Google Photo Sphere Viewer for.. Desktop! ( Windows / Linux / Mac )

Google has recently pimped up the stock camera app of Android, with the result that it's now very very easy to create so-called PhotoSpheres.
PhotoSpheres are essentially 360 degrees panoramas, constructed out of several shots, that the user can take following the camera app indications.

The results are actually pretty cool, and, at least for my own sake, this tool is quite useful for taking spheres of interiors.
However, there's only one missing thing about photo spheres, that managed to annoy me pretty soon.
It's normally only possible to view these spheres from the android device, whatever it is. If you want to share one with someone else (= also yourself, but on another machine), you can do it through Google+.
There there's a widget that allows to admire these 360 panoramas directly from your favorite browser ( though i haven't tried. So this might actually not be correct).

The catch is... I don't want to use Google+ to share my photo spheres! I want to send one via email to whoever i want. This i think can be true for me (ofc.) but for other people as well, as i believe that the use of these photo spheres could be also professional (imagine interior designers, architects, etc.).
I believe professionals also do not wish to share these panoramas through Google+.

Well, anyway, all this mumbo jumbo to say that this is the reason why i made a QAD  (= QuickAndDirty) PhotoSphereViewer.  It's trivial, it's in Python, it's GPL, and it's even portable (on windows).
For linux users, it's portable too, as your favorite package manager can surely install all the needed dependencies for you.

If you improve it, please let me know :) (there's plenty of improvements possible)
I am also urgently looking for a host for these ~70MB. If anybody has a suggestion of where to host the portable package, please contact me!

otherwise, just enjoy your photo spheres, now on your PC


Link:  PhotoSphereBundle





Documentation
A couple of lines of documentation here:
1) there's no file selector. You have to enter it by hand (or copy paste it from somewhere else)
2) the address has to be in URI (URL, if you will) form. Meaning that your favorite file in
C:\Users\You\Pictures\PANO_ABC.jpg becomes   file://C:\Users\You\Pictures\PANO_ABC.jpg
(  you can use regular slashes, too).
3) the positive consequence of this fact is that you can pass a regular http:// url to the program, and it will open and display it for you. You can try it with, for example,
http://cdn.thenextweb.com/wp-content/blogs.dir/1/files/2013/05/Horeshoe-Bend-PS-645x250.jpg
http://www.studio8apps.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/glass_team_pano_resized.jpg
http://i-cdn.phonearena.com/images/articles/73441-image/google-nexus-4-photo-sphere.jpg

etc. etc. (have fun with google image search)


Known bugs:
It does not work with big panoramas on older graphics chips (like, f.ex. GeForce 6 or maybe even 7 or earlier)


UPDATE:
Now also with a file selector and on GitHub

Development revived

After some.. ages, I finally resumed the development of my apps.
I decided to start with the contacts synchronizer, mostly because i have one architectural problem left with the re-engineering of meeTrainer that requires some additional thinking.
Well, I hope to fix it soon, in the meanwhile, a bunch of bugfixes for syncgcontacts.
It can now correctly assign types of contact attributes, as most of the users requested.
It now also syncs almost all fields,  which is good (tm).
Many features are, however, to come: preset support, programmable operators, 2-way sync (it won't be totally seamless, beware), offline support and a GUI, of course (which in principle could be developed independently)
Soon on the store :)

Spiky HR..

I realized a couple of days ago that the HRM data coming from the chest belt can be very spiky, in particular when the phone is kept extremely close to the belt.
This is of course not very good, and some smart method for despiking this data is required.
Now, the problem is that, at least in certain cases, there are more spikes than data, and classical filters (e.g., median) fail. 
Here's one of such cases, and the blue plot is the data (red) filtered using a median filter.
The green one is instead an experimental despiker i made,which seems to work very well for this particular case. It would be nice, however, to gather real workout spiky data, and see if it would behave as good..
If any meeTrainer user would like to contribute with their spiky data, i would very much appreciate!
Of course you have to wait till 0.2.2 will be available (still under QA), so that you can see the actual data and how spiky it is :)

meeTrainer v0.2.2 is out

After quite a while and a lot of work, finally the second release of meeTrainer, v0.2.2, is out and has been pushed to the store. Among the other things, it adds support for sportstracker bluetooth chest belts,  charting of workouts time series data, and a better overview of the workouts, with per-months summaries. It also includes tons of bugfixes and improvements, as well as a lot core rework. 
I want to take the chance and thank all the people that contributed with ideas, suggestions, bug reports, help, and more. In particular i would like to thank Martin for his help and feedback. It's also thanks to him if meeTrainer now supports sportstracker chest belt, and if it will have a nice UI in the future :) I also want to thank Rune, Gabriel and Suyog for having supported the development and for precious feedback. Finally i also want to thank the guys on #harmattan for all the tips and help, me being a beginner in the field!

So now here a couple of screenshots of the new feats

Sports tracker killing n9 too?

A friend ponted me to a recent announcement made by their team.

Apparently they say from now on the symbian version will just be maintained, and no mention for MeeGo at all.
I'm now even more convinced that meeTrainer was something needed!

syncgcontacts now available on Nokia store

Today the  Nokia QA team finally let syncgcontacts through! so now you can finally filter your contacts by groups on your Nokia N9 :)
Have a look at the description page for more info