14 DAY TRIAL // Photosynth, an incubation project from Microsoft Live Labs, went out of Technology preview stage and was released to web on August 20, 2008. Just eight days later the Redmond company introduced the first update for the service designed to permit end users to upload collections of 2D digital images and create navigable 3D spaces.
Microsoft touted the introduction of a breakthrough visual medium with the Photosynth and, as early as August 28, jumped in with the first minor update for the service. According to the software giant, the update did not add new features; however, some issues have been dealt with while new details are available to end users.
“If you've been upload errors or the dreaded "stuck in publishing" problem, you should know that we've been working very hard on these issues this week, and we've released a partial fix tonight. "Stuck in publishing" should be gone -- or much less frequent -- and we've added diagnostics to our servers to throw light on the remaining issues. Next week, we're going to do our best to get to the bottom of them. A better quality "Recently Synthed" view - we're not showing synths with very low synthiness scores,” indicated David Gedye, Photosynth group manager.
Following the first refresh of Photosynth, Microsoft introduced support for the recently launched Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2, but it also tweaked additional areas of the service. In this regard, some issues on the About webpage have been resolved, and the synths displayed on the home page of the service have been swiped for new ones.
“We made the "Report Abuse" button more prominent. If you saw something inappropriate on the site it wasn't obvious how to report it. There's now an easy to recognize icon alongside the words "Report Abuse" just to the right of the synth as you view it. We've saved your printer cartridge - our page design with the dark stripes across the top and bottom of the page really sucked ink,” Gedye added.