Hi,

the new iOS 8.0 beta is out now - here my first impressions from testing it with krpano on an iPad Air and an iPad 3:

The good news:

• It supports WebGL with very great performance!
• That means even faster rendering and full support for all pano projections - and it opens a door for other nice things that are possible with WebGL and might come in future krpano versions.
• WebGL should be more stable then CSS3D because more efficient memory management and a lot of removed browser overhead.
  

The bad news:

• iOS8 beta Safari is unfortunately full of bugs...
• The rendering of CSS3D elements is partially very very slow and leads to almost instant browser and/or system crashes!
  This is very bad, but one good thing here is that WebGL can be used instead - but this requires adding the html5=prefer+webgl setting - or even better - updating to a newer krpano version where WebGL will be preferred by default on iOS.
  
• Trying to use a HTML5 video as WebGL texture throws a security error => that means still no video panos on iOS!
• The screen height is wrong in several cases (bug demo).
• The gyro doesn't work correctly in landscape mode on the iPad.

That means on one side it's good to have WebGL finally also on iOS, but is very bad that CSS3D is not usable anymore and that there is no way to use videos with WebGL...

I really hope that Apple will fix these bugs before the final iOS 8 release (all bugs are or will be reported to Apple)...

Edit: these bugs were already fixed by newer iOS 8 beta versions

There should be very soon an updated krpano version (1.17.4) that will be adopted for this iOS 8 beta - that means with WebGL usage by default to avoid CSS3D - and workarounds for the screen height problems.

Best regards,
Klaus

Hi,

it's not that bad as it seems! The HTML5 support of the browsers is getting better and better, especially on Desktop and also on iOS it is basically very good. Android is the most problematic system here, but since Android 4.4, where Google has finally replaced the outdated and buggy Webkit engine of the default Android browser with a much better Chromium one, the situation is also improving.

I only wanted to show up that krpano itself is not the reason when existing panos will not working correctly when updating to iOS 8 beta. The CSS3D bug in that current iOS 8 beta is a pretty heavy one (because it leads to system crashes), so I really hope Apple will do something here.

The general situation is not much different to the Flashplayer days - there were also constant changes from Adobe or the browsers, like the Flash 9 to Flash 10 change or the mouse-wheel problems or the fullscreen-mode from the contextmenu problem (and many things more) that required constant updates to get everything working at the best. So it's basically business as usual, but it's a bit bad that updates are required to keep already existing and already working things still working...

But as krpano user you shouldn't need to care about that much. Just try to find a work-flow where you can easily update to the latest krpano version. The updating itself should be pretty easy - only the krpano viewer files would need to be updated/replaced - either manually or by using the Update Tool.

Having WebGL itself now is a very good news - technically WebGL is soo much better than CSS3D and its also very great to work with it. Expect nice new features here in the future.

I have just released a new krpano version (1.17.4) that will be prepared for iOS 8 - WebGL will be preferred by default there and an automatic workaround for the page-height bug is included.

Best regards,
Klaus

Hi again,

here a quick demo video about krpano on iOS 8 beta:


Best regards,
Klaus

Hi,

iOS 8 beta 2 was released today.

It seems that almost all bugs from iOS 8 beta 1 were fixed there:
- CSS3D is working again very fine
- the iPad wrong screenheight bugs
- the wrong gyro on landscape iPads bug

but unfortunately there is still no video for WebGL support...

Best regards,
Klaus

Hi,

iOS 8 beta 3 is there and with it the first possibility to play video panos also on iOS.

Here a short demo video:



My first quick testing remarks about the video support in iOS 8 beta 3:

• it works with great performance on the iPad Air
• but on the older iPad 3 it is pretty slow - the pano rendering itself is very fast, but the uploading of the video to the texture is very slow (I will report that to Apple, technically it should be possible to improve that)
• the iPhone 5 works fine, but there is still the 'automatic-video-fullscreen problem' of the iPhone (bug report here)
• the CORS support seems to be buggy...

Best regards,
Klaus

Hi,

WebGL support itself is basically there since krpano version 1.16.

In version 1.17.4 only the WebGL-usage was enabled by default for iOS (before krpano was preferring CSS3D over WebGL on iOS by default) and the resolution of the WebGL canvas increased for retina support.

In the demo videos above a preview of the next krpano version 1.18 is shown - and a new feature there is the support for pano videos when the browser is supporting WebGL and videos as textures.

Best regards,
Klaus

Quoted from "globule22"

iOS 8 Beta 4 released today, any news about Krpano 360 video support ?

iOS 8 beta 4 is horrible - don't try to install it!

All webpages (even very simple ones) that are trying to use WebGL are crashing in beta 4!

This single line of Javascript code is enough to crash Safari in iOS 8 beta 4:


That means it's not possible to test video panos with it at the moment...
Let's wait for beta 5...