Posts made by tomot

@unknownuser said:

Sure doesn't fly at my office. . .

Fair enough! Luckily I work from home, so all I have to worry about is my wife looking over my shoulder.

Getting angry is not going to help, nor will a EULA in the front of a script, prevent anyone from copying or selling these scripts. I for one will not change my attitude towards providing free scripts for everyone that uses SU, furthermore I thank Didier for providing a home for all of them. There will always be be rotten apples, and unfortunately as the size of the barrel increases so does the likely hood of more bad apples . c'est la vie!

Its was a slow Friday morning. Since Designers appear to have more time on their hands these days, I thought I would install Windows 7 beta on a new 500gb SATA Hdd

Here are my observations:

1. No automatic router internet connection yet, unlike Ubuntu 8.10. The entire install still takes almost twice as long as Ubuntu.
2. No optimized monitor display recognition from video card
3. Very poor quality system font display. (muddy grey), much worse than the existing Vista or XP font display.
4. No recognition of 2nd data filled 500gb SATA Hdd, even though the bios had recognized it prior to boot up. It did find a 3rd 250gb IDE Hdd however.

I'm interested in hearing about your experience, should you find some spare time.

Gaieus: whats wrong with a little soft porn?
usually they say "a picture is worth 1000 words"
However in this case the words without the picture
appears to me at least, to be a little too politically correct.

Apple does it again:

Apple Computer announced today that it has developed a computer chip that can store and play high fidelity music in woman's breast implants. The iTit will cost between $499.00 and $699.00 depending on speaker size. This is considered to be a major breakthrough because women have always complained about men staring at their breasts and not listening to them.

Fredo6: thanks for this great scale plugin adaptation

I would have thought the next generation was going to turn out smarter. That's what my father told me. But now that I'm older is clear that my Father lied to me

I remember AutoCad 2.5; it came on 6 - 5 1/4" floppy diskettes, it has not changed a bit over all these years, now I comes on a DVD. (LOL) and it still only does 2d drafting. WOW now that's change I can believe in....... yeah right!

I remember one day being asked to do a simple 3d plan of an existing Condo that I had measured up. The firm I was working for at that time, was using AutoDesk Architectural Desktop. I spend 4 hours trying to accomplish several simple tasks, without much success, inserting on opening into a wall, not never finding a floor entity, nor was I able to raise the elevation of a floor a floor without creating a box. I went home that night, used SU, finished the entire 3d plan in less than 1 hr, exported it to dwg, bought it back to the office the next day. I left that firm shortly thereafter. They could not see why the $12,000.00 dollars they had spent on Software and Seats was not producing the return they had hoped for. My explanation of the benefits of SU went right over the Well Aged Scotch drinking heads of the Principals of the firm.

AutoDesk has done a marvelous job, training the next generation of users with of its outdated Software. This has been accomplished by their AutoDesk University and by supporting their education products at most major Technical and Post Secondary Institutions. And while we are now in the 21st century the Architectureal/Engineering Profession has not asked one fundamental question "Why do we still need 2d drawing to produce 3 dimensional buildings in the 21st century" ?.

You can see why today graduates in Architecture are clones of the snobs that preceded them. They are being trained by the same old school thinking snobs, who were learned it from their predecessors.

@johnsenior1973 said:

But unfortunately the Japanese were of a mindset that they would continue to improve their products until they were better than the competition. Google clearly doesn't seem to think like that regarding SU.

Yes. I agree, It seems Google's objectives are not the same as the original owners of SU had in mind. Thats why we on the Architectural Design side have to be more vocal and make our concerns known.

I find this very interesting. I don't use IE at all. I use Firefox.
I have not downloaded this Ruby. From the discussion in this thread
I understand it may be related to a version of IE.

This raises a few questions:

Why are we developing Webdialogs to make Rubies Run ?
Why are Ruby Programmers using this technique, when they can't
guarantee that their code will work with future versions of IE.?
unless they see this as a continuing revenue stream, for future versions.
Why are we going down the "being dependent on what Microsoft may or may not do in the future"?

Please don't shoot the messenger I'm only asking a few questions.

jzer7 thanks for this, I almost missed this SU surface grapher.

#1:
I was interested in finding out why the Z direction is so much greater that X and Y for example: A Hyperbolic Paraboloid is supposed to look as per the site below http://www.archimy.com/ while the results in SU look like the blue image in this attachment, while the small back image at the btm has the correct proportion. I have not been able to adjust the code, to reflect the proportion.

#2:
Can you make it possible to enter specific x, y, and z ranges, in order to generate isosurfaces as per the 2nd attachment?

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RtnE4C9Gv5U
or will they all be laughing at us again 4 years from now?

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@azuby said:

@jj

1. What is wrong with WebDialogs?
2. What is wrong with the multi line consoles I mentioned? (Have you tried them?)
3. Why not writing an own Python lib with the help of the Sketchup SDK instead of using a bridge and getting angry about Ruby?

I agree: Sketchup Ruby (1.8.0) is just a basic thing. "True" Ruby (>= 1.8.6) has lots of great libs.

(PLEAC Ruby - kind of documentation)

azuby

I'm sorry azuby for adding my 2 cents, I realize this quote was directed @JJ.
I don't hear anyone getting angry about Ruby. All that's being discussed is having another Scripting option that would co-exist along with Ruby, within SU. I'm not a programmer, I'm not interested in learning 2 more languages just so I can incorporate WebDialogs in SU. How long are WebDialogs going to be around, before something new comes along? The Web and its content are constantly changing. Look at all the different video formats on the Web. No one can agree on a standard. We just keep adding more, because each might infringe on the patent rights of the other. However if I was 20 again and had the programing skill you speak of, I might be tempted to agree with your point of view.

@thomthom said:

But I'm puzzled by another thing, tomot; you would be willing to learn Python to make a GUI, but not CSS+JS?

It may surprise you Thomas; I'm not a Ruby programmer or a LISP programmer nor GDL http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geometric_Description_Language programmer.
I could not sit down with a text editor and bang out a new Ruby without at the same time having open on my Desktop at least 2 or 3 existing Ruby's whose content may help form the basis of a new ruby idea I'm trying to bring into being. Then through lots of cutting and pasting of code and many trials and errors of loading and reloading the same script into the console, over and over again, I eventually arrive at the solution. The programming related lines I can't solve I usually bring forth to this forum for help from those that have real programming knowledge, and I'm always grateful for their support. The following piece of code was provided by Jim Foltz.

normal = useanamehere.normal
normal.length = -$xxx
tr = Geom;;Transformation.translation(normal)
group.transform! tr

This small piece of code has been invaluable, its used repeatedly to offset distances that make 2d lines into 3d, planes, without it Window and Door Tools could not exist.

Its also one of the reasons I'm grateful that not each Ruby contributor decides to use obfuscation on their code. Obviously if everyone did this, this community would not have benefited from my Window and Door Tools scripts.

If this Python API works out, I will approach scripting with it the same way I do with Ruby. Firstly I would ask for some simple existing Ruby's to be converted to Python. I would use that as a springboard to start scripting in Python.

@jessejames said:

I think what tomot wants is a GUI toolkit built-in for SU scripting. Web dialogs are quite lacking. Scriptwriters need widgets!

Text, Listbox, Entry, Button, Frame, Toplevel, Spinbox, Label, Scrollbar, Dialogs, RadioButton, CheckButton, Menu, Scale, LabelFrame, Canvas, OptionMenu, PanedWindow, Image Support

Yes that's exactly what I meant. Here is a Google definition of Webdialogs:

By using powerful cross-browser Javascript and CSS, WebDialog renders dialogs, windows and even modal dialogs inside the browser window. It avoids the problems caused by restrictive popup blockers and gives you greater flexibility when designing your web application's user interface.

That's not going to help my scripting endeavors without now also having to learn Javascript and CSS.

JJ you put a generous offer of the table, I would like to contribute where ever possible. Lets hope we can get ScottLininger on board? Because without some support from Google I can't see this going very far.

Canadian Medical Association researchers have made a remarkable discovery.

It seems that some patients needing blood transfusions may
benefit from receiving chicken blood rather than human blood.
It tends to make the men cocky and the women lay better.

I would like to see a GUI added to the Ruby API. This has been sadly lacking from when the Ruby API was first added to be the scripting language for SU. Please add this to your SU8 wish list. Failing that, perhaps an easier task maybe to add a Python API with GUI to SU. I see no reason why SU can't function with 2 scripting languages.

@jessejames said:

PYTHON GUI
Also Python has a built-in GUI(Tkinter). Tkinter is a very easy to use GUI toolkit, which contains all the main widgets a GUI needs, built right into the language. How would you like to have that on board for ya scripting pleasure, eh?

here is a Tkinter program that contains a button widget

> from Tkinter import *
> root = Tk()
> def call(); print 'Hello SketchUp'
> Button(root, text='Press Me', command=call).pack()
> root.mainloop()
> 

That short piece of code creates a main window with a button that prints 'Hello SketchUp'.

Look, i want to improve this great software for everyone. The more people we have coding, the more ideas and improvements we can bring to SU. Let's empower all SU users!!

I have been looking for a better GUI solution. And quite frankly I'm disappointed that not more has happened with the Ruby API, since the release of SU7. It appears that Ruby is stuck where it is right now. And I'm not quite sure what Web Dialogs are going to do for SU going forward. I would like to hear from some of the other Ruby experts we have in this Forum. The attachment below may be a it ambitious but I would like to have the capability to produce such a GUI. And if Python has that capability, I'm on board. Modo is capable of using Perl and Python scripting. Why should SU not embrace Python as well?

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There are only 2 lines of code I added in order to cut the opening,
which the previous version did not have. I was not able to make this
new script automatically recognize an opening from a face, at this time.

Hence if you prefer to use the opening method only, then remove the following 2 lines of code. from glass_tool.rb and frame_tool.rb

#-------Cut Face
    base=entities.add_face(@pt0jj, @pt1jj, @pt2jj, @pt3jj)
    base.pushpull -$kqBC45

Great stuff! makes it easy to build sculptures.
After which one could add some "catmull clark or doo sabin" meshing.

It might nice to add negative stepping as well. Perhaps by adding another button. Hence one can toggle between either negative or positive stepping.

I have a tile maker.rb file I created. It can be used to make cubes of uniform dimensions of a selected area.
I don't know if this tool would be helpful for what your are describing.
attached is a short wmv file.

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tile.wmv

I welcome all ideas, and anyone is welcome to make changes to Window Tools 1.1 or Door Tools.

Jim:
I like your idea, although at the moment I don't know how to implement your proposal either
pm me, maybe we can can come up with a solution.

CadFather:
I don't mind seeing an expanded Architect Tool bar with Window Tools 1.1 and Door Tools
being part of it......Go for it! ...... Just don't get me in trouble with your partner