OSX Lion: Should you upgrade?

I love upgrades.  I am usually the first one to get a new operating system, an app update, or the latest beta version of a software.  Half of the software that I run on my various devices is in beta.  I love being on the cutting edge.  Sometimes this means you get the latest features, and sometimes you get some broken stuff.

Apple on Wednesday released "Lion" the latest and greatest update to what it calls "The best OS we've ever made".  I've checked out the reviews, watched the videos, and I think it looks fabulous.  Take a look for yourself:

With every major upgrade, there is the potential for stuff to get broken.  I almost updated right away, and then I thought I should do a little research.  A few Google searches later and I came up to this post by a Google employee on the Sketchup help forum:

On behalf of the SketchUp team, I want to give everybody a heads-up that we've encountered a few issues using SketchUp on the new Mac Lion OS. You can check them out below (along with suggested workarounds); we are working on improving/fixing these -- thanks in advance for replying here with any other issues you find using SketchUp on the new Mac OS!

Issue: SU freezes when generating scene thumbnails for models with background images (ie, those with Match Photo scenes).
Workaround: Keep the Scenes dialog box closed when working with models with background images.

Issue: In a model with 1 match photo scene, the camera is no longer synced back to the scene when clicking on the scene.
Workaround: Add a second scene via some method other than using the Scenes dialog - e.g. right click on the Scene tab and select “Add”. Adding a scene via the Scenes dialog is not possible given the first issue.

Issue: When trying to login to the 3D Warehouse from within SketchUp, you see the message “Service not available. Try again later”.
Workaround: You can still login to the 3D Warehouse outside of SketchUp by going directly to the site: http://sketchup.google.com/3dwarehouse/ From there, it is possible to then upload KMZ files which means you need to export your SketchUp model to the KMZ format before uploading.

Issue: When selecting a region using the “Photo Textures” dialog, only one pin is visible which makes it hard to accurately grab a photo texture. You can still grab photo textures - it is just that grabbing the exact region you want is now more difficult as you can’t see all the pins.

Workaround: By left clicking on the photo region and moving the mouse, you can somewhat manipulate the region you want to capture.

Issue: With the new Lion OSX, there is a new Mouse option (“Move content in the direction of finger movement when scrolling or navigating”) which is checked by default. When this option is checked, scrolling forward with the mouse wheel causes the SU model to zoom out and scrolling backwards causes the model to zoom in.
Workaround: In Lion, go to System Preferences > Mouse and uncheck “Move content in the direction of finger movement when scrolling or navigating”. Note: in a future release, unchecking this option should no longer be necessary.

Issue: Stacked Snappy dialogs can now break apart after resizing one of the dialogs in the stack.
Workaround: Re-snap the dialogs together if they break apart after a resize.

Issue: With Lion, SketchUp now remembers whatever models you had open in a previous SketchUp session and, on re-launch, opens those same models. This means that models can now show up behind the Welcome dialog, which is a change of behavior. It may also mean that SketchUp can take longer to launch and may potentially re-open a problem model from a previous session.
Workaround: Close your models prior to exiting SketchUp if you do not like this behavior.

So, I suppose not an entirely bad list, but there are a few alarming ones in there, particularly with the 3D warehouse.  No official word from Google on when we will see some updates.  So those out there itching to upgrade, you probably should let Snow Leopard purr a little longer.  Have you upgraded?  Tell us your experience in the comments!

Here is the link to the post on the Sketchup help forum.

My geeky heroes

Over the past few years I have been afforded many opportunities to speak publicly.  Some of my career options early on included "Rock Star" in the list.  Alas, I don't have any tattoos, a regenerative liver, or most importantly the ability to play a "cool" musical instrument.  So because of these limitations, I have been relegated to the less "cool" task of being a kitchen design, blogger, and geek.

Whenever I get the chance to be on stage I get a bit of an adrenaline rush.  Like the rush you get when you hear the bark of a powerful car engine after a perfect heel-toe shift.  There is something about being in front of people and having something interesting to say that really gives me a charge.  My goal whenever I speak is to not drone on and be boring, I always want to be memorable and fun.  My thought is that you could be saying the most useful facts in the world, but if you aren't memorable, those facts will be forgotten when people walk out of the auditorium, or head to the next booth.

Since I don't have a talent coach I sometimes scour the internet in search of good speakers, I watch them and try to learn from them.  There are some great speakers in our time, Martin Luther King, John F Kennedy, and some say even our current president.  Rather then review the most famous speakers of all time, I have picked a few more recent, more tech related folks that I have discovered and would like share with you.

First up:

Steve Balmer:

I know what you are thinking:  You didn't pick Steve Jobs as the first one!!  I know Steve's great, and we are getting there.  Steve Ballmer has got to be one of my favorites.  At his core he is 100% passionate about what he does.  Every time you see him speak you can see that.  That being said, he certainly has a penchant for sticking his foot in his mouth and being a bit of a loose cannon.  His faults make me love watching him even more.  The guy sometimes borders on being a maniac!  See the videos below:

This is a clip of him handling a really tough question with his typical loud and boisterous behavior...

This is a developers conference where he flips out on stage. Can you see the passion here?

Bill Gates:

Ok, I will be honest, I think Bill Gates is not a good public speaker. He's not the worst, but there is just not a lot of energy from the guy when he is on stage. Brilliant guy no doubt, but I find the "Steve's" much more engaging. However, Mr. Gates did have one moment which really stuck out in my memory. Since his departure from Microsoft he's been spending his time fighting malaria. He did a speech for TED on malaria and was describing how it's transmitted through mosquitos. The speech itself was decent, but the part where he unleashed live mosquitos on the audience really sent his point home.  He didn't tell the audience until several minutes later that the mosquitoes were uninfected.

I can't embed this video for you, so you'll have to watch it on YouTube

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ppDWD3VwxVg

Larry Ellison:

So this guy is NOT someone I look up to. Below is a highlight reel from him at a product launch. This is a HIGHLIGHT reel, so it's probably got the best stuff in it. I am sure Larry is a smart guy, and I am nerdy, but he just lost me right away.... You'll see, you only need to watch it for about 15 seconds.

Steve Jobs:

This guy is a master of presentation. He's such an engaging speaker. He inspires his employees, developers and makes his customers swoon for his products. How does he do this? I'll let someone else explain that at the end of the post. For now though, take a look at the original iPhone launch. Steve really knows how to launch a product.  I am not a live sports fan, and I always refer to Apple product launches as "my Super Bowl"

Now, lets step back and look at these four guys. They are all heads of HUGE tech companies. They by many measures are fabulously successful. Microsoft probably has way more resources then Apple. Why does everyone carry around and talk about their iPods and not a Zune? How about the new Windows Phone 7? The answer is below. If there is any video on this post that you watch in it's entirety, you must watch this one.  This video will literally change the way you think about marketing your product.

Simon Sinek:

Kitchen Tech on Design Kula

My friend Corey Klassen graciously invited me to write for his blog, Design Kula.  We brainstormed a topic together, and we decided that with my penchant for tech that I would cover some interesting kitchen technology.

I dug through the internet and found several pieces of technology.  Some good, some great, some odd, and some quite green (literally).

So I recommend that you head over to Design Kula and check it out!  (unless you are still shouting at your voice activated coffee maker)

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.

Guest Post: Tips from Arne Salvesen

Arne Salvesen is a CKD (Certified Kitchen Designer) from Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.  He writes the blog Useful Spaces that focusses on kitchen and bathroom design, and from time to time good things to eat and drink.  I had the pleasure of meeting Arne at KBIS, and he is such a nice guy.  In addition to his great design sense, he's also a Sketchup user. I asked him if he'd be interested in doing a post for my blog, and he jumped at the chance.  With one proviso:  He had to be able to use the Canadian spellings of words.  Of course I agreed!  You can follow Arne on Twitter [@arnesalvesen]

Eric has graciously asked me to do a guest post for Sketch This!  It's truly an honour since Eric has been one of my go-to guys for Sketchup for about a year now.  But after he asked me for a contribution, I wondered what could I possibly offer to someone who knows so much about this terrific piece of software.  Eric's advice:  go with what you find useful.

For me, Sketchup's benefit comes in the form of speed.  The functions contained within the programme duplicate tasks I would perform while hand-drafting, and do so with more accuracy.  Two of my favourites are the "divide" and "multiply" functions.  "Divide" is useful when you have a fixed amount of space you want to divide into an equal number of spaces.  To illustrate, I'm showing a bar back panel that I want to make into a door style with five, equally sized recessed panels.  I start by creating some guidelines around the outside of my panel, set 3" (the width of my rails and stiles) in from the edge.  There's also a guideline on the left edge.

To outline where my panels will be I simply select the first two guidelines and copy (not move) them being sure to select the left guideline as my starting point.  These guidelines are then placed so select point lines up with the guideline set in from the right edge.

To create my panels I simply type "/5".  This will make 5 copies of what I have just moved, and space them equally over the distance I have moved them.  Now I simply have to use the guidelines to draw in my panels knowing they are all exactly the same size.

The opposite function to this is "Multiply".  Multiply is used when the space between a group of items is the important part.  A very common example of this is framing.  Typically the framing member is a wall are spaced 16" apart.  Here, I show an object (representing a 2x4 framing member) being copied in line to a new location.  If I simply type in "16" while I'm moving the object, then hit the Return key, the object will be moved exactly 16" (This assumes you're working in inches.  If not, just add " after 16 and you're set!).

To repeat the move, simply type "*" followed by the number of times you'd like the move repeated, and voila!  Your wall is framed.

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