The only 3D I’ve worked with any depth has been through the virtual world Second Life. Their built-in builder interface makes it a snap to create 3D objects: prisms, cubes, triangles and much more. This morning I saw the new Google SketchUp is being equally toted as “an easy-to-learn 3D Modeling program” that:

… enables you to explore the world in 3D. With just a few simple tools, you can create 3D models of houses, sheds, decks, home additions, woodworking projects - even space ships. And once you’ve built your models, you can place them in Google Earth, post them to the 3D Warehouse, or print hard copies.

Marketing hype aside, I decided to download and see how “easy” and “simple” it would really be for me to build a basic dice cube. I was able to create one in Second Life and already had the textures necessary for the cube sides created with Photoshop by hand.

Building a cube
Starting with a rectangle shape, click on the pull tool to turn the rectangle into a six sided cube (the rectangle tool is marked with the red arrow on the left and the push/pull tool is marked with a red arrow on the right):

Then stumbled trying to figure out how to add textures to the sides of the cube. Off to the Sketchup help docs under “images.” Just go to File -> Import and then you’ll see a menu to import as a texture:

Placing the texture on the object wasn’t very intuitive compared to my experience with Second Life. In SL you just drag the texture onto the object and it automatically resizes to fit. Not the case for Sketchup where some other manipulation is required (?). It’s possible that Sketchup method is superior for professional 3D modelers but it wasn’t for me in my first test anyway. As shown from the picture above, my dice is broken, showing more dots than there should be (the texture only had 3 dots, but it was stretched and somehow duplicated).

Making a basic square with six already designed textured sizes should be a quick job. Guess I need to spend some time with the tutorials to figure this out. I never needed a tutorial using SL to build a dice cube. I just needed to build the texture and add a few lines of LSL to script them onto the six sides like this:

Any readers who are experienced 3D modelers and have given Sketchup a quick try? What do you think? Most pros will stick with high end products like Maya, but there is a pro version of Sketchup. I didn’t poke around too long to find out pricing. High end 3D graphics software can run well into the thousands so it’s nice to see Google trying to get non-pros into 3D.

What about the 3D Warehouse?
Google has a 3D Warehouse where you can share your Sketchup models. r0m made and shared a jail (amateur) and for the more skilled check out the Rose Bowl.

Final thoughts
Conceptually, I like Sketchup, but it’s not really “easy” to learn. Easy to me means someone who has already worked with a little 3D shouldn’t have to dig around and take tutorials to make basic shapes with premade textures for the object sizes. I like the idea of being able to work offline and build shapes as opposed to inside the SL interface which requires building everything online and logged in and thus is susceptible to work being lost if you don’t save it often. I suppose the computer could freeze offline and work could be lost too. I noticed Google has an autosave feature to My Documents which means you wouldn’t lose all your work.

All in all, this one requires some time to dig into. More time than somebody like me who doesn’t really have a huge interest in building and sharing 3D objects for fun. If I was going to spend time doing this then I’d more likely use Second Life where there is an actual marketplace and those objects can actually be bartered, given away or sold. Second Life has sandboxes where you can build 3D objects without having to pay for an account.

3D virtual Las Vegas
While in the 3D mode here and unrelated to Google Sketchup, one of our VTOR group members visited a virtual Las Vegas sim in Second Life. Cool pictures and report, JohnnyRS. I’m going to have to check that place out. It would be cool if the real casinos moved into this sim. Imagine them advertising specials for their terrestrial casinos? Oh, the possibilities …

Every once in awhile, I have a little to say about a lot and thus Hmm Quickies was born and makes appearance #23 today:

- Microsoft makes Express versions of Visual Studio free forever, or at least until they obsolete the product line.
- allegations are being made that Digg is corrupted by an editor bias it isn’t supposed to have. Of course the one making allegations seems to admit that if you get enough people together there will always be a popuarlity bias. Darkmoon offer his take on the situation.
- Sony cuts price of PS2 down from $149 to $130. Anybody that might care already owns a PS2, now what about PS3 pricing?
- Opera 9.0 beta is now available for download and includes widgets. The widget-o-rama continues. CNET has a video review.
- Google opened their calendar API.

I haven’t been very good about Tablet PC updates lately. Guess I’m in what you’d call the second year Tablet PC owner hardware blues mode. I can just see and hear somebody inking virtual violins in the distance.

However, this mode hasn’t prevented me from continuing to explore inking possibilities in new places. Check out the screenshot above of me in Second Life inking, er painting I mean, on a large 3D virtual canvas: yes, yes, yes.

This is from a program my friend referred to as “The Wand” and I understand it sells for L$15,000 (about $50USD) in world. If anybody is interested in buying this program then send me an IM and I’ll ask my friend who showed this to me who to buy this from (not my program so please forgive the lack of details). It does many more things besides the painting shown here, it basically sits in an area and allows people to summon interactive items out of the sky. Like we summoned these bubbles and you can get inside the bubbles and ride them up into the sky looking around the world below. There is also a giant and very realistic eagle you can get on and fly around on.

For those who are into Second Life feel free to drop by my new store: TD Scripts inside SL (SLurl) — my name is TD Goodliffe, BTW (just think good life, but with an extra ‘f’) — it just opened. And for my blogging friends in particular if you look upstairs in the building to the immediate right of the store you might just find something I’ve been working on interesting …

To find our store in world, just do a search for “TD Scripts” inside the find places inside SL or you can follow the SLurl above.

I write regularly about my SL experiences (so far that has consisted of building, running and promoting a business in SL) at our VTOR group blog. VTOR stands for Virtual TO Reality, see past Hmm entry for more details. Yesterday our very first group blogging payments were made — in Lindens of course — and I made L$148 for my blog posts made during the month of March.

Meeting others from the web in SL
I’ve also talked to a few web folks like Eric Rice who gave me some props the other day for opening my virtual store on his blog (thank you). It took me a little more than 90 days to buy land, learn enough of the Linden Scripting Language (LSL) and in world building tools to make my first product and create a store presence complete with advertising.

As of this writing, I have only one product officially to sell, a game, but am working on more. I actually have three products that I have created and sold (two are unofficial products, but available to those ask me about them): a security camera that moves and reports back who is in a designated perimeter on land (I use this to tell me who is stopping by my store), a timer for games and the dice cube game. The cube is listed on both the major web to SL marketplaces: slexchange and slboutique, and I blogged my experiences over at VTOR about these as well. Customers who have purchased the cube have been very happy so far and it received a five star user rating at slexchange.

This has been a rewarding and exciting learning process so far. I was telling one of the members of our group that this was the most fun I’ve had learning something programming-related in a long time. There are a few downsides and quirks like it can be slow building and scripting in world as opposed to more traditional development environments, especially when Linden Labs is having technical difficulties. Unfortunately that was happening to me last night when I wanted to do some scripting on a couple projects. Fortunately, that has been fairly rare to date.

I still have much to learn, especially in the social areas, events and activities of the world. Fortunately, some other members in our VTOR group are checking into this scene. One of our group got married, choosing me as his best man, and within a month the virtual marriage turned into divorce. Maybe that’s a bad sign for me making a career out of being a virtual best man.

This seems to be a morning of abortions. I checked and Scoble hasn’t dug into this one yet. Curious when/where the Channel 9 interview is and/or will be on this story?

Microsoft just loves change. And this wouldn’t be so bad if some of their product names weren’t so nonsensical like Windows Live. And if a product isn’t doing well, they just nuke the product line and come up with a new name. God help us all if they don’t change the code when they change the names.

Soon we’ll be able to credit the Redmond lumberjacks with giving the exe by “late 2006″ to FrontPage:

After nine years of being an award-winning Web authoring tool, FrontPage will be discontinued in late 2006. We will continue to serve the diverse needs of our existing FrontPage customers with the introduction of these three brand-new application building and Web authoring tools using the latest technologies, Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Designer 2007 for the enterprise information workers, Microsoft® Expression™ Web Designer for the professional Web designer and Microsoft® Visual Studio 2005 for the Web developer.

It is so “award-winning” that they are discontinuing the line. Funny.

Is this a good move? FrontPage is almost universally despised by hosting companies and developers alike as not playing well with other programming so this move does give Microsoft a chance to pump some fresh into the space. Let’s hope they learned from their mistakes. And I wouldn’t touch their Frontpage extensions with a ten foot pole (on a Linux box) if it wasn’t sometimes part of my job. Never mind what type of code surgery is needed when mixing with PHP and other scripting languages in the editor. Not into BDSM, sorry.

I will admit (blasphemous, I know) occasionally using the FrontPage editor for roughing out tables visually, but I still rewrite most of the code and pull out all the garbage FrontPage adds. This is a bad habit I’ve been unable to shake, especially with better WYSIWYG editors out there. And the version I’m still using? FrontPage 98. That doesn’t say much for their numerous upgrades. Think I bought FP 2000 and promptly uninstalled.

Now what’s up with the name of their replacement program? Expression Web Designer? I dislike the name already. Maybe the program rocks but the name is weak. Of course if the program is good they can call it whatever they want and I’ll still use it, so who am I to namebash? Still, I wonder what do they do up there in the naming department? Sit around and think up the worst names they can use for something? FrontPage might have been tainted, but it had a better name and a history, albeit a rocky one.

Now, seriously, what other WYSIWYG editor should I switch to so I can cast off FrontPage editor forever from my coding toolbox? Something that works good with CSS since I do more of that these days than straight HTML and doesn’t hose code snippets.

Hopefully an API for the new beta labs project Google Related Links is on the roadmap. Without one, it’s worthless to me as a webmaster.

As a surfer/visitor I see some draw to it for convenience, but is it useful? Webmaster using Google Related Links can choose which of the three panes to show (or all three): news, search and websites.

When Yahoo did their contextual search they released as an API which gave webmasters much more customization possibilities. What I’d like to do is offer readers related content for our own sites and then a link to Google, Yahoo, etc so they can search from there. Heck, I’m guessing most people reading this right now have a search box to their favorite engine a short mouse click away. On certain posts I could see including this, particularly newsworthy posts.

Google (finally) worries about new release scaling?
For the first time with any Google release I’m seeing a message that Google wants webmasters to contact them if they do more than 10,000 visitors a day and want to use Google Related Links. Can these webmasters also access a special API to tap into the related search technology? That would be sweet. It’s smart for them to identify that it’s different asking webmasters with 100 visitors a day putting up some javascript than copy/pasting to a site doing 10,000+. A lot of these new web pooh point oh apps don’t seem to take this into consideration.

Example showing news only
Here is an example showing only news in a 468×60 banner like style. Do you like it? I can see the value of adding something like news only somewhere on some of our sites (maybe here).

And if you don’t see this above then this means it doesn’t work inserted into a Wordpress post without some additional code voodoo. That will lower adoption rate too.

Would this add value to your reading experience?
My personal opinion is that it would be better if we could tap into an API and include on only certain posts in certain situations (like Yahoo allows). Also it’s javascript loaded which means it could slow down page loads if Google has server trouble. That’s not far-fetched considering some of their past launch experience. The Adsense ads are javascript loaded and that hasn’t been problematic there but Google might be underestimating the value of web real estate. To get me to add something to every page or even most pages of a website I want:

1. to really, really like something and/or
2. find it really, really useful to site members or visitors (navigation, copyright, etc) or
3. it needs to make money (pay for its real estate presence)

I’m not sure Google Related Links does any of these things, although it’s way early and if they run out an API with it, I can see some definite possibilities. Another downside: since it’s javacript that means it won’t show up in some RSS aggregators.

Your turn. Do you see this as helpful and useful or page clutter? Your thoughts on this in the comment/trackback section would be greatly appreciated, as always.

Lots of buzz the last 24 hours about the new PayPal portable features. I’ll get to that in a minute but first a story about one of the very first things online we had to deal with when we returned from Arizona recently.

My wife said our PayPal password no longer worked. She had tried numerous times and it wouldn’t work and trying to reset it didn’t work either. So I got involved and tried the same series of steps. Finally, she ended up calling the help line to find out how to fix. She was instructed to reset the password the way we’d already done it. This time it let us set a new password. There was never any explanation about why this didn’t allow us to reset the password from the site or why the password didn’t work any longer except the rather feeble: “sometimes these things just happen” (I’m paraphrashing what we were told).

Since March 8, 2002 we’ve been accepting PayPal for some of the programming-related work we do. This was after many, many requests to start accepting these type payments. Initially we were concerned about the security and that people — or the vendors using the service — would get hosed.

Turns out that we’ve had a pretty good run with the service and in all this time, more than 4 years now this is the only login problems we’ve had. For a minute I was thinking about all those phishing messages we’ve received telling us if we didn’t do something our account had been disabled. For a moment, however brief it was, I thought we had trashed a legitimate message that had finally gotten our account disabled for real. Those bastard phishers, look how they’ve corrupted our minds?

But just some kind of weird system glitch, it seems.

Now fast forward to over the last day the news being that now folks will be able to send money over their cellphone using Paypal, text messaging and a secret pin number (see photo above). We have Verizon phones so I was curious if this would work with our phones or if we needed special phones or services. Looks like we won’t need anything special, we can text message or call and use the pin.

I noticed when checking out the account that we had a foreign phone number attached to our account (not activated) that was not one of our numbers. This had a local area code. We went into the account area and removed the phone number. We don’t know how that number got there but this brings back some of those concerns we had 4+ years ago.

If we need to send money we can send it from the office desktop computer. I don’t really see the need to do it from the field, but I suppose there are some circumstances it could come in handy. Think we’ll just wait and see when/if the need arises before we actually activate any numbers and use it.

Anybody else planning on sending money this way?

This is just a rumor at this point and no idea if it turns out to be true if it will be only for Xbox and not for Xbox 360 (much more compelling if it’s for both).

Daniel Terdiman’s blog post at CNET:

… at the Game Developers Conference here today, the rumor is that Microsoft plans on announcing tomorrow a developers kit that would make it possible for anyone to build games for the console, or for PCs, and that the kit will cost only about $100.

If this actually happens and the kit isn’t completely handicapped it’s a really smart marketing move. It could bring back the games of yesterday and open up a marketplace on Live for smaller games developers to create entertainment (and revenue). I mused back in November 2005 that it would be exciting and a little like 1980-1985 all over again if the field was more wide open for smaller game developers. I believe that you’ll see some innovation from smaller developers that isn’t possible for the bigger ones who have to spent millions making games and can’t affort to take the risks that smaller publishers can do with a download only marketplace and not as involved graphics/gameplay elements requiring teams of artists, actors and programmers.

This could also be the move that knocks Sony off their pedestal because the word is now that the PS3 won’t be coming out until 4th quarter 2006. This gives Microsoft plenty of time to ramp up and fix the Xbox 360 supply issues, which BTW, I still haven’t been able to see on any retail store shelf a mere 45 minutes south of Microsoft’s Redmond campus. I haven’t been camping overnight or showing up the day the shipments come in so I’m sure there have been more opportunities to bag one now than there were prior to Christmas. I also noticed the Hmm poll, totally unscientific, still has 67% of the respondents either ‘undecided’ or with ‘no plans to buy.’ I’m not in either of those categories. I fully intend to buy one the minute I see it available on local retail shelves. We’re getting near the time I predicted I’d find one on store shelves here (end of March, April) so don’t be surprised if you see me going Xbox 360 gaga soon.

As for the Xbox developer kit, If/when this is officially confirmed, somebody please point me to it.

I just went over and voted for some of the first annual Sourceforge.net Community Choice Awards. A few of the categories I didn’t feel comfortable voting on because I wasn’t familiar enough with the choices.

digg story:

There are well over 100,000 open source projects on SourceForge.net. Now you can vote for your favorites in 14 categories. Your vote will help select winners of the first annual SourceForge.net Community Choice Awards. You must vote on or before March 23. Winners will be announced April 5 at the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo in Boston.

Just think, a person could create a blog reviewing only sourceforge projects and not run out of content in their lifetime. There are some outstanding open source projects in there. Good luck to all contestants.

AOL opens up AIM? That’s what the press release says. A lot of people use AIM and ICQ, I wonder why doesn’t this include ICQ? See the AIM developer area for the nuts and bolts on the situation, but it looks to me like presence, plugins and custom AIM clients will all be possible.

I collected a key for a presence indicator for one of our sites and noticed there were two terms of service agreements. Nothing like a paper trail. Developers need to specifiy the following (emphasis mine):

If your Site is located within a proprietary, nonpublic network, you must grant AOL access to such Site for periodic reviews, upon request by AOL. If you would like to use or access the Presence Tools through any means other than a Site, including but not limited to any application that is installed upon and/or runs on an end user’s computer or other hardware (a “Client”), you must obtain AOL’s prior written consent, and may direct any such inquiry to AIMCommercial@aol.com.”

Now what if you want to add AIM presence indicators inside several different third party sites (you need to list them all?), or make available so others can copy/paste code to add to their sites? Looks to me like this won’t be possible. Looks like those developers would need to email them as they could see that as “commercial” usage? I love the word “open” which in many cases for developers carries the word “except for these conditions.” Grrr.

Steve Rubel thinks this is a great thing and is “really excited about this marketing opportunity.” Clearly he’s taking the bait. Some of his readers however are not, see the comments. One of my favorite comments there is by Paul Fabretti who wisely points out: “I can’t quite see the benefit of this Steve, other than to AOL. What possible benefits could an external developer add to the AIM that there isn’t already around amyway?”

Bingo.

The big print giveth, the small taketh away is right. It’s cool that they want to open things up, but let’s be real here. A lot of these supposed ‘open’ agreements — and not just from AOL but from many vendors — are closed for activities that involve any sort of revenue for the developers. What these companies should be promoting is “open for non-commercial use only.” Of course that doesn’t sound as appealing, hence the asterisk in this post’s title.

Read about Ether this morning on Techcrunch:

Service providers set up an account by providing some personal information and a phone number that they would like to be called at. Any service that can be provided over the phone is a perfect match for Ether. “Sellers” set their price, from free to anything (on a per minute or per hour basis). They can tell Ether the hours they are willing to take calls. Every seller is issued a toll free phone number (with a dedicated extension), which forwards to their phone.

The TechCrunch review also indicates that it handles digital content (like software delivery):

Sellers can also sell any type of digital content through Ether as well. The buyer is able to access the content only after paying the agreed upon fee. This content can be emailed out to people, or accessed via a link/badge that can be placed on a website.

I’m definitely interested in actually using this service (not only reviewing it for Hmm) and tried to sign up for the beta. Uh oh, the beta invite didn’t like my email address.

On the beta invite form they aren’t accepting the + in emails which can be used effectively in some programs like Gmail. I realize that technically speaking it doesn’t conform to the RFC 2822 specs, but it is a handy function in Gmail for sorting mails into folders. I reported this issue on their technical support contact form (Update: this form doesn’t accept emails with the + in it, either, I told them that) and pointed here so they would be aware of this issue.

I’m curious about this service, particularly since I’m working on several things that concern digital delivery and could see where Ether might come in handy. Their 15% fee isn’t as aggressive as some third party processors.

Fellow developers, does this service sound like a potentially useful additional distribution channel? Non-developer readers, does this sound like a service you might use to buy products and services?