Microsoft launches panoramic photo-sharing app for iOS

While it's not the first panoramic photo app to arrive for iOS, Photosynth is one of the few such apps that's free and that emphasizes photo-sharing.

Microsoft has stepped into the mobile photo-sharing ring with the launch of Photosynth for Apple’s iOS. The free app lets users take multiple photos with an iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad 2 and then stitch the photos together to create a single panoramic image. The newly created image can then be uploaded and shared on Facebook, the Photosynth website or through Microsoft’s Bing  mapping service.

“After capturing a great panorama of a museum you love or a beautiful garden, choose to publish to Bing Maps and it could be seen by the world,” Microsoft’s Bing team said in a blog post. “From the map, ‘dive in’ and see your panorama next to that museum. Or, experience it seamlessly alongside the museum’s listing in Bing (if tagged with the location name).”

The app automatically snaps photos as the camera moves and displays in real-time a preview of the final image. A single tap on the screen and Photosynth automatically stitches the photos together to produce the final 3D panoramic image.

The latter of the two options is notable as it creates an opportunity for a crowd-sourced alternative to Google’s own photo-mapping project, Street View. Unlike Street View, which has so far been primarily limited to city streets, Photosynth’s 360-degree images can include indoor locations and outdoor areas that would be inaccessible to Google’s Street View vehicles (although, Google has done a few indoor locations including Street View imagery of several art museums).

Photosynth also allows business owners or patrons to photograph their spaces, link to the business and then incorporate the panoramic image into Bing Maps’ directory service for instant 360-degree publicity.

Photosynth has been available as a desktop panoramic tool since 2008. Microsoft has said that it plans to release the app next for its own Windows mobile operating system.

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‘Lame’ Color photo-sharing app to address user complaints with update next week

Color, a new mobile app that shares users' photos with any other nearby user, has been pounded by bad reviews in the first 24 hours after its release. But the company is listening, and says an update to address the complaints is on its way.

The newly launched public photo-sharing app Color, available for iOS and Android devices, took the tech world by storm Thursday after it received a massive $41 million pre-release cash injection from venture capitalists. Much of the enthusiasm surrounding the app also came from its radical functionality, which treats all photos taken in the app as public, and shares those photos with any other Color user within 150 feet, friend and stranger alike.
Because Color decides for you who gets to see your photos, and bases this entirely around being nearby other Color users, the first-day reviews aren’t good. Early adopters say that the app is not only worthless unless used within the vicinity of other Color users, but also makes them feel lonely because their pictures are the only ones that show up in the app when they use it alone.
The problem is so apparent that on iTunes the first thing in the app’s description is “WARNING: DON’T USE COLOR ALONE.” The app currently has only a two-star rating based on just over 200 reviews. (The majority gave the app one star.)
Users also complained that the app includes very little instruction for how to use it, and doesn’t explain what the app does.
Not surprisingly, the company is taking the criticisms extremely seriously, and is already working on an update to fix the “loneliness” problem, reports Mashable.
According to Color co-founder and CEO Bill Nguyen, the update will do two things: First, make it impossible to use the app unless other Color users are around; and second, increase the distance required for another user to be considered “nearby.”
Nguyen says the update will allow the app to determine the appropriate distance for creating the app’s “dynamic network” based upon the population density of a user’s location. So, in tightly populated cities like New York or Tokyo, the app’s current 150 radius could still work well. But for spread-out cities or in smaller communities, the app will increase the distance automatically to ensure that all users can access other’s photo streams.
The update should be available as soon as the middle of next week. Until then, we recommend anxious Color users simply get more friends.

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