I actually worked out that for what I wanted I could save money doing things the other way around. I wanted an HDTV, but was not overly impressed by the prices, so I got myself a 24" 1080p iiyama monitor and a freeview tuner box (digital terrestrial for the non-brits), making sure that both had HDMI ports. The monitor does have speakers and gets the signal through the HDMI, but I used the phono outs on the tuner to go through my hifi. It's not the tv in the lounge, so 24" is fine, but you could go for a bigger screen if you wanted.

I don't know whether there are big differences between the ways of quoting refresh rates, but mine was quoted as 5ms (because it is a monitor), which should be 200Hz, I would think, but they could be referring to different things, so don't just take my word for it. Whether that matters probably depends on what you want it for: just doing things in SU it shouldn't be an issue, but if you like to play fast racing games and things too, then I would go for a faster screen.

I'm not an A/V engineer or anything like that, so I can only talk about my case, which is that it still works (very nicely) as a high spec monitor, but is also a pretty good tv and a great screen for my xbox 360. It is only very slightly more complicated than just buying a tv off the shelf and is probably easier if you also want it to be a monitor, I don't remember the figures, but I think it did save me a fair amount, especially through shopping around.

As much as I would like a native linux port of SU, there is a list of other things I would like first.

Maybe we will get lucky and they will decide they want a version for their own OS, then the only extra they would have to do is make it X11 compatible. Although, as Chrome OS is planned for netbooks that may not be likely.

I would be happy to test it for them, if they do ever plan a linux version.

Until a recent update (I think) broke it, I did have SU running ok in wine for general things. DCs don't work though, I think the dialog boxes depend on IE or something, which is annoying, and there is the known issue with the screen not refreshing, apart from that it was pretty much the same as in windows.

I have a Mac (powerbook), which I use most of the time and I generally prefer it to using my windows box. Unlike most people, I got the Mac for the things you can't see; I like that it has Bash by default, that there is a lot of uni stuff I can put on it easily and just the general *nixiness of the internals. It is good as a laptop, too, light, thin, decent battery etc. Most things do just work and I don't know what I would do now without Hot Corners.

There is the odd thing I have come across in the Mac version of SU that I prefer (exporting pictures, for example, as rarely as I do that from the menu), but there are also a lot of annoying things which are different from the Windows version, for no good reason.

Of course, if I could choose any OS and have SU work on it, it would be Linux. I don't think I am a fanboy of anything, but windows really annoys me when I have to use it for any length of time. Linux usually does what I want and, ironically, is now easier to use most of the time, too. It really has come on leaps and bounds in the last few years and some of the window managers now rival OS X for prettiness. If a few key applications would properly support it, I wouldn't look back.

Oh, and for anyone who has ever had trouble installing Microsoft software, using Windows Update, or anything else like that: you may be amused to know that you are not alone.

I remember a BBC documentary about them, which some of the other Brits might have seen: Louis Theroux and The Most Hated Family in America. It was interesting and funny as most of his things are, but also disturbing and quite sad, especially for the younger members of the family, some of whom were starting to question what they were told, at the risk of being completely ostracised. There are some links to extra, interesting information at the bottom of the wiki article.

I find it entertaining that the Hell's Angels now offer to police soldiers' funerals to keep that church out and drown out their protest. Maybe not surprising, given their origins, but entertaining nonetheless.

That appears to be it, Fredo, everything is working.

Hopefully that will mean things will be fine on the Mac in the future, but I will look forward to testing whatever you come up with next

Also, About Centre is toggled by Option (Alt) on the Mac, but that is fine as it is consistent with other tools (Ctrl is used to right click, in case you really feel the need to use a single button mouse).

Ok, now I am really confused.

Things are fine in the plugins menu and the toolbars, but the context menu is still the same. Also, Tab works fine in JPP, but not in this. That does use the old version of LibTraductor (Dec 2007), although the section on keys appeared to be the same (I only looked briefly, so I might have missed something.

F2 and F3 don't seem to do anything, although if selected from the menu (context menu when using the tool works, but not for selecting the tools at the start), it behaves as you would expect. The ASCII code for Tab does seem to be 9, but, interestingly, for F2 and F3 it is 120 and 99, which is the same as for x and c. The hex keyboard codes are 78 and 63 (rather than 7 and 8 for x and c). I don't know if this is the same on the PC or how things work in the rubies, but hopefully that will help you a bit.

Here is a picture of the highlight thing, on the line tool at the moment, if I press it again it will move to the rectangle tool. It does that if you Tab with other tools in normal use, so maybe JPP was grabbing the input in another way?

That's excellent Fredo, I have all the labels and the shortcuts are bound. I assume it was just splitting that line in declare_command, although I am not sure why that should affect it.

Tab seems to highlight different tools, which can then be selected using space. It does something similar with Georeferencing sometimes. I think it is a Mac thing and it is Really Annoying, as space is the default (and most useful) binding for select. I really wish Google would choose the best aspects of the Windows and Mac versions and then make them both the same.

But anyway, thank you for all your hard work, I am glad it is now working.

Mine originally had two, but I changed it to show all of them down at the bottom of the preferences. You have to scroll down and resize the window in order to see it. I'll use the normal two more, but the target ones will be handy to have around.

Thanks Edson. I gave that a go, even migrating all my plugins, but that didn't seem to work this time. It did make me think about permissions and ownership, but they all seem fine. I think the rubies only need to be readable, as SU just reads them on startup and presumably then runs things from memory.

My own scripts work fine, despite having no execute permissions (644, must be something to do with Aquamacs, I will have to check the settings).

Oops. Sorry, I forgot to mention that all the instructions show up fine in the status bar. I think everything works fine, apart from the bits in the screen caps.

Hi Fredo, got some pictures for you.

This is what you get with 'Customise Toolbar', so what you would see if they were on the normal toolbar (instead of floating, like they do on the Mac).

This is the drop-down from the plugins menu, showing the blank lines (which do work if you click on them and are ticked if you have already selected the tool from the toolbar).

The context menu failing to fly out

Mouseover works

The real problem is the shortcuts

The half covered preferences window. The bottom bit scales with the window, always covering half, if you stretch to twice the length you can see everything.

I hope that makes things a bit clearer. I did try the Ruby thing as well and it returned Free Scale, which is confusing.

I noticed in FreeScale.def that there was the line:
T_DEFAULT_ToolbarName = "Freescale"
I tried capitalising the S, but it seemed to make no difference.

I did change the language to both French and Spanish and the problems appeared to be the same.

Also, Tab doesn't work, but I can right-click for the dimensions box. I am not too bothered about that, but I thought you might want to know anyway. It might just be bound to something else on the Mac, I will let you know if I find it.

Thanks again for a great plugin, it is now my default scale tool

First: thanks Fredo, this plugin is going to make a lot of things a lot easier and quicker. I could have used taper on some recent things and being able to reorient the scaling box is something I will use all the time.

Second: how it works on the Mac. I didn't see many people writing about this, so I thought I would let you know. The good news is that generally works fine, the only problem is a couple of UI things. The web dialogs do display, but it fills the bottom half of the window with nothing (presumably stretching the little blankspace border you normally get around things), but you can get around this by resizing the window until you see everything.

The slightly bigger problem for me is labels. The mouseover description works fine, but the labels under icons are blank (when I turned them on), in the menu there are four blank lines, which work for selecting the tools, but have no names and I do not get anything in the flyout from the context menu (I mean there isn't a flyout, but there should be, the Freescale thing is there, but nothing happens). I don't care about the labels per se, but I use keyboard shortcuts a lot and without a label there is nothing to bind it to (I want to replace S for the normal scale tool ).

The only thing I can think of off the top of my head would be a filename/case sensitivity problem, as that is more likely to affect OS X than Windows (which I think is still case insensitive, at least most of the time). You will probably know better than me, though.

I can't really take credit for Dagfinn's work on the model you uploaded (thank you Dagfinn), but I am glad it is working and was happy I could help earlier on.

The error could have crept in if you adapted a model that has been scaled a few times, or something like that. If it is something simple enough, then it can be quicker just to do things from scratch, rather than hunting for ages to find the problem, although this time it might be useful to try and work it out.

For learning about DC's I would recommend looking at google's examples of how to use various functions (they have some collections on the 3DWH) and just playing around to see how things work and what you can get them to do. That is how I learn things anyway, it might not suit everyone.

Without seeing the model I cannot be sure, but I would guess that you have constrained LenX for the sides, but not the middle, simply allowing that to scale with the model.

You would expect that to work, but because of the way DCs function, it will not. You have to define LenX for the rails as the total width minus the width of the sides. Otherwise, the whole thing is scaled up (including the sides), then the sides are scaled down to what they should be, which reduces the overall width. If you scale with the scale tool you can see this happen, but it will also occur if you input into a text box.

As an example, sides 2.5", rails 10", giving a total width of 15". If you scale up to 30", the all the LenX values will be doubled, giving 5" and 20", but the values for the sides are constrained, so they are scaled down to 2.5", there is nothing to constrain as far as the rail is concerned, so it stays the same, giving a total length of 25".

The above bit assumes you have done things to the X position of the parts, to make sure it doesn't fly apart.

I made a quick demonstration for you, it is in cm, but the maths is the same. I saved this as a DC, so remember to import it and not just open it.

If I am completely wrong, then could you post your model so that people can have a look at it and check what is wrong?scaling_probs.skp

Happy to help

Because a component can only read an attribute from its parent, a sibling or a child, if you want to read an attribute more levels away than that you have to have something to pass the message along.

Generally I just use a custom attribute on the levels in between, which is defined as a direct copy of the attribute you are after.

For example, if your drawer bottom needed to know LenX for the cabinet, I would do it as follows:

Cabinet:
LenX

Drawer:
cabDepth=parent!LenX

Drawer_Bottom
attr=parent!cabDepth

I use things like that to pass the message along the line, cabDepth could be called whatever you want and you could use Cabinet! and Drawer! in place of the parent! bits, but I like using parent.

I hope that makes sense.

Isn't that code just:

=(STD_DW_CAB!LenZ-DRAW 1!DOOR_T_GP-(0.3*(STD_DW_CAB!DRAW_QTY-1)))/STD_DW_CAB!DRAW_QTY

?

I may have missed something, but if I am right I think it would be considerably easier dealing with an equation like that than the huge number of IF statements. Much easier to make changes, too.

And I think the top equation simplifies to:

=(STD_CABINET!LenZ-STD_CABINET!CARCASS_MAT)/(STD_CABINET!SHF_QTY+1)

Is this right? Does it help at all?

I had a play with a few different arrangements and it seems like things will only animate if they or the parent have the attribute.

Here is a working version. I constrained some things as well, to stop the resizing you mentioned, which I believe happens as the dimensions of the master component change due to the animation.

See if that is more like what you wantbetter animating.skp

I reckon it would be well worth your while working out some basic trig, it should be very handy for your DCs. I'd also have a look at trig identities and things, they can save you code and calculations, one of my formulas got a lot nicer when I remembered that the thing was inclined at 30 degrees, so the length was just twice the rise (sin30 = 0.5). Plenty of universities will have notes on the web for basic trig courses, so you should be ok.

Technically, it should be possible to model any path using sin and cos, but my Fourier analysis is very rusty and I really don't want to have to type it all into that little box. I think it should be possible to use something like the example above to script more complex movement, though. I wasn't entirely sure if it would work, but I was glad it did.

Ah, that will be why it didn't work for me, then; I was trying to use mirroring for the ends of a strip light, which I need to be able to control the rotation of. I did just use another component in the end, but it is nice to know that that bug will be looked at.

Personally, I'm quite happy dealing with negative lengths, imaginary numbers, virtual photons and the like, but I accept I am probably not normal in that regard and most people (ie those who live in the real world) would find it very confusing. Oh well, as long as there are ways to make it do what I want

Thanks for the reply Scott.