open source

OK, so it's not _quite_ new, but it might as well be. :-)

PanoSalado has been through many revisions, and is now world-class (if not bullet proof ;) ).

What is it? The only open source Flash panorama player on the, er, market. "Open source" is often times a synonym for "free", no?. :)

Panosalado is being 'dogfooded' by myself, over at cheathamlane.net (links below), and should be visible in a couple of my client projects sometime soon (cool!).

Hi there:

Just a quick note to say that our open source pano viewer from flashpanos.com has gotten its own blog -- this will make it much easier to update and keep folks updated about.

It's still living at flashpanos.com, just with its own niche in the site.

Lots of changes afoot in the viewer recently, and astute readers will notice an increasing dependence on XML. We're trying to keep it friendly to both Flex and Flash developers, and to the novice coder and experienced alike. In any case, enjoy!

Patrick

Blog at:
http://flashpanos.com/blog/79

if you're on a mac, think cs3 is outrageously expensive and gimp sucks, coming next is pixelmator http://www.pixelmator.com/ if nothing else, it's damn sexy and built on open source !

I have blogged about sharing back to the Drupal project before, but previously my contributions were merely small 'patches' to current projects and modules. This time around, I have created two modules that I will maintain on Drupal.org myself.

Regarding my earlier post on relative links in feeds, I have now implemented fixes for both parts of the issue.

• The feeds that Drupal creates are now checked for relative urls. Relative urls are changed to absolute urls instead.
  Like I did before, I have submitted a patch. Since this is a Drupal core issue, I fully expect the patch to be altered quite a bit or even be rejected, but we'll see.

• Incomming feeds are also checked for relative urls.
  Unlike the other part above, this could be fixed using Drupal's theming system, without patching any of the modules. Once there is more clarity on the patch I submitted, I will make another patch for the incoming feeds and submit that.

Mike Quan 'alerted' me about the new Panotools.org website. After yet another fall-out with a certain selfproclaimed owner of the original Panotools list and community, and the subsequent move to new Yahoo group named Panotools NG, the new site on www.panotools.org marks the end of an uncertain time for the Panotools community. The Panotools wiki, a very good resource for anything Panorama related, can now be found on wiki.panotools.org. Good for you keeping things together, guys!

A love of Drupal, ofcourse!

Drupal is used for more and more high profile sites, including sites at NASA and NATO, but also 'smaller' sites such as MTV UK and many others. Google also loves Drupal (and that may or may not be a reason why my own Drupal-based sites are so well-indexed), sponsoring a substantial number of Summer of Code projects for Drupal for the second year in a row.

See, my fanboy-ism towards Drupal when we decided what CMS to use way-back wasn't unfounded...

As I have mentioned before, the gallery is mostly powered by Lightbox.js. I've made a couple of changes to Lightbox 2.02 in order to make it work for the IVRPA site:

Quicktime VR content

The original Lightbox script only supports images. Ours supports still images and Quicktime VR. Others have made similar changes, and I'm sure mine are a bit more hacky than some of those. But it looks nice ;-)

Image scaling

If an image is too large to fit in the current window, it is now scaled down to fit. No scrolling necessary to view the whole image. Quicktime VR files are automatically extended to fill the screen.

As much as I like Drupal, ofcourse it would be all too easy if it did all that we needed for the IVRPA website out of the box. Fortunately, (a) it is open source, and (b) there's a very active community developing additional functionality for Drupal.

Ever since I have started using Drupal on the SPi-V developers website, I have been making small alterations here and there, untill I finally got some of my code in the core of Drupal. For the IVRPA website, I have been actively contributing to the following projects: