Extending their lineup of beta-version web-editors, Autodesk just released Project Butterfly. After Project Draw (drawing and diagramming), Project Dragonfly (space planning in isometric 3D), Project Showroom (rendered previews of interior design selections), their latest addition to the labs (the Butterfly) is an online DWG-editor. Made by an acquired company (Visual Tao) and Autodesk, this web [...]

I was once again changing the design of one of my websites when I realized that it would be great if I could just move things around on a page to preview the changes – without any coding. As it turns out, there is a solution to that problem: A bookmarklet and a few lines [...]

Chirp, chirp… While I was figuring out how to make best use of all things Web 2.0, I found that Twitter is a great way for me to broadcast quick news items related to my blog’s topics (AEC-CAD, timber engineering, design and web stuff). So whenever something is too short for a blog post but [...]

And the good ideas keep on coming! As just announced by Autodesk Labs in their post Project Twitch Range Expanded: can YOU connect?, Autodesk extended the range of their application tryout platform “Twitch” beyond the originally stated 1000 mile radius. Now user connection capability is just limited by a network latency cutoff. And as I [...]

Now that’s a very interesting surprise! After releasing a rather useless “Fluid” application (actually a technology preview) on the iPhone a while ago, Autodesk this time released a winner. SketchBook mobile is a nice sketching application. Other than most similarly-minded iPhone software, it has nice brushes and even boasts a layer system. Here is a [...]

Oh, dear – maybe the title goes a bit too far. It’s not about what you may think this is about… This really is about combining temperature and virtual 3D models of buildings. Click on the image below to get an idea of what I mean. Please upgrade your browser For this project I took [...]

As announced in their latest blog post, Google has just released an optimization feature for their online spreadsheets (which, of course, are part of Google Docs). With this new feature, linear optimization problems can be solved easily. This is a great feature and makes online spreadsheets even more Excel-like and usable. Here are some of [...]

I recently had the need to set up several different websites in one (hosted, shared) webspace. While this by itself is trivial there was a catch: I had multiple domains that needed to be DNS forwarded (using CNAME) to this webspace. In essence, the functionality I needed was that once a user goes to one of [...]

What is it with backyard bugs and software? First there was Grasshopper and now there is Dragonfly. Add to those the big animals used by McNeel and the cover designer of the O’Reilly books and we have ourselves a veritable zoo! But I digress… Autodesk Labs has several web-based applications that look very interesting and [...]

I just installed IntenseDebate on this site. It is a comment management system that is far more flexible than what I had so far. Threading is implemented (without me having to fiddle with the code and making everything work with WordPress 2.7 comments) and RSS subscription is nicely implemented. Commenters (and comments) can also now [...]