Building a Home on Earth Friday 2006-04-28
Finally it is possible to build your own cozy home in the virtual world. Quick Online Tips today publishes a tip for Google Earth habitués. Google releases a free 3D modeling tool called Google SketchUp. With the tool you can draw realistically looking buildings and other stuff.
You can than place your new home on Google Earth and at least fly around it. We will probably have to wait for the day, when we can enter our virtual home and sit down at the kitchen table with a nice cup of coffee.
Advanced buildings can be crafted with SketchUp, like Tai Mahal or The White House. Maybe you need the payed
pro version for more complex things.
But if you have Google Earth installed, and like to build things on the planet, go get Google SketchUp and hammer away. Show your new home to the real world.
Vår i Rinkebyn Tuesday 2006-04-18
Vintern börjar ge upp sin kamp om markerna och våra sinnen. Endast små ynkliga svartnande högar av grusblandad snö ligger kvar på skuggiga ställen. Årets isiga mars har övergått i ett soligt april, och fastän vindarna ännu kan kännas kyliga, finns hopp om vår och sommar, och de djärvaste blomstren har kastat sig upp ur mullen och lyser vid soliga väggar.
Jag har lämnat Ön och mina multimediala experiment och besöker familjen Arborelius i Rinkebyn. Äntligen har jag fått träffa den sköna Jez, på besök hos Olof från Jerusalem. Vi sågs här hos Naela och Björn, som bjöd på god mat och trevlig samvaro under en kväll. Snart nog far Jessica tillbaka till Jerusalem, och till sommaren skall hon besöka sitt amerikanska hem. Till hösten planerar hon att studera i Stockholm, och jag kan bara önska dem all glädje av varandra. Man kan bara ta en sådan varm och generös ung kvinna till sitt hjärta.
A Flash Image 3D Cube Friday 2006-04-14
Just a short message before I rush for the bus, for transportation to the capital Stockholm, to enjoy the company of my children.
I’m working on a 3D Image Cube, I want to adapt for getting Flickr images. Could be nice. Maybe a new tutorial?
Until next time!
[Edit] Back from Stockholm with a message from Headzoo, who made a WordPress plugin for Flickr stored images. The Flickr Spinnr uses PHP to get images from a Flickr user, caches them for better performance and uses Javascript to drive a rotating cube. At the time of writing, you can see the result in my left sidebar.
[Edit again] I had a proposition from Headzoo, a fierce competitor in the Flickr 3D Rotating Cube arena 
The Javascript 3D engine is a bit slow, and we may work together to use a Flash engine. You can follow the results of our joint efforts on the 3D Image Cube page in Petit Labs.
[Eidt] We’re on our way, the results soon to be shown on a blog near you.
WordPress Widget tutorial
If you use WordPress, and follow what happens at the WordPress dot Com blogger site or in the WordPress community, you haven’t missed the new web 2.0 Ajaxian way to treat Widgets. If you have, here’s a short resume to get you in touch.
A WordPress Widget is some facility you place on the sidebar, like a calender or a list of, say recent posts. We all have something like that in our blogs, so that’s nothing new per se. The news is that you can do all kinds of fancy things with a WP Widget widget from an admin interface, like switching them on and off, moving them around or change their behavior.
Now you know. But do you know you how to craft your own widget?
The always alert and helpful Kaf at guff szub.Net has written a short and readable tutorial “My Widget - Example WordPress Widget“
Google Calendar is Up Thursday 2006-04-13
Today Google Calendar is up and running, and you may centralize your events handling system. Over the years, many different solutions have been presented, to solve the problem of group and personal calendars, that you can reach from anywhere. The first networked calendars were for company internal use, so that work groups could note meetings and other important dates. Later calendars, from among others Microsoft and Netscape, used Internet based HTML calendars. More ore less sophisticated, they allowed for private calendars, that could be used also by groups. The private calendar is naturally used for private events, as visiting aunt Molly or the dentist, while group calendars knits together project groups.
Google’s new web based calendar takes the technique of earlier calendars a step further, by using an web 2.0 Ajax approach, which makes the user interface fast and easy to use. You can customize the calendar in a lot of ways. There are setting for the presentation, such as what days to show, on which day the week starts and what time format you want use. You can also choose what i kind of notifications you want from the calendar, and how long time before the event it should be sent to you. You can get notifications by email or by SMS. The latter can only be done via certain mobile service providers, that Google has an agreement with. Living in Sweden, I seem to be unable to get the SMS notifications.
You can invite your work group members, friends or family to view your calendar and/or send invitations to it.
If you let anyone see your calendar, you’re at risk for receiving unwanted spam invitations. So you better setup the calender for moderated invitations, which means you have to accept the invitation before it reaches the calendar.
To use the calendar, you will need a Google account, which is free.
Patents of Software Destruction Tuesday 2006-04-11
blood was rushing to my head, as I came about an article in ZDNet news entitled “Eolas work-around puts the brakes on Rich Internet Applications“.
Provocative title, no doubt, but what’s it about?
Eolas Technologies Inc. and the University of California has raised a lawsuit against Microsoft over a patent on interactive software embedded in net documents. Says ZDNets Ed Burnette:
“Eolas basically patented the idea of embedding interactive content (like a Flash control or a Java applet) in a web page and won’t let anyone else use this idea without paying them millions of dollars.”To no surprise, Microsoft is not willing to pay, but reacts by crafting a work-around for embedding Active-X controls. In effect they regard them non-interactive until the user “activates” the applet by clicking on it. For the user, this means the applet must be clicked on to focus it before it is usable. An inconvenience, and in my opinion completely unnecessary. There should be a world wide ban on software patents. They only work to hinder development and use of good software and user experience.
In this case a federal judge has ruled that Microsoft pay Eolas and the University of California $520 in damage for the alleged patent violation. I usually think that Microsoft, while doing a lot for the computer and Internet users, are also doing too much to lock them into an all Microsoft environment. In this case though, I think their place on the barricades is beneficial to all, users and programmers alike.
Look at this excerpt from US Patent 5,838,906 filed October 1994, and let me know what you think!
“What is claimed is:
providing at least one client workstation and one network server coupled to said network environment, wherein said network environment is a distributed hypermedia environment;
executing, at said client workstation, a browser application, that parses a first distributed hypermedia document to identify text formats included in said distributed hypermedia document and for responding to predetermined text formats to initiate processing specified by said text formats; utilizing said browser to display, on said client workstation, at least a portion of a first hypermedia document received over said network from said server, wherein the portion of said first hypermedia document is displayed within a first browser-controlled window on said client workstation, wherein said first distributed hypermedia document includes an embed text format, located at a first location in said first distributed hypermedia document, that specifies the location of at least a portion of an object external to the first distributed hypermedia document, wherein said object has type information associated with it utilized by said browser to identify and locate an executable application external to the first distributed hypermedia document, and wherein said embed text format is parsed by said browser to automatically invoke said executable application to execute on said client workstation in order to display said object and enable interactive processing of said object within a display area created at said first location within the portion of said first distributed hypermedia document being displayed in said first browser-controlled window.”
And it goes on like this of course in ten paragraphs. Yes I know, legal gibberish looks like this, and for a reason. The patent is not so much for a technical solution, as for the mere idea of embedding software in a web page and have it execute (at least partly) on the client computer.
When it comes to real usable software, copyright laws are absolutely sufficient, and patents only serves to make development difficult and users suffer.
Please tell me otherwise, if you like!
Flickr Badge and XHTML, Part 4 Thursday 2006-04-06
In my tutorial series “Building a Flickr Flash Display“, I have come to Part 3. Here we go through the code needed to make the images of the display zoom out smoothly, when the user mouses over one of the thumbnails. We’ll also make a version in which the zooming in and out of randomly selected images is done automatically. It is fairly simple to accomplish the smooth and professionally looking behaviors, using the versatile Actionscript Tween class and its easing helper classes.
Please join me to craft a dynamic Flickr display.
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