@unknownuser said:

so while its possible to see apple the corporation as some incredibly smart/innovative corporation.. it's also possible to see them as an incredibly smart set of business people with powerful ways of luring the necessary technicians into working for them.

I think Apple is both of these things. And like I said, it is also a corporation not afraid to place big financial bets on things that may not pay off, which is part of the reason it can attract top-notch talent. Same for Google.

@unknownuser said:

right.. i fully see what you're saying.. but to me, the actual technology & the money side of things are not very closely related..

To me, they are very closely related. Anybody can dream about using some great new partially developed technology for all sorts of things, but turning those ideas into useful, practical products is a difficult & expensive process. If you don't invest enough in R&D to get the details right, it doesn't matter how good you are at marketing.

For example, the basic concept of wearable computers with some kind of heads-up personal display, touch and/or voice input, & so on has been around for years (for decades, if you include "movie magic" & science fiction novels) but over the past three years Google has invested millions in turning that concept into a practical consumer product & the development team freely admits they are still a long way from that. They aren't even certain it ever will become anything more than a curiosity with no mass market appeal.

An interesting article about the Google Glass project is at http://www.theverge.com/2013/2/22/4013406/i-used-google-glass-its-the-future-with-monthly-updates.

@unknownuser said:

Well, they do not have to but (especially with for less experienced users), these are good suggestions.

I certainly agree that it is a good general suggestion. I really just wanted to point out it isn't absolutely necessary to follow it & mention a few of the reasons why someone might want to do something else.

@gilles said:

Never do this!
All geometries must remain in layer 0.
Layers in sketchup is just a way to show/hide things so only put groups or components in them.

All geometries do not actually need be on layer 0. I can't think of any reason why you would want all of a group's or component's entities in a layer other than layer 0 but you might occasionally want to put some of them into a different layer to exploit the 'color by layer' option or when you want a quick & easy way to hide/unhide only specific entities in one or more groups or components.

For the same reason, it is also occasionally helpful to put some ungrouped entities into a layer other than layer 0.

@unknownuser said:

... to me, apple is basically a marketing firm.. except they have enough money to just buy the inventions/products/technology then claim them as their own...

There is a lot more to it than that. Apple is among the very few major corporations willing to take big financial risks on innovative new products with no proven track record of success. They don't just buy new technology, they also invest heavily in developing it, both in house & through collaborations with other companies.

In one of the earliest (& often forgotten!) examples, almost nobody saw the potential of GUI interfaces until Apple developed PARC's crude implementation by adding key usability features like drop-down menus & overlapping windows … & even after they did, it took many lean years for that investment to pay off. Apple is among the very few computer manufacturing companies to ever have taken an active role in the design & development of CPU architectures optimized for a specific OS, first with the ill-fated (for Apple) AIM Alliance & currently in partnerships with Intel & Samsung.

We even have Apple to thank for Gorilla Glass. Only after Steve Jobs went to Corning in 2006 looking for a rugged, scratch resistant glass for the iPhone project did Corning commit a factory to manufacturing it in large quantities, initially just for the iPhone & now for around two hundred products from many different companies.

I think Apple is without peer in this respect. Its track record is far from perfect but it does seem to have an uncanny ability to make the right bets far more often than anybody else. That's a powerful inducement for other companies to follow suit.

@brookefox said:

This is a non-vid. Is that why the canned linkage fails?

??? Seems to be working for me with the BBvideo tag, at least in preview...

I'm sure many of you are already familiar with the Animusic projects from the Pipe Dreams video that 'went viral' several years ago, but if not, here's a sample of its unique blend of 3D modeling, animation, & music:

@unknownuser said:

alternatively
{…}
(doing it like this also creates a hotlink above the video which will take you to youtube itself)

However you choose to do it, please keep posting more videos to this topic. Now that I have discovered it, the first thing I do when I visit scf is open this topic in a separate browser tab so I can listen to the clips while browsing the rest of the site in another tab.

It's like scf has its own music channel.

@chris fullmer said:

Why do you guys have so many PM's?

'Cause there are some things too dark or dangerous to discuss in public forums, like how to model geometries capable of tearing holes in the space-time continuum, what the SU inference engine really infers from user input, the bizarre effects of bowler shapes on higher brain function, & so on.

@unknownuser said:

And leave so many as unread?

I generally skip the ones from Nigerian princes, people of indeterminate gender wanting to be my girlfriend, etc.

@unknownuser said:

(@marcus- i do have the scf/forums bookmarked and i guess i could make a secondary one for new posts but i'd rather have just the one if possible)

Have you considered making a bookmarks folder for scf stuff & putting that in the Bookmarks Bar (or the equivalent if you aren't using Safari)? You can then add as many bookmarks to it as you want & they will all have one click access, yet won't clutter up the browser interface with lots of individual bookmarks.

I have organized all my often used bookmarks that way, with one bookmarks folder for all the SketchUp-related pages that I frequent, another for Mac-related stuff, & so on. I find it a real time saver, if for no other reason than I don't have to scroll long web pages to wherever the built-in links appear on the page.