In a few weeks, in the beautiful southwestern American city of Tucson, Arizona, something interesting will occur; men and women with odd-looking photographic equipment will be seen roaming this area.

What they will be doing there, with their strange mechanical devices, no one really knows for sure – unless they attend The International Panoramic Photography Conference. We gnomes will be amongst these good folk and we look forward to seeing you there!

Hurrah! The Skin Editor tutorials have been updated! These tutorials were created with Pano2VR version 2.3 beta 4.

• Adding a controller and image (or logo) to your project
• Building a custom controller
• Building a loading bar with text

Apple today released  Mac OS X 10.6, Snow Leopard and I am happy to report that we didn’t found any issues with Pano2VR & Object2VR during the last weeks testing.

The only issue is QTVR & QuickTime 7 support because Snow Leopard by default only comes with QuickTime X and QuickTime X can not play QTVRs.

You have to manually install QuickTime 7 to have the proper player, otherwise you get a “Unsupported Format” error message. After you install QuickTime 7 you can choose which QuickTime version should be used to open the .mov file.

To install QuickTime 7 you need to hit “Customize” during installation and check “QuickTime 7″. You can also install QuickTime 7 afterwards by inserting the Snow Leopard disk and go to the “Optional Installs” package. In any case QTVR will still work in the browser because the browser plugin is still QuickTime 7.

For more info also look at http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3678

Obvious side note: Maybe now is a good time to switch from QuickTime to Flash because only Steve knows how long it takes before they drop QTVR entirely.

Last week I release a new beta of Object2VR.

• Sound effects in the skin
• Image caching for faster creation
• Skin – Start Autorotate action: Speed can be defined
• Bugfix: Blank images in light table

The Garden Gnome Software office is moving to a new home this week. (yay!) If you’re worried because you haven’t heard from us in while, this is most likely the reason. We should be back up and in full swing by next week.