build here.

This build features several new hotspot actions in addition to the one we had there for a while which was just opening or browsing to a URL on click / tap inside a hotspot:

LABEL ACTION

You can create lables for any number of your 360 degree product photos under the Images tab inside the List section and then assign such labels to the Hotspot actions on the Hotspot form under Actions as per the following screenshot. Note that you can either jump to a label (image) on click / tap or play to a label with a configurable playback speed which is called Period. Period represents the number of seconds it takes to make a full 360 degree spin. As with any hotspot actions, it's possible to assign such action to either rotating (dynamic) hotspot or a static one that can be positioned anywhere inside your 360 product view.

To create a new label just double-click on any thumbnail image under Images->List and enter its name:

CONTROL ACTION

This action allows you to assign any of the existing toolbar functions we currently have (playback, full-screen, zoom, etc) to your hotspot actions which can be then activated by user on mouse click / tap inside the hotspot. Same as with the label actions, this hotspot action can be assigned to a dynamic or static hotspots, allowing you to override our standard toolbar controls as you wish (i.e you can hide the default toolbar controls under the Interface tab and then create static hotspots anywhere inside the viewer to serve as your custom toolbar controls.

XML RELOAD ACTION

This is a useful capability that allows drilling down into any number of associated 360 degree spins inside the the same viewer box via click / tap inside a hotspot. Simply add a relative (or absolute path) to your other 360 product view in the hyperlink action box that you can see on the following screenshot. This can be useful for product part exploration, loading additional color combinations, navigating inside architectural 3D views, and more!

IMAGE ROTATION

This build also features our new auto-rotation capability for importing your 360 product photos that can be activated on the New Project form via the drop-down menu marked yellow on the following image.

UPDATE - August 7th, 2014: build 764. More new features and fixes:
PS: project and configuration files are backwards compatible so your older 3.5 projects should open and work fine. Also, you don't need to reinstall X11 or Mono if using Mac - just copy SpotEditor app to your Applications or Desktop.

DOWNLOAD
Some Tips On Producing White Backgrounds in Your 360 Product Views

June 12, 2014

If you haven't seen it on our Facebook page, there's a short post about some techniques we use here for producing pure white or near pure white backgrounds in 360 product views. This is one of the major topics we see folks are interested in, especially when working with 360 product photography where your lighting setup can't be configured just for a single shot but rather has to apply to all images. So we put together a quick overview with a couple of diagrams.

Just click on the image below to jump to the article:

(diagrams were created with the help of Lighting Setup PSD by Kevin Kertz):