Except as mentioned below, PanGazer is a new application, written since April 2018 and sharing most of its modules with MapGazer ». It is written in C, and follows and extends the object-like code conventions » I developed for the Tollos supervisor ».  As of August 2023, it comprises about 39,000 lines of my code.

 

Special thanks are due to:

• Laurens Blanckenborg for many suggestions for, and lengthy testing of, the PanGazer user interface.

• Fulvio Senore, whose excellent 360° FSPViewer » prompted me to expand on his ideas and write PanGazer, and who has been especially helpful in advising on colour management.

• Bill Collis, Juan Corrin, and Martin Korinek, for encouragement, many good suggestions, and testing.
  Juan’s Matienzo caves project » has dozens of panoramas suitable for viewing with PanGazer.

• Kittredge Cowlishaw, for helping solve the bounding condition for minimum zoom for spherical projections.

• Wolfram MathWorld for its accurate description » of the gnomonic projection (but note that the formulae presented there can be simplified considerably; see my gnomonic projection page), and Ed Williams for his Aviation Formulary.

• Mark Cowlishaw, for identifying and illustrating aspect ratio issues and zoom distortions, and other good suggestions.

• Erik Krause, for his reporting and exemplary testing of a problem that I was unable to recreate.

• Don Abrams, for his suggestions and helpful comments.

• Pascal van Voren for testing many panoramas, and some excellent testcases.

• Ismam Huda, for an elegant formula for an S-shaped curve that I have used for contrast enhancements (and augmented to both dimensions so the control parameter is also [0..1]).

• Daniel Radu and the rest of the Advanced Installer team that made it possible to create the simple .msi Windows installer for this application.

• Darrell Commander, for libjpeg-turbo development and support, and many useful suggestions (PanGazer uses libjpeg-turbo as a compile-time switchable alternative to jpeglib, giving file loads that are twice as fast).

• The Independent JPEG Group (Thomas G. Lane, Guido Vollbeding, et al) for jpeglib, also used for JPG-encoded images.

• Lode Vandevenne – for lodepng, which allows me to handle PNG-encoded images when Windows cannot.

• Curtis Galloway, Lutz Mueller, et al, for libexif which I use for manipulating Exif metadata in images (e.g., to extract GPS coordinates and save image bearings).

• Charles Petzold – it had been ten years since I wrote a Windows application, and his Programming Windows (5^th edition) book proved as useful now as it did back then.

• The developers of GCC – the compiler used to compile PanGazer.

• All the people that put together the Win-builds and MingW resources that made it possible to build this application using GCC; extra thanks for the painless 64-bit support.

• The Microsoft, IBM, and other teams who built the Windows and OS/2 APIs that underpin the application.