Dassault Systèmes have recently announced the release of 3DVIA Composer.
The application is a useful tool in the product documentation publishing marketplace and provides technical illustrators with the ability to quickly produce product documentation associated with 3D CAD model data.
Various CAD systems are supported directly including SolidWorks, CATIA V4 and V5 and Pro Engineer. Supported file formats include STEP and IGES. The system can also be integrated with any PLM system using simple XML.
3DVIA Composer is available for Microsoft Windows platforms and will be initially supplied through Dassault Systèmes global network of resellers and partners. Early next year it will also be available through SolidWorks Resellers.
Find out more information from the web-site at
http://www.3dviacomposer.com
or
http://www.3dmojo.com/
The telekinesis project at Google Code, allows you to access your Mac through a collection of mini web applications, on your iPhone or iPod Touch.
Although still a developer prototype, which is intended only as a demo, it is available to download from the project home page at
http://code.google.com/p/telekinesis/
This provides an application iPhone Remote which you install and run on your Mac.
Then you can connect to the installed machine through its name, or IP address, in the Safari web browser on your iPod Touch, or iPhone, as follows:
https://NAME OF YOUR MAC HERE:5010/
and you are presented with a screen display similar to the following
Amongst other applications, as well as being able to see what is happening on your Mac screen (using the screen application) there is also an application which allows you to use the iPod as a remote control for the Mac.
I also came across another useful write-up on this topic at
http://www.sipedia.co.uk/mac/ipodwifistream.php
Sabeer Bhatia, famous for co-founding Hotmail and selling it to Microsoft for US $400 million, has recently announced the release of Live Documents, an online Office service.
http://www.live-documents.com
Although not quite live yet, the site will accept requests for an invitation to join the private beta program of its technology preview.
Live Documents is a suite of on-line Office applications, built using technologies including Flash and Flex, which offer functionality equivalent to Word, Excel and Powerpoint. The applications allow users to edit and view documents using a web-browser on any operating system.
The suite is also available as a desktop client application that enables offline access to documents. Although not entirely clear from information available on the web-site, this appears to be provided via a plug-in to Microsoft Office applications which converts them to web-enabled smart clients.
There are currently at least 3 players in this market segment viz Microsoft, Google and Adobe. It remains to be seen whether, or by how much, this new entrant will create an impact.
BTW whatever happened to Office Live Workspace, which is the equivalent offering from Microsoft? Perhaps this will provide a spur for them to open it up a bit more . . .
Scratch is an application that makes the process of creating interactive stories, animations and games etc. as simple as dragging and dropping pre-defined program blocks/modules into order.
Scratch is aimed at children between the ages of 8 and 16 years old (but can be used by anyone). It was developed by the Lifelong Kindergarten group
http://llk.media.mit.edu/
at the MIT Media Lab
http://www.media.mit.edu/
in collaboration with the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, with financial support from the National Science Foundation, Intel Foundation, and MIT Media Lab research consortia.
Here’s a sample application I put together in about 30 minutes
In the left hand panel, you can see the palette of blocks which can be used. The next panel to the right contains a number of blocks which have been snapped together to create the program segment and the right-hand panel contains the running application.
Scratch is an easy-to-use application for developing programs and learning about programming concepts. It includes a community which users can join and share applications they have developed. It could have an appeal to a wider audience who have always wanted to learn how to program.
All the details are available at:
http://scratch.mit.edu/
Files2Phones is an application that allows you to access your desktop PC (or Mac) directly from your iPhone or iPod Touch.
http://www.myf2p.com/
It is not necessary to install anything on the iPhone or iPod Touch, all the functionality is available through the Safari web browser.
The software installs the Files2Phones Access Server on your desktop PC. During installation a web address (for example, yourname.my2fp.com) is created for your computer and this is what you use to access your desktop computer.
You can determine which files and folders are made available and Files2Phones provides multiple security options to protect your data and access to the desktop. Public, Private and Guest areas are available.
A first look at Photo Gallery from the Windows Live suite.
This test is trying out the ability to upload images in Live Writer. If everything worked OK, you should see the image below.
I’m writing this using Windows Live Writer which I’ve just downloaded. This is one of the applications which is part of the Windows Live series and is available, at the time of writing, from
http://get.live.com/
Other items include:
- Hotmail: Stay connected anywhere with your Web e-mail account
- Mail: Access your multiple e-mail accounts in one place
- Messenger: Connect, share, and make your conversations count
- Toolbar: Easy access to Windows Live services from any Web page
- Spaces: The best place to share your world online
- Photo Gallery: Get creative and share your photos and videos
- Events: Plan your event. Send invitations. Share photos.
- OneCare Family Safety: Help protect your family and computer
So far so good, although I would like to see an auto-save feature; it may already be included, I just haven’t found it yet.
Installation was relatively straightforward, although it did seem to take long time to complete.
In addition to Live Writer, I also installed Live Mail – which is a client email application and Photo Gallery – equivalent to Picasa from Google.
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