join.me: The coolest screen sharing app.

This past week I was in Chicago for NeoCon 2011. While I didn’t spend too much time in the MerchMart, I did hang around the Brizo showroom with a group from Interior Design Chat for a live chat.

If you aren’t familiar with Interior Design Chat, it’s a Twitter chat that happens every Tuesday night at 6pm EST. A bunch of interior designers get together and chat live on Twitter using the hashtag #intdesignerchat. The chat is fast, like a cheetah with a rocket pack on its back fast. You need quick fingers and quick wit to keep up. It’s worth it though, the people you can meet are really interesting. The chat was started just about a year ago and has really blown up in the past year. People from literally every side of the planet participate. I heard a statistic that the chat is read by some 44,000 people.
After the live chat we met the next day at the Lightology showroom in downtown Chicago. Lightology is the worlds largest lighting showroom, and certainly makes lights look like artwork, not just utilitarian electrical to photon converters. While we were there, we were given a design challenge. We divided up into four teams, fired up Sketchup, and set about creating big kitchens in a small amount of time. Since we’re all members of Interior Design Chat, we naturally were all over the social media while we were designing.

As far as the technology goes, I am never satisfied with what is available, I always want the next thing, almost to a fault! I had been playing around for the past few months with join.me. join.me is a simple online meeting app. If WebEx or GoToMeeting were wearing suits, join.me would show up in flip flops and a Hawaiian shirt. At first, you may not take it seriously because it doesn’t have all the “big boy” features like our suit wearing friends, but it does have one magical feature: Simplicity.

WebEx and GoToMeeting are great online meeting apps to use. They’ve got a ton of features that suit wearing, BMW driving business types will find extremely useful. With all that power comes complexity, and price.

How often have you been on the phone with someone, and you just wanted to show them your screen? With join.me you can do just that, and in a matter of seconds. All you do is go to join.me, click “Share” and a tiny little app fires up. It gives you a link that you can paste into an email, or a chat. Once the person on the other side clicks the link, within seconds they are seeing your screen. No complicated software installs, no signup, or configuration. Just instant screen sharing! It’s amazingly simple and you wouldn’t believe how fast it is. There is even a phone conference as part of it. The best part, its FREE! I use this service all the time when I am talking to clients about a design.

So what does this have anything do to with our design competition? Well, as we were designing, people were asking us questions about what we were doing on Twitter. Rather then answer them in 140 characters, I just fired up join.me and Tweeted a link! People from all over the world logged in to see what I was doing. In the course of a few hours, I had over 60 unique viewers watching me design live! Mind you, there was no planning, and no promotion of this. It was just a last minute thing I decided to do. Soon, I had each team in the room tweeting a link, and we had viewers from all over the place watching us create these kitchens. The level of engagement was amazing. People were using the live chat feature to ask questions, and even tweeting, and retweeting the link all over the place.
Maggie from the join.me team even stopped in to see what we were up to. I told her how pumped I was about this neat use of their software, and I asked her if she’d answer a few questions about it here in this post.

Q1> So join.me is free, but I also noticed that you have a paid version. What’s the difference between the two?

join.me pro is really for those who love join.me but need a little more. They might want to have their own personal URL, or the ability to schedule meetings in advance, or have a few presenters on the account. It’s as simple to use as join.me, but with a little extra. You can start your free two-week trial here.

Q2> So join.me is ridiculously simple to use, but would you have any tips for beginners?

I guess my tip would be like any other tip I’d give someone who is using a new service: Get your hands on it. Use it. Share your screen; view others. Check out how everything works. If you want, you could share between your computer and your mobile device (iOS or Android). The best part of join.me is the experience. You can also check out our blog if you want to dive deeper into some of the features.


Q3> Have you ever seen someone tweet what is on their screen like we did for the design competition?

I haven’t, but it’s a very cool way to use join.me. We have people who use join.me in all sorts of ways, like joining virtual book clubs, holding virtual “office hours” for students, reviewing projects and documents with colleagues - it’s really interesting to learn how join.me can fit into their lives.

For what I do on a day to day basis as a designer, WebEx and GoToMeeting are too complicated, and too expensive me. They do have their place though. join.me is so fast, and so easy to use it’s just amazing. If you’ve ever thought “I wish I could show what’s on my screen to someone else” in the easiest, fastest way possible, join.me is your app.

Memorial Day Re Run: Apps for Sketchup? Steve Jobs is NOT amused.

Due to the long weekend, I leave you with this re-run from several months ago.  This is an immensely useful plugin that I use every time I use Sketchup.  Its free, and definitely worth downloading.

Sketchup is as useful in the 3D world as a Swiss Army knife, but sometimes it just doesn't do exactly what you want it to do.

Just like you can put an app on your smartphone, you can add a plugin for Sketchup.  There is a great developer community out there, and just like the smartphone apps, a lot of the Sketchup plugins are free.

Plugins solve problems.  One problem that I have is that clients always love to change colors.  When you've got a Sketchup model full of materials it can be time consuming to swap them all out.

Thanks to a plugin by Thomas Thomassen I can now do this with just a couple of clicks.  Check out the video of his "Material Replacer" plugin below:

This fabulous plugin can be had for free by downloading it right here.  Thomas, or "ThomThom" on the forums works for cookies.  So please, if you like this plugin send him a cookie.

WebPad for iPad

So to add even more awesomeness to the iPad, I have discovered a new app called WebPad.  WebPad lets you draw on your iPad, live on someone else's computer screen.  Ok, I realize that doesn't sound that exciting, so let me give you a real life scenario for this:

A customer called me a while back, I had been working on a design for them.  There was a particular detail that I was describing to them.  I had a picture in my head, and I was attempting to put it into words.  Like a lot of customers, they aren't telepathic, so they didn't understand what I was talking about.   If I was talking about this face to face, I would have fired up Adobe Ideas and draw out the sketch for them.  In this case, I didn't have that choice.

Enter WebPad:  With WebPad, I can fire it up, instantly email my customer a link.  Once they click on the link, they see my iPad screen live on their screen!  As I draw, it shows up on their screen.  AMAZING!  Virtual paper.  Watch my demo live below!

AIA 2010 Re Run: Mike builds kitchens from space!

This year unfortunately I won't be attending AIA, but my good friends Mike Tadros of Igloo Studios, Mark Johnson, and David Pillsbury will be!  The show starts today and I am sure that they are going to be doing all kinds of magical things with Sketchup, including but not limited to some Shaderlight renderings.  Check out what Mike did last year:  Also, follow the #AIA2011 hashtag on Twitter to keep up.  Each of the presenters names are linked above with their Twitter feed.  You can follow the AIA hashtag to the right with the Twitter Widget!  Here is a post I did about some of the "Movie Magic" that Mike did last year....

At the AIA show this year, Mike Tadros, president of the Sketchup training company, www.go-2-school.com did several presentations during the AIA show.  As with all of Mike's presentations, they are well thought out, and very informative.  Mike has a really fluid manner of teaching, and he's great at sensing what his class needs, and molding the presentation on the fly to accomodate everyone in the room.  Check out some of Mike's videos to get an idea of what I am talking about:

Of all Mike's presentations, there was one that really stuck out for me.  Mike started building a kitchen using the Kraftmaid models that are available in the 3D warehouse.  He went on to show how easy it is to create kitchens and living spaces with these models.  At one point, a lady asked if she could build her own kitchen with these tools.  Mike said "Sure!"  and then asked, "How about I build your kitchen for you?"  She agreed.  At this point, she, I, and I think everyone else was confused as to how Mike was going to accomplish this.  Remember, we're all on a trade show floor, and even though we were surrounded by architects, nobody had any idea what her kitchen looked like.

Without skipping a beat, Mike asked what her address was.  He pulled up Google Earth, and zoomed in on her location, and found the aerial photography of her house.

With just a few clicks, Mike had the aerial photography in Sketchup, where he began to trace the outside of the house.  He was quickly able to model up the walls.  The lady at the show was rather confused up until this point, because she had no idea how Mike was going to draw her house, without ever seeing it.  As soon as she saw the walls go up, she was able to easily describe where her kitchen was located.

After finishing the walls, Mike started to build a kitchen for her...

Right there on the screen, Mike put the cabinets where she wanted them.  There was no waiting, no render time, it all happened live, right there on the trade show floor.  Mike was using Merillat cabinets, which are available on the 3D warehouse in Sketchup

After Mike built her a kitchen, he even emailed her the Sketchup model.  She can now go home, download Sketchup Free, and view her dream kitchen herself, right in her own home.  When she decides its time to get it built, she's got a great 3D model to start with!  They say a picture is work a thousand words, but how many words is a 3D model worth?

Adobe Ideas on the iPad.

I did a lot of presentations at the Kitchen & Bath Industry show this year.  The presentations that I did were at Kraftmaid's Knowledge center.  Kraftmaid is doing a great job at being a leader in technology for design, and that's what a lot of my presentations were about.

If you follow this blog, you may know about my exploits with various bits of technology, in particular, my new iPad.  I got the iPad about six months ago, despite my newfound Android addiction.  Since getting the iPad, I have slotted it into my workflow rather nicely.  In this digital age, I see no reason that we can't go completely paperless.  In part for saving the trees, but also because its so damn convenient to not have to deal with paper.

In my presentations for the iPad I talked about a slew of apps that can make your life so much easier as a designer.  One that I really love and use just about every day is called Adobe Ideas.  This app is a simple, robust drawing app built by the company that made "Photoshop" a verb. Despite the rather nasty spat Apple had with adobe this past year, Adobe Ideas rocks on the iPad!  In the video below you will see how I use this app for taking field measurements, meeting notes, and I even draw ON a picture!

As the KBIS coverage continues throughout the coming weeks, stay tuned for more apps!  In the meantime, go get this app and let me know in the comments how it works for you!