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Nokia is going to leverage Microsoft’s tools

Now I’m not Nokia user, in fact I think I’m pretty sure I’ve never owned a Nokia phone. But since Nokia owns Navteq, I pay attention to them. When I saw this announcement on Nokia’s website about Ovi Share being discontinued, I figured I’d look closer. Since I don’t user Ovi Share, the graphic that Nokia had on their blog post caught my eye.

Ovi Share

It appears Ovi Share uses Google Maps to display the picture locations. How crazy is that? Nokia doesn’t use Ovi Maps/Nokia Maps on their own products. Of course maybe it is because their users prefer Google.

I’m guessing with the Microsoft Phone integration, Nokia is going to leverage Microsoft’s tools (and probably Bing Maps) to share your “experiences” with others. Can we add Nokia to yet another company leaving Google Maps?

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Very important update for SketchUp 8

In the world of software, the designation “M2” refers to “Maintenance Release #2”. Maintenance releases are mini-versions that come out between major updates. They aren’t really about flashy new features; they’re more like tune-ups for your car; squeaks and rattles get fixes, tires are rotated, fluids are changed. You get the picture.

It’s been a few months since we released M1; since then, we’ve collected a fresh batch of performance tweaks and bug fixes—over 150 of them, in fact. M2 is a free update for all users of SketchUp 8 and SketchUp Pro 8 in all 12 languages. The best way to get it is to open SketchUp and do this:

Windows: Choose Help > Check for Update
Mac: Choose SketchUp > Check Web for Update

Having stated that maintenance releases aren’t always flashy, we couldn’t resist adding a few shiny, new things that we think you’ll appreciate:

Better Ruby Script Installation

We’ve had a way for other folks to build SketchUp plugins and extensions for years. Anyone with coding skills can use the Ruby API (application programming interface) to whip up new tools that they can distribute any way they like. People have created thousands of great scripts—we consider the API one of the most useful things we’ve done.

The tricky part has always been teaching SketchUp modelers how to install and access the Ruby scripts (Rubies) that they want to use. Adding a sophisticated Ruby used to involve finding a specific folder on your system and putting a bunch of files in all the right places. Try explaining how to do that to your boss.

The Extensions panel in SketchUp Preferences has a new button…

In SketchUp 8 M2, we’ve added two features that should make using Rubies a whole lot easier: The first is a new button on the Extensions panel in SketchUp Preferences. Clicking it lets you install any properly-configured “.RBZ” (ruby zip) file, which puts the needed files into the correct spot, without having to dig around in your computer’s file system. It’s simple, but huge. We’ve also added a lightweight set of “hooks” in the API that should help scripters build their own script-management tools.

Better COLLADA

All versions of SketchUp 8 can read and write COLLADA, a 3D file format that works with lots of other 3D software. It’s managed by the Khronos Group, an industry consortium that decides which features COLLADA should support. As of M2, SketchUp’s import/export support for COLLADA is now compliant with over 90% of the official Khronos compatibility test suite, only leaving out support for animations and shaders—neither of which can be authored in SketchUp anyway.

We think you’ll like SketchUp 8 M2’s ability to seamlessly import and export clean and compliant COLLADA geometry. One particular thing to note: SketchUp now preserves texture names in exported files. This makes it easier to work with COLLADA files in 3rd party rendering tools.

Advanced Camera Tools included in Pro

Back in March, we announced the Advanced Camera Tools for SketchUp Pro 8. The ACTs let set designers, cinematographers, storyboard artists and other people in the entertainment industry work with simulated real-world cameras in their SketchUp models. Until now, the ACTs were a separate plugin that you had to install. In M2, they’re built right into every copy of SketchUp Pro 8.

More Straightforward Pro Trials

After you download and install SketchUp Pro, you can try all of the Pro features for 8 hours (of use) before deciding to buy a license. Up until now, we’ve simply switched off the Pro stuff if you don’t enter a license after the trial period. Effectively, Pro reverted to being just like regular ol’ SketchUp.

The problem was that lots of people didn’t realize that they weren’t actually running Pro anymore. Even worse, folks who had bought Pro licenses and had forgotten (or otherwise been unable) to activate those licenses were missing out on all the great stuff they’d paid for. Our Pro Support team has been fielding dozens of “Why can’t I import a CAD file?” questions per day. It’s been a bit of a mess.

Starting with SketchUp 8 M2, the SketchUp Pro Trial will no longer revert to “free mode” when the trial period expires. A separate version of SketchUp will still be available to download for free, but SketchUp Pro will require a valid license file to run after your trial period has expired.

Mac OS 10.7 Compatibility

Users of Apple’s latest operating system, take note: SketchUp 8 is fully compatible with your hardware. And I ain’t lion. Rawr.

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Adding Image Overlays in Google Earth

This video will demonstrate how to add an image overlay into Google Earth. We will show you how to add the image overlay, make the image transparent, and re-size it to fit identically on the map.

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London Riots Map: Visualising correlations on maps

Correlation is a statistical technique very often used in data analysis. It can show whether and how strongly pairs of variables are related. It normally involves lots of mathematical calculations but a quick insight into the phenomenon under investigation can be gained by simply superimposing the data on a map, if both datasets have a common spatial component (eg. location).

Take, for example, a case of recent London riots, mapped on MapTube. Overlaying locations of civil commotions with Index of Deprivation (ie. a measure of poverty) allows drawing a hypothesis that poverty and propensity to violent demonstrations are related. The correlation may not necessary be obvious when analysing each dataset in isolation and in a numerical form.

A point to note however is that, if the two variables are said to be correlated they may or may not be the cause of one another. In other words, correlation does not imply causality. The correlation phenomena could be caused by a third, previously unconsidered phenomenon, called a lurking variable or confounding variable. For this reason, there is no way to immediately infer the existence of a causal relationship between the two variables. Hence, one should not jump to the conclusion that “poverty is a major factor contributing to London riots” without examining the phenomenon in more detail.

As a side note, I am very surprised to see so much “red” on the London map, implying that the majority of central suburbs are poverty stricken areas – with only a few pockets of wealth on the city fringes. This picture is in big contrast to Sydney where underprivileged areas are concentrated mainly in the south-western part of the city and, most importantly, account only for roughly a quarter of the overall metropolitan area. Australia indeed seems to be a very lucky country…

London Riots Map first spotted on Google Maps Mania

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Now 3D buildings in Google Earth for Android tablets!

Google Earth on mobile devices just took a big step forward with the release of Google Earth 2.0 for Android, with a special emphasis on tablets. It has some great new features, but is still lacking some of the features that we were hoping for.

The big addition to this release is 3D buildings! Every 3D building that you can view on your desktop is now available on your Android tablet. The buildings use the same high quality texture as the desktop version, though there’s no anti-aliasing built-in so things can look a bit choppy around the edges.

Curiously, it doesn’t appear to load any of the gray buildings from Google Earth — only the ones that are textured. Nor do any of the new 3D trees load, though that’s not a big surprise at this point.

In addition, they’ve worked on the “action bar” at the top of the screen to make it easy to search for locations, toggle layers, reorient yourself, etc. It’s very well done.

Other nice new features include the new content pop-ups when viewing items like photos, as shown here:

The photo feature is nice, but it’s difficult to view the picture full-size. Rather than clicking the photo itself, you need to click the small Panoramio link below it. Not very intuitive, though the overall photo viewing experience is quite nice.

In terms of performance, it certainly doesn’t run quite as smoothly when you’ve got the buildings enabled, but it holds up quite well. Much of that will be based on the capabilities of your tablet, but the Xoom with its dual-core processor handles things quite well. It’s very apparent that they worked hard to optimize performance on this version.

The only real downside is that they’ve ignored most of Frank’s list of things the tablet version should have, specifically KML support. Having some degree of KML support on the tablet version would be quite nice, and I’m sure we’ll see it someday. We believe that the new Android tablets are fully capable of supporting all of the features from the desktop version, and it’s a matter of Google taking the time to port those features over.

If you have a Xoom, or one of the other few Android 3.0-enabled tablets, give it a shot and let us know what you think!

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