We're excited to announce that a much awaited release of a fully reworked SpotEditor for Mac has been released. Here we will cover some of the major Mac specific improvements (see full version history).

Simple Installation and Stability

Our old installation workflow was getting clunkier and less secure with each macOS release as Apple was removing old features and restricting what vendors like us could do. You had to go through two required third-part installations totaling almost 1 GB of installed data between mono and X11. Our new installation of SpotEditor v3.6.4 for macOS is just 18 MB and it doesn't require any separate third-party software. No reboot or lowering your core OS security is required. Dropping X11 as an intermediary layer between the application and macOS made the software very stable.

Native Fast UI

While we kept the overall look and feel of the application the same so we're consistent with our Windows software (and folks who have been using our software for years don't need to re-learn it!), the underlying technology has been reworked to use native macOS rendering so things like text boxes, check-boxes, drop-downs, full-screen function, etc are the same that users expect on macOS. It looks flat and modern. No more slow re-painting of the application controls every time you open a tab or a hotspot dialog, it's native fast.

This also brings support for Dark Theme which looks gorgeous. Plus the new software fully utilizes OpenGL to render 360 spin images on the screen which makes our industry leading non-destructive batch workflow noticeably faster.

Native File Management

Arguably, one of the major limitations in our old Mac software was the inability to work with projects or files outside of your user folder. Since the new software uses the native macOS File Open and doesn't rely on X11 for internal implementation, you can use pretty much any location on your Mac, network, or external hard-drive.

Superior Image Quality and Publishing Times

The old Mono implementation didn't allow us to use the Bicubic interpolation for published JPG images which would produce substantially better results comparing to Bilinear we had to rely on Mac for years. With the new software you get the same great published image quality that we always had on Windows. Surprisingly, this didn't stop us from optimizing the overall publishing speed which is now roughly 4 times faster for the same set of 360 product images than in our previous Mac releases.

Preview in Chrome and Firefox

Again, due to various limitations in the underlying technologies in the old software, you could only preview your published 360 product views in Safari. Now you can select from Chrome, Firefox or Safari, and with Chrome we take care of all local security restrictions so you don't have to deal with the manual scripting just to test your published work in Chrome on Mac locally (see this post for more details).

Inverse Path

Inverse Path is a function of our Path tools that allows you to quickly clip unwanted space around an object in your 360 product images so you can quickly remove the background. You don't have to trust us that this feature is high on our users wish-list on Mac. Just check out this forum thread where year after year since 2014 we have been asked if this has been made available on Mac yet... well now it is!

PS: there's a slew of new features and improvements we have released in SpotEditor v3.6.4 some of which we have been showcasing in v3.6.4 BETAs such as this new ground-breaking 360 spin image rotation mode or the integration with our new hosting platform PixRiot.

Download

If you have older version of WebRotate 360 Product Viewer v3.5 or v3.6 installed on your computer, click the info icon on the left bottom of the application window and select Check Updates to get the new software. Otherwise, download the free version of WebRotate 360 Product Viewer Software or request the commercial version here if you have purchased a license in the past.