Neil Budde's dashboard

A reference implementation in C# would be a huge step for cross-platform dissemination, given Microsoft's support for Silverlight in the Macs, and Novell's Moonlight. In fact, I am surprised that Photsynth was not released as a Silverlight app, as it seem to be marketed as an internet app, and that is what Silverlight was designed for. It would finally give a lot of people a very good reason to install Silverlight.

Skinkie, how about option C-- what if we were to make a simple reference implementation of the viewer available to the community, so that Linux fans can go and do what they do best, to everyone's benefit? ;)
I imagine the synther is already Wine compatible, btw, but would appreciate if you could verify!

Now I can look in the future a bit, and I see that two things can happen. Microsoft thinks smart, thinks .NET and makes the binaries work in .NET and .mono. Or some smart lads from Germany already show what is possible on this point: http://user.cs.tu-berlin.de/~nowozin/...

Or the Linux community feels ignored, goes developing their own nifty sift based patent encumbered european based Photosynth-free-clone. People will use the free clone because more people can develop on it and in the end removes the momentum from Photosynth because there is a better toy in town. I see by not going cross platform or not making the tool 'Wine' compatible only problems. Think of the result if the tool does run under Wine, you can serve mac and linux people. – Skinkie, on August 25, 2008 04:22

Shinzann, I won't rule it out, but to be brutally frank, I think the chances aren't good. This has nothing to do with operating system partisanship-- we're very keen to do the Mac version simply because lots of people with Macs are passionate photographers and early adopters of visual technology. We know that it hurts the community as a whole for there not to be a Mac implementation. But the cost to us of supporting additional platforms in binary code is substantial-- we have a small team, and such support must be balanced against lots of great features (for the rest of us) we could build with comparable resources. In other words, it's all about a kind of integrated value over the community. It's a tradeoff-- wider, or deeper? We don't imagine that a huge segment of our potential community works exclusively on Linux boxes. But if you have data that might cast doubt on this intuition, do please share.
I'm more optimistic about PowerPC, because as far as I understand the APIs and compilation tools are identical to the new Mac, so the cost may not be very high. But I'm not sure.

Since we're asking for Cross-platform support, is there a linux version coming out as well?

I would also suggest the possibility to support PowerPC Mac users... at least until Apple stops supporting us...

I am currently running PhotoSynth on a MacPro 2.8 GHz, Dual Quad core using Boot Camp. It is absolutely amazing.

I received the same error message, but i am running vista enterprise with IE7 (v. 7.0.6001.18000)

Eric, you're not the only one eager to see good crossplatform support!