Pano, a fun iPhone app for taking panoramic photos, has been around since last fall and the developers at Debacle Software have been hard at work improving the app ever since. While the first iteration stitched together a maximum of 4 photos, the 2.0 version of the app upped the limit to 6 photos.

Now Pano 3 (click opens iTunes) rewrites the rules for taking panoramas with your iPhone. The new version can automatically meld up to 16 photos, providing 360 degree panoramas. The team at Debacle added a way to resume interrupted panoramas, so if Mom called right as you were taking the fifth shot in your series of sixteen, you can pop back into Pano 3 and start right back up.

While the capabilities of Pano have increased, the price remains the same low $2.99US. I use this app a lot, and it's just about the most fun that you can buy for $3. If you have an iPhone and love to take photos, Pano's deserving of a place on your home screen.

After you've shot a few panoramas with Pano 3, take part in Debacle's I Love Pano Pano Panorama Contest. A group of TUAW bloggers are judges, and there are some great prizes.

In traditional photography, the time elapsed between the shutter snap and the careful, loupe & light table examination of the captured images for some unexpected surprise or Cartier-Bresson's "decisive moment" might be days or weeks. With photographer David Bergman's massive panorama of Tuesday's presidential inauguration, the challenge wasn't in waiting for the darkroom process to complete (although the Gigapan software did crank away on his MacBook Pro for over six hours to generate the 1,474 megapixel, 2 gigabyte master file); it was combing through the enormous image to discover those moments Bergman didn't even know he had photographed. Several commenters on Bergman's blog have already found themselves or family members in the crowd.

One moment that Bergman did discover quickly: a prominent attendee of the inauguration, 'bow-syncing' cellist Yo-Yo Ma, was caught in the panorama making an image of his own, using a familiar-looking smartphone. See the video zoom below for the context of Ma's snapshot in the larger image.

As digital imaging has replaced film photography for newsgathering and journalism, there have been counterexamples of newsworthy images that would have long been deleted except for the fact that they were shot on film instead of on memory cards. In this case, the image of Yo-Yo Ma and his phone wouldn't have been preserved, except that it was captured by chance and 'mined' out of the massive, frozen decisive moment.

Image & zoom video used with permission of the photographer; all rights reserved.

Pano, a panorama photo app for iPhone we reviewed back in October, has been updated to version 2.0.

What's in the update of the $2.99 app (click opens iTunes) from Debacle Software?

• The ability to make panoramas of up to 6 individual pictures (version 1.0 maxed out at 4 pics)
• New stitching algorithms and color correction that resolve the dark bars that sometimes appeared at the "seams" between photos
• A new portrait mode
• Better memory management for more stability
• Reduced processing time when merging photos

Pano 2.0 was supposed to ship with a new icon, but the icon police at Apple apparently had issues with the updated design.

If you already own Pano, be sure to download the update to take advantage of the nifty new features. Debacle Software is hosting a panorama contest in the near future with lots of fabulous prizes, and featuring several TUAW bloggers as impartial and unbiased judges. Start taking those panorama shots soon!

When I saw the words Provue Development and Panorama in a press release this morning, I felt like I was suddenly transported back to the 80s. When the Mac first came out in 1984, Provue was there with the first real database manager for the Mac (OverVue). It's great to see that they're still developing innovative products like Panorama Enterprise Server. The $399 Panorama Enterprise Server is a RAM-based database server for Mac OS X 10.4 and above.

Panorama Enterprise Server works with Provue's desktop database application Panorama 5.5 to create network-based databases. It distributes RAM-based copies of shared data across a network in a mesh architecture. By distributing the load of common database actions over a number of machines, speed is improved dramatically.

Another unique feature is that users can disconnect from the network, work offline, and their database changes sync back up to the rest of the meshed computers when they are reconnected. Panorama Enterprise Server has remote configuration, management, and debug tools to keep DBAs happy, as well as automatic backup of live databases. Designers will like the visual design tools for building HTML and CSS-based forms, and support for Google Analytics.

Provue offers a 45-day free trial of both Panorama 5.5 and Enterprise Server.

In a previous Ask TUAW we covered a few of the panoramic photo stitching options available for the Mac. Now another tool for doing this has come to my attention and is probably worth a look for anyone interested in making panoramic pictures from multiple photos. Hugin is a cross-platform GUI for the Panorama Tools open source project created by Professor Helmut Dersch. It has many detailed options for stitching photos together exactly the way you want it done. As such it's probably not the easiest panorama tool to use, but by the same token it looks quite powerful. You may want to check out some of the tutorials available to get a sense of what it can do.

Hugin is a free download from sourceforge.

[via Cool OSX Apps]

I stumbled across this video on YouTube, which shows a cool panoramic scrolling effect on an iPod. It comes from website Ben+Marc, which offers a complete write up on how they created the effect. They set up a camera on a tripod and took a series of pictures, snapping each one with about a 5 to 10% overlap to build a 360-degree revolution. After, on their computer, they edited the photos to create the near-seamless joins. Cool stuff. Enjoy the video.