Comments on: The iPad’s Certain Impact On Real Estate Photography

By: Christian

Christian — Thu, 30 Dec 2010 04:50:34 +0000

Interesting article about the Apple selling 65 million iPads in 2011. Making sure your website is “apple friendly” is a must (also having a html5 player to fallback to when doing video, slideshows etc) or you will absolutely lose business as apple sales continue to rise.

While some might think this is not important, it would be a shame when your client comes to you after THEIR client has complained that they cant see the multimedia for their house….because its in flash and they are using an iPad. Telling them that they will have to use a PC or anything else but an Apple product wont go over too well if I was a betting man……

I have been coming to this site for years for advice from Larry, and to be honest I was totally against this whole “apple friendly” idea when he brought it up, even commented against it in his blogs. In the end I made sure I had a backup plan just in case apple continued their “no flash” route and thank god (and of course Larry) I did.

here is a link to the article: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-20026734-37.html#ixzz19Wru9LaV

By: Mike

Mike — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 02:56:04 +0000

Well it seems that Apple was right! With over 2 million in under 60 days, consumers are buying it. I am a Realtor and on the hunt for a VT company that will run in HTML5. I own an iPad and it is GREAT for realtors. I do my listing presentation on it an use it or my iphone to capture signatures. My only hold up is my MLS requires IE and active X controls.

Anyway, I would say the first company that will get an HTML 5 VT going will be a big winner! Also, I mean a real VT not just a panning photo.

By: Robert Hudson

Robert Hudson — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 22:17:45 +0000

Flash certainly is on the way out. We saw this coming some time ago at iFloorplan. And yes people will certainly want to shop for real estate on the iPad and do already on the iPhone and iPod touch. The only way is to use the new standards – JavaScript, CSS and HTML. Virtual tours are almost always in Flash. Some of the new mobile real estate web sites don’t even show the link to virtual tours for fear of the little blue cube. That is frustrating for us at iFloorplan.net because we have spent time and money making sure flash free browsers display our tours just as they should.

By: Matthew Field

Matthew Field — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 18:15:40 +0000

A concept 360 VR viewer programmed with HMTL5 already exists, the problem is that it depends on the WebGL extension, and that isn’t available in regular Safari yet, let alone mobile Safari. You have to install Webkit on OSX, (or enable beta WebGL support in Firefox) to get it to function.

http://webuser.hs-furtwangen.de/~dersch/PTViewerNG/PTViewerNG.html

By: Michael

Michael — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 21:44:01 +0000

I found a fun piece of code for iPad. It is an example of how to swap a Flash SWF with an image if your user agent is an iPad. http://www.combsconsulting.com/ipad-replace-flash-with-image-java-script-example/

By: Bob Stone

Bob Stone — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 21:03:55 +0000

Kineard: “Apple thinks they can control the end user and they can’t. People will move onto the next device that meets there needs better”.

Well said Kineard! Couldn’t agree more.. When will people understand this? Apple is trying to force feed it’s own customers and they continue to be lemmings for this company? You WILL be assimilated.

By: kineard

kineard — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 05:15:39 +0000

oops that didn’t work Like this.
http://vr.ratesmate.com/index.php?action=show_vtour&popup=yes&listingID=203

By: kineard

kineard — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 05:12:38 +0000

Larry I looked at your flash tours and they are very good and I can see how you could turn that into HTML very easy. How every how do you put something like this into to HTML. Oh I can watch this on my phone.

By: kineard

kineard — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 05:09:03 +0000

Larry I don’t understand why you feel the IPad will be popular. This product has been launched before and each time it has flopped. Newton, apples first attempt at this product failed perhaps for reasons that no longer apply. Apple is asking people to carry a computer around without a key board that will not fit in your pocket at a cost of $500. If it wore $50 – $150 I would have two or three laying around my house and in my care for convince. But for more than the cost of a reasonably good laptop, I am not not going to bother. Probably more of a problem for the iPad than laptops is netbooks which are now available for less than $200 and I do not even want to get into the competition tablets are facing but I will. Camangi $275, Archos 280, iPod $180, PORTEGE M200 more of a laptop $490 and the list is growing.
I could be wrong I never thought Amazon would sell 3 million Kindles, I guess there are a lot of avid readers.
I still stand by my view that the smart phone industry will significantly fragment regardless if Apple continues to be a bunch of communist or not.

By: larry

larry — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 00:39:06 +0000

@Kineard- Everything of coarse depends on the iPad’s popularity. But indications are that that sales are going to be huge. If I were a betting man I would not bet on Apple loosing market share because they don’t support Flash on iPhone and iPad.

Dealing with the lack of Flash on the iPhone and iPad is not is not a difficult technical problem. On the tours that my partners and I are developing (http://pfretour.com) we already (works today) handle the issue. We run tours in Flash for those browsers that support Flash and for the iPhone and iPad we display the same tour in HTML. Of coarse this hasn’t been tested on the iPad yet but my guess is the iPad will work right out of the box because today the iPhone works and the iPad has the same OS. We’ll probably have to do something special to deal with the iPad’s larger screen size.