But before I get to the point, let me comment something that really bothers me: As of now, the US App Catalog shows about 2000 apps, while the German catalog is showing a mere 600, paid apps included. I understand, that given Palm’s app submission forms, it’s a bit of an inconvenience for developers to fill out the extra fields to make an app available outside the US, but from my own apps QR deCODEr and DIX Dictionary, I managed to collect a bit of statistics (which I also confirmed with other developers), looking as shown below:

While the numbers for Canada, Mexico, Great Britain and Spain are admittedly not too impressive, things look quite different when it comes to Germany. The US account for about 70% of all WebOS users, but 20% of all users come from Germany as the diagram suggests. Thus, those developers not willing to take an extra five minutes to fill out the forms to make their app available outside the US are basically alienating between 20 and 30% of potential users of their app. What I find most frustrating about this is, that I can’t understand why so many developers don’t care about this. Sure, it’s a bit of a hassle to fill out those extra forms since translating your app takes quite some time and effort, but then again, Palm doesn’t force you to do so. You are free to just copy over your English app descriptions into the German / Spanish / French forms. That’s about two minutes for each additional language. So to all of those lazy developers: Are you sure you don’t have an extra six minutes?! There really is more to this world than the United States!

But enough already, here we got with the install tutorial for apps submitted for other regions than your own.

HOWTO Install Apps Not Showing Up In The App Catalog For Your Region

I realize that this may seem quite some work to most ordinary users, but for somebody who’s used homebrew apps or the WebOS SDK before, it doesn’t take more than 5 minutes to follow the tutorial and install an app.

The basic idea is to exploit the App Catalog update mechanism’s current behavior. If you click a link to an app that’s not available in your region, instead of viewing this app, the app catalog presents you with an error message that this app is not available in your country. Nevertheless, if you already have an older version of such an app installed and go to the update view in the App Catalog, you’ll find that even for those app only available in other regions, you get a notification of available updates and upon tapping ‘install’ the App Catalog will happily download and install the new version of such an app.ç

So all we need to do is make WebOS think that we have an old version of the app we want already installed on our device and it will allow us to download and install the latest version. We do so by creating a “dummy” app with the same app ID as the app we want and a lower version number than the currently available version.

UPDATE: As an alternative to the following DIY tutorial, there are two apps that do all the work for you. See the end of this post for details.

1. Make sure you have all the prerequisites: A text editor, the Palm WebOS SDK , your WebOS device with activated Dev Mode and Preware installed on your device (or some other way to find out app IDs).
2. Create a new folder called Dummy somewhere on your hard disk.
3. Within that folder, create a text file called appinfo.json
4. Open this file in a text editor and copy the following lines to the file (including the brackets):

   {
   “id”: “FILL IN APP ID HERE”,
   “version”: “0.0.1″,
   “vendor”: “FILL IN VENDOR HERE”,
   “title”: “FILL IN TITLE HERE”,

   “type”: “web”,
   “main”: “index.html”
   }
   

5. Fire up Preware and find the app you want to install, e.g. French Le Monde app as show below:
   
6. Scroll down to see the vendor name, version number and app ID:
   

7. Now edit the text file we just created and replace all ‘FILL IN … HERE’ entries with the data you see in Preware AND make sure the version number in the text file is LOWER than the version number you see in Preware (0.0.1 as version number should usually work fine).

   For our Le Monde example the text file should look like this:

   {
   “id”: “com.backelite.lemonde”,
   “version”: “0.0.1″,
   “vendor”: “Le Monde Interactif”,
   “title”: “Lemonde.fr”

   “type”: “web”,
   “main”: “index.html”,
   }
   

8. Fire up the command line, go to the folder containing the Dummy folder and type the following to pack the dummy application:palm-package Dummy
   
9. Now connect your device to your computer via the USB cable and type the following to install the dummy application to your device:palm-install –d usb com.backelite.lemonde_0.0.1_all.ipkYou should now see the dummy application on your device’s launcher page showing up with a default icon. (Don’t launch it, because it won’t start up at this point, since it’s just an empty dummy app.)

   

10. Launch the App Catalog on your device and go to the update view, where you should see our dummy application showing up and an updated version being available:
    
11. Tap Install Updates and wait for your device to download and install the new version.
    
12. Congrats! You now have the full and latest version of an app installed on your device that is not available officially via the App Catalog in your country. You can now launch and use the app.
    
    In your launcher you may still see the old dummy icon for this app. The real icon will show up once you’ve restarted your phone.
    

I’ve successfully tried this procedure with a dozen apps. It works only for FREE apps though. For paid apps, Palm is unfortunately / thankfully doing additional checks, so that you can’t just inject a dummy package to get a free update to the actual app

One last thing: Since I’ve already done this procedure for quite a few apps, you can download my dummy app packages below and just install them to your device using WebOS Quick Install. This way you can skip the text file editing and command line packaging / installing and directly head to the App Catalog update page to get these apps.

• AccuRadio
• 20minutes.fr
• Lemonde.fr
• Word Whirl Lite
• SFR WiFi
• Net2Streams Lite
• YPmobile

Enjoy!

UPDATE

As Jason Robitaille points out here, his Ipk Packager tool may be more comfortable for creating dummy app packages than your regular text editor. Also, Blacklight was kind enough to update his Ipk Fetcher tool to completely automate the above method. Presented with a list of available apps, just select the one you want and hit ‘Generate IPK’ and it‘s done.

Microsoft has become quite innovative in my opinion over the past months. Ranging from creative, refreshing and productivity boosting changes and features in Windows 7, to an actually competitive new search engine called Bing and the recently announced Windows 7 Phone Series with a quite unexpected look & feel, Microsoft apparently also wants a piece of that online maps cake. The following video, which I came across here, shows some of the latest (yet to be published) features of Bing Maps, some of which a rather impressive and astonishing than just cheap copies of what Google Maps offers.

But see for yourself:

Click here to go to the apps web site and make sure your read the short manual here which explains the types of barcodes supported and how to use the application.

The app is currently available via Palm’s web distribution program here while awaiting approval for the on-device app catalog.

I’ve been waiting to get a new phone for quite a while and while originally waiting for the iPhone 3GS release, I decided to wait a little longer when I learned that the Prē was on its way. Last Friday finally was the day, and it has been over week now that I own this shiny new toy. That’s plenty of time to explore every little detail of it and the reason I’d like to share a few of my thoughts, point out what I like about it and what not so much. There are a lot of things in which  i don’t agree with other reviews out there, but of course there are a few things that you may have read before, so here we go:

Pros

• Multi tasking is just so much more natural and handy than the way the iPhone works
• WebOS is fun to use and actually looks awesome
• Standard apps like browser, email and messaging are rock solid
• The app store is getting new additions every few days now
• German Prē is sim and net lock free (see O2 FAQs here)
• The Prē isn’t as Google focused as Android and not as manufacturer bound as the iPhone
• App store less restrictive than Apple’s version
• Gesture area is an awesome idea (I’m hardly using the middle button on the device)
• While not possible yet, the instructions for tethering are already present on the device and tethering is planned to be supported with future firmware versions (see O2 FAQs here)
• Touchstone charger: Works great and is well thought through (automatically takes the call when you take it of the charger while it’s ringing, automatically switches to speaker mode once you put it on the charger during a call, etc) BUT seems there are quite a few faulty touchstone chargers on the market (see below for details). Once you got a good one though, it’s just awesome.
• UPDATE: Form factor: With the slider closed it’s just tiny and cute, with the slider open it’s the most comfortable phone to hold while talking that I’ve ever seen. BUT the form factor also has its drawbacks. See below.

Popular Cons I do NOT agree with

• Sharp edge at the bottom of the device: People have claimed it’s sharp enough to slice bread, but I really don’t see the problem here. Sure, it’s a sharp edge, but I don’t even feel in during my daily use of the device. I’ve never had the slightest complaint about this edge!
• Small, tiny keys on the keyboard and bottom of the screen to close to the keyboard: I’ve got small hands, small fingers, for me the keyboard is quite comfortable and not too hard to type on. I wouldn’t give up the hardware keyboard for the world! As for the bottom of the screen being to close to the keyboard: No problem here either. Though I must admit, I can picture people with larger hands having way more problems here. The keyboard for sure isn’t too large and while it isn’t a problem for me it definitely might be a point of complaint for some of you.
• Wobbly slider mechanism: Total crap! The slider is absolutely fine. It’s not 100% firm and stiff but nowhere near annoying or disturbing!
• Battery runtime: I somewhat agree with this one, but it isn’t worse than e.g. the iPhone. Just switch of push email and use WiFi when at home instead of 3G and battery runtime increases from intolerable to ok ;). A few more tips (in German) can be found here.

My personal Cons

• Hard- and software adaption regarding Europe: Palm claimed that hardware and software adaption are the reason for the late release of the Prē. I know this is true as for the GSM support the Prē needs to work on European networks, but what about the rest of the hardware? What about special characters on the keyboard? There umlauts in German, accents in French and Spanish, etc. You could have adapted the keyboard!!! Even worse for the software: O2 stated things like “support for popular European social networks” (I don’t recall the exact phrasing) in its advertising for the Prē, but in fact the only thing supported is Facebook. I can only speak for Germany, but the most popular networks here are: StudiVZ, lokalisten and maybe Xing (for business). Besides, there other less important ones like Stay Friends and I’m sure Spain, Ireland und UK have their proper social networking sites besides Facebook. Not a single one of those is supported! In fact, Europe did not even get the same software version as the US. We are two versions behind! I honestly did expect more in this regard. Honestly Palm, if you want to win the hearts of your European customers, you’ll probably have to do more than just make your devices technically work on European networks. Please!
• Combined and instant messaging: The idea is admittedly awesome BUT what good is it if only AIM and Google Talk are supported? Again, I don’t know about the US, but in Europe, ICQ and MSN are far more popular. They should be supported since the initial US release of the Prē. I really can see no reason why those are not supported. Please Palm, this is a MUST. It is the feature I miss most!!!!
• Software keyboard: I really love my hardware keyboard but sometimes you just need to type a single word like a login or a street name on Google Maps, not worth the effort of sliding your phone open. This is not among the most important features to add, but a software keyboard would surely make nice plus!
• Auto-correct and auto-complete: The Prē has basic typo correction but nothing more. Even the oldest Windows Mobile phones have auto-complete (in conjunction with hard- as well as software keyboards). Leaving this out is a big one! On mobile devices, T9 or auto-complete just makes typing so much faster. That needs to be added as soon as possible!
• Support for third-party music players: Support for iTunes is really nice, but first of all I need the latest firmware version to able to use it (which isn’t available yet in Europe) and secondly, we probably all know that this cat and mouse game can’t go on forever. Sure, the Prē also support third party players like Windows Media Player or others via its flash drive mode, but it doesn’t provide a reasonable way to sync playlists. There’s not even a way to create playlists within the music app on the Prē itself. I’d be 100% OK not to use iTunes, but you can’t seriously expect me to sync hundreds of songs to my device and not have a single playlist, only being able to choose between all songs or a single artist or album to play. That’s not very satisfying. My suggestion: Focus on supporting other players for music sync instead of continuing that time consuming game with Apple.
• App launcher: Currently one can rearrange icons but not add new pages to the launcher. That’s annoying, with three pages (one being for device & settings related stuff) I can’t figure out a reasonable way to order and arrange my apps. It should be an easy task to allow users to add more pages to the launcher. That’s not really a big challenge. But it would definitely make a difference! As a last thing: Reducing the icon size on the launcher or the launcher bar would allow to add more icons to either of them. (Though I see that they would be harder to touch and icon quality would probably suffer due to the down sampling, so I understand it that one is not coming)
• Lid for the USB charging cable: It’s so hard to reach and open that you’re probably annoyed by the second time you have to do it. Seems like a strategic design aiming to increase the sales of the overpriced, wireless touchstone charger. Sad, but then again, Palm’s goal is to earn money just like any other company out there, so somewhat understandable! Still, if the touchstone charger weren’t so overpriced it would be even more understandable.
• Touchstone charger: Palm obviously has or had a quality problem in the manufacturing of the wireless charger. I had to go to the O2 shop three times to exchange both, the back cover as well as the charger till I had a set that did actually work reliably. Before, my Prē would loose the connection to the charger from every few seconds to every few minutes, just to pick it up again shortly after that, bringing up the “battery charging” notification (along with the according sound) each time. This is just plain annoying and intolerable (see this video). A little bit of internet research also brought up that I’m obviously not the only one with this problem. Anyway, for those experiencing this issue, have your retailer exchange the charger (and possibly the back cover that comes with it). A perfectly working charger (like the one I own now) should not have this issue, not even once a day or so. My Prē hasn’t lost the connection to the charger in over seven days now, except for when I took it off the charger of course. Also, unlike some of the forums posts or Palm support guys tell you, the problem with this issue is not misalignment of the Prē on the charger. Sure, it has to be aligned right, in fact there are only two possible position in which the Prē will charge but you’re not required to align it to the millimeter. The magnets in the charger take care of the alignment as long as you’re not trying to put it on the charger in some completely awkward position like diagonal or so.
• UPDATE: Form factor: While perfect for your pocket and super comfy in your hand while talking, it has quite a few glitches. With the slider open, the phone seems extremely unbalanced  when you type on the keyboard. Even more so if you’re trying to type one-handed. Especially for the latter case, I find this quite annoying.

In the end, the Palm Prē is a great phone in my opinion. In a few ways it’s two years behind the iPhone, in most things it can totally take it up to the iPhone and in some ways, it even beats the cr** out of the iPhone. As long as Palm doesn’t think they can take it slow now (in which case they would be sadly mistaken) and as long as they keep the updates coming and address current shortcomings and problems with the Prē, it has the potential (together with future WebOS phones) to be mentioned in the same breath as the iPhone and any Blackberry.

Oh, and as a last note: The reason I’m comparing it to the iPhone so much, although it’s not meant to be a so called “iPhone killer”, is because that’s the main competitor in functionality in my opinion. RIM / Blackberry I just don’t know well enough, and Android / Windows Mobile and manufacturers supporting those are just way too busy badly imitating the iPhone, trying to make their devices look like yet another iPhone without actually being one and more importantly without putting the necessary effort and creativity into the job to actually make their devices good and shiny. I just can’t get why they’re doing this, as Palm made the solution so obvious: Don’t copy everything, just copy the good and important features and copy them well! Then add a few of your own ideas. There must be some?!

UPDATE: I see the need to revise my statement on Android above. I still think what I said is true for Android 1.x and according phones, but it seems this all just changed with the release of Android 2.0 and and a vast number of manufacturers jumping on the Android train. The new software version seems to do exactly what I recommended above. Copy all the good existing features like the iPhone’s app store idea, multi-touch / touch-oriented interface, the Pre’s combined messaging, synergy, hardware keyboard and multi-tasking. Then add some of your own ideas (like a killer navigation app that’s even free) or / and improve on the existing features like combined messaging, better hardware keyboard, etc. Combine this with a developer with nearly unlimited resources (such as, I don’t know, Google?!) and a variety of Hardware manufacturers willing to go along, and you get a system that should be gaining ground immensely fast, casting a huge shadow on the new Palm. More so since Palm is taking it really slow with its update policy and currently not doing much but fix bugs. (This article says a lot of the things I am thinking.) I really hope they have something big to show with the upcoming update(s) because otherwise I see a lot of dark clouds at Palm’s horizon, again!

No why is this worth writing about? First of all because it’s an astonishing tool creating absolutely realistic images of your board before you even think about manufacturing and soldering it. But secondly, because Eagle3D is not the type of tool with funny, colored icons in a nice little toolbar where you just click one of those icons and your rendering is done. Unfortunately, using it as it comes out of the box, you’ll probably end up with only half of the parts on your board being rendered correctly or rendered at all. To see the rest of you parts on the board, there’s no way around some fine tuning of the Eagle3D scripts (or even some CAD construction work to build custom parts). Below is an image of one of my boards at various stages, rendered with the out-of-the box version of Eagle3D, rendered after editing some of the Eagle3D scripts and finally, rendered after construction and adding some custom parts with Google SketchUp.

So before I explain all this, let’s make sure you got the basic part right:

1. Go here and download Eagle3D AS WELL AS the archive containing all the parts included with Eagle3D as images. You’re gonna need the latter one later on for lookup purposes.
2. Get the latest POVray version here.
3. After you’ve installed all the above to whatever location you prefer, fire up Eagle, open your favorite board and select File –> Execute ULP then in the dialog that appears, navigate to your Eagle3D directory and the ULP sub-folder there and select 3d41.ulp
4. Once you hit Open a settings dialog appears. You can basically leave the default settings as they are, just remember the path that’s shown on the first page where Eagle3D stores the povray file.
5. Hit create POV-File and exit and answer all the questions you’ll be asked (e.g. colors of LEDs, logos on ICs, …)
6. After the POVray file has been created, open it with POVray and hit Run to render your board.

At this point I’d like to point you to this site here and this one for a detailed description of Eagle3D’s features and further instruction on its basic usage.

Now, if you’re really lucky, after the six steps mentioned above, you end up with an image of your board with all parts rendered correctly. Unfortunately, in most cases, some of the parts will be rendered incorrectly (misplaced, mirrored, etc.) or not rendered at all. These problems result from two different situations with different solutions, but first a little but important background info:

Eagle3D parts are all described by macros written in POVray’s scripting language and you can find them in the povray subfolder in your Eagle3D directory. These macros are named different from the Eagle part / package names, which is why there are two files 3dpack.dat and 3dusrpac.dat in the ulp subfolder of the Eagle3D directory in which you can find the mapping between Eagle package names and Eagle3D part macros.

So if now some of the parts on your board are not rendered (correctly or at all) there’s the following two reasons:

1. There is no or a wrong mapping in the 3dpack.dat or 3dusrpac.dat file between some of your parts in Eagle and the Eagle3D macro BUT such a part EXISTS in the Eagle3D image library.
   
   Example:
   In the design above, I’m using 4-pin Molex connectors with the package name 53048-04 in my Eagle layout and Eagle3D doesn’t render those connectors
   
   BUT I browse through the image archive I’ve downloaded before from the Eagle3D website and I see, that there is in fact an image of the connector I’m looking for, named CON_MOLEX_53048_4.png.
   Solution:
   1. So I open the 3dpack.dat file and search for CON_MOLEX_53048_4 to find the following line:
      

      NOEAGLEPAC:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:CON_MOLEX_53048_4(:Molex 53048: 

      This line tells me that the Eagle package with the name NOEAGLEPAC is mapped to the Eagle3D POVray macro CON_MOLEX_53048_4.

   2. Now you can either directly edit the line in this file or more elegantly copy the line into 3dusrpac.dat
      

      53048-04:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:CON_MOLEX_53048_4(:Molex 53048: 

      This way, you tell Eagle3D to map your Eagle package 53048-04 to the CON_MOLEX_53048_4.

   3. Now if you save your changes and go through steps 3 to 6 of the basic Eagle3D instructions above again, the missing Molex connector should be rendered correctly

   Hint:
   If a part is actually rendered but misplaced or flipped, rotated, etc. you can edit the mapping above and change the 13th to 16th ‘0’ digits to correct the rotation angle and x-, y-, z-offset of your part, e.g.

   53048-04:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:90:3.2:1.2:2.6:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:CON_MOLEX_53048_4(:Molex 53048:

   Details see here.

2. There is no mapping in the the 3dpack.dat or 3dusrpac.dat file between some of your parts in Eagle and the Eagle3D macro AND such a part DOES NOT EXIST in the Eagle3D image library.
   In this case, there are two different solutions:
   
   Example 1:
   Eagle3D comes with the following 6-pin and 10-pin connectors (named CON_DIS_WS6G and CON_DIS_WS10G)
   
   similar to the connector I need, BUT I need an 8-pin version which doesn’t exist in Eagle3D. 

   Solution:

   1. Look for the Eagle3D macro for these connectors, to be found in the connectors.inc file in the povray sub-directory.
   2. Inside this file, look search for CON_DIS_WS6G or CON_DIS_WS10G and you will find the following:
      

      #macro CON_DIS_WS6G()
      object{CON_DIS_WS_XX_G_GRND(6)}
      #end
      #macro CON_DIS_WS10G()
      object{CON_DIS_WS_XX_G_GRND(10)}
      #end
      #macro CON_DIS_WS14G()
      object{CON_DIS_WS_XX_G_GRND(14)}
      #end
      #macro CON_DIS_WS16G()
      object{CON_DIS_WS_XX_G_GRND(16)}
      #end 

      As you can see, these lines describe a 6-pin, a 10-pin, a 14-pin and a 16-pin version of the above connector AND more importantly, they all just call another macro named CON_DIS_WS_XX_G_GRNDGRND with the number of desired pins passed to in brackets.

   3. Add the following lines to the file
      

      #macro CON_DIS_WS8G()
      object{CON_DIS_WS_XX_G_GRND(8)}
      #end 

   4. Now, of course, you need to add a respective mapping to to 3dusrpac.dat again:In 3dpac.dat you’ll find a line saying:
      

      ML6:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:180:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:CON_DIS_WS6G(:Wannenstecker 6Pin:Shrouded Header 6Pin 

      So, add a similar line for the 8-pin version to 3dusrpac.dat:

      ML8:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:180:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:CON_DIS_WS8G(:Wannenstecker 8Pin:Shrouded Header 8Pin 

   5. Render your board again and you should now see your 8-pin connector!

   Hint:
   This does not only work for connectors as used in this example. In fact, many of the Eagle3D parts, especially ICs are implemented as specific macros that then call a generic macro to which they pass the number of e.g. pins as a parameter. So you can easily add a similar part with fewer or more pins for example. There is no guarantee that this does always work as it depends on how the generic macro is implemented but fact is, in many cases it works!

   
   Example 2:
   On your board there is a completely exotic part, e.g. the Amber Wireless BlueNiceCom IV in the case of the board above
   
   AND there is nothing even remotely similar to be found in the Eagle3D image library.

   Solution:
   In this case, think about living without this part being rendered on your board but if you’re really desperate to see this part on your board, there are two ways to go:

   1. You can manually write a povray macro to draw your part. This option receives a straight ‘zero’ though on the intuitivity scale and is extremely time consuming. I’d only recommend that for very simple parts. If you still wanna go there, have a look at this site here and the pages linked here.
   2. Design your component / part in Google SketchUp and have SU2POV export it to povray format which can then be included in your Eagle3D design. Don’t underestimate the time needed for this approach! But especially for more complex parts this is way easier than approach number one!

      When this idea came to my mind, I did a quick Google search and it turned out someone has had this idea before. So instead of writing detailed instructions on how to export SketchUp designs to povray and include them in Eagle3D, I’d like to point you to this tutorial which does a pretty good job in explaining the whole process.

      I’ve used this method to design the Amber BlueNiceCom IV mentioned above as well as a CR 2032 battery among others.
      
      You can find these and other Eagle3D components I’ve done in Google SketchUp at Google’s 3D Warehouse here.

Finally, some eye candy… these are a few of my boards rendered with Eagle3D:

Almost two years ago when I was about to move in into a new apartment, I was on the look for some 3D home design tool. Now, there’s plenty of those tools on the market, developed by smaller software companies producing software off the assembly line, i.e. flooding the market with half-baked mass-productions at a ridiculous price point. So I didn’t really consider buying one of those things. Then again, professional CAD software at an even higher (though justified) price point as e.g. various products offered by Autodesk would have been a bit of an overkill for the task at hand, which is why I finally ended up using Google SketchUp.

Now Google SketchUp has a few things going for it:

• First of all, of course, it’s free! That’s as cheap as it gets!
• It’s got a very fast learning curve (compared to pro CAD tools) thought you should know it still has some form of a learning curve, i.e. there’s quite a few smaller rocks to bump into once you try to do more then simple objects
• There’s a large collection of existing models that can be used in SketchUp, to be found at the Google 3D Warehouse which are all free. That’s a real time and money saver, compared to site like http://www.turbosquid.com/ where you pay quite an amount for each 3D model. This also makes Google SketchUp kind of a Web 2.0 thing, since everyone can down- and upload models from and to the 3D Warehouse.

On the other hand, up till then, I had only used SketchUp to design simple objects for Google Earth and never done anything more complex. So designing my new apartment in SketchUp working with true and precise scaling, I also realized quite a few shortcomings on an otherwise awesome product:

• It lacks precision tools and precise ways of interaction which I can only assume are present in the Pro Version of the tool and which I sadly missed building a exact model of my apartment.
• Automatically generated intersections between surfaces and lines or other surfaces often show erratic behavior, meaning surfaces that should be plain no longer are, etc. … making it a pain in the a** to work with them. The real problem here is the spontaneous and unpredictable nature of when this happens or not plus the lack of a proper visualization of such surfaces which makes it really annoying to work with. One way to somewhat deal with it, is using groups and components to keep closed objects together and from intersecting with the rest of your model.
• Last but not least the overall interface for selecting and interacting with your model could use some reworking making it more consistent and predictable, less annoying (though you get used to some of the annoyances and find workarounds to compensate for them) and besides, I’d love to see more import and export functionality in SketchUp (which is again reserved for the Pro Version).

So what’s the verdict? Given it’s price and learning curve compared to other products on the market Google SketchUp is the way to go for most of the hobbyists out there, I’d say! Although the user interface could use some improvement and a bit more pro functionality would be nice to have, with a little bit of patience you can do almost anything with SketchUp, from building a whole city quarter for Google Earth to designing and planning the interior of your new apartment. See the results of my work for an example of the latter one:

There’s also an all-wireframe, all-opaque and all-x-ray version of the video above.

Two final notes:

• In a big copy-cat action Microsoft bought a CAD software manufacturer called Caligari, just to offer this company’s C 3D design product named trueSpace for free to compete with Google SketchUp. While I found trueSpace far less intuitive and easy to use and didn’t really get into it, I still wanted to share the info here and encourage you to head over to their website, get a free copy and come to your own conclusions (which you’re free to share here of course).
• As a second note, I’ve been using Google SketchUp together with Windows 7 RC lately just to find out, that while it’s still useable it shows extremely buggy behavior regarding surface selection and rendering. This may well be related to Win 7 graphics drivers (Intel integrated graphics in my case) and not to Windows 7 itself directly, but being as buggy as it is I can’t really recommend using Google SketchUp 7 in conjunction with Windows 7 for the time being. Anyone any similar experiences? Or updates on this behavior with respect to Win 7 RTM?

So my solution to the problem is simply not to make the SDK installer try to install this Windows Update Package. Since it’s only an update, it’s probably not crucial to running the SDK. So here’s a 15 min. procedure how to edit the Mojo SDK installer program based on this former blog post of mine, so that it skips the Windows Update package during install.

First of all two preliminary steps to install the tools we need:

1. Download and install the Microsoft Windows SDK which contains a tool called Orca which we need for the procedure.
   (You don’t have to install the whole SDK! You only need to select Developer Tools – Windows Development Tools during install)
2. After installing this, go to C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v7.0\Bin and run Orca.MSI in this folder, which install the actual Orca tool.

Update: Several people have mentioned this link, where you can download Orca directly without having to download and install the full Microsoft Windows SDK. You can get Orca from there and thus skip step 1.

Now the procedure to actually alter the Palm Mojo SDK installer:

1. Open the folder to which you downloaded the Mojo SDK installer (Palm_Mojo_SDK-Win-1.1.0-sdk62-build08.exe)
2. Hit “Windows + R” on your keyboard (or click Start and Run) to bring up the Windows Run dialog and enter %TEMP%, hit enter.
   
3. Now arrange the two folders next to each other so you can see the both at the same time, then run Palm_Mojo_SDK-Win-1.1.0-sdk62-build08.exe.
   
   In your Temp folder you see all kind of weird files and folders, the important thing is, that once you run the installer above, a new folder with a random name starting and ending with brackets and consisting of lots of numbers appears.
   
   There may already have been similar folders in your Temp folder before you ran the installer, so try to locate the one that was created the moment you ran the installer.
4. Initially this folder contains nothing but three *.ini files, yet once the first step of the installer is completed a new file is created there, named Palm SDK.msi. Copy this file to the folder where Palm_Mojo_SDK-Win-1.1.0-sdk62-build08.exe is located.
   
   Once the copy process is complete, cancel the installer.
   
5. Now right-click the copied file and select Edit with Orca.
   
6. In Orca, select InstallExecuteSequence in the left pane, the scroll to the very bottom in the right pane and select installumdf.08B8BE2B_9174_49D1_84B0_40324FD7DE34. Right-click and select Drop Row.
   
   This removes the command to execute the Windows Update package which causes the installer to fail.
7. Now we’re almost done. Hit Save and exit Orca.
   
8. Run Palm SDK.msi and just follow the wizard. The SDK should install fine now without any problems or failures.

A tiny tip at last:

Once the SDK is installed, if you want to run the Palm Pre emulator as suggested by Palm, right-click the application link and select Run as Administrator or if it still doesn’t work Troubleshoot compatibility and then select Windows XP SP2 mode. When I first just clicked the emulator link, nothing happend, no program appeared, … I don’t quite remember which one did the trick, running it as Administrator or in compatibility mode, but one of those finally made it work.

Some useful links regarding the SDK:

• How to operate / control the emulator, keyboard shortcuts, etc.
• Instructions how to install the Eclipse plug-ins for development
  Important: The Eclipse plug-in update link given on the site doesn’t work. It’s and https link. Use this link (the same link with http) and it should work.

Have fun with the SDK!

RTL just put the same gadget on their own website. All they did was change a label move two buttons and change the gadget’s color from red to green. Nice job! I think you guys at RTL owe me some credit for that. You copied the overall gadget design and even the fly-out window. You didn’t even bother to change the settings dialog! This is a copy and paste job!!! I guess some intern then was asked to change a thing or two, right? A color, a label, even a button… I guess at least someone in the copy-cat company has heard Einstein’s wise words before: “Real creativity is knowing how to hide your sources”

Can you tell the difference?

Well I think you should have given me some credit for the hours of work in which I designed this gadget. If you didn’t want to do that I wish you had at least been kind enough to spend some extra money to come up with your own gadget and not just copy mine!!!

Anyway, I guess I should feel honored if not directly, at least indirectly by the mere use of my own gadget as THE template for your own, official sidebar gadget. Thanks, I guess!

Deutsche Version:

Das ist mir dann doch einen Blog Eintrag wert: Offenbar wurde das Windows Vista Sidebar Gadget dass ich vor einiger Zeit entworfen habe um den RTL Formel 1 Ticker in der SIdebare zu folgen, zur Vorlage für RTL, genauer gesagt zur 1:1 Vorlage für deren Klon!

RTL hat vor kurzem ein solches Gadget auf deren eigener Website online gestellt. Dabei wurden gerade einmal zwei Buttons, eine Textbeschriftung und die Farbe des Gadgets geändert. Tolle Leistung! Ich denke dafür schuldet ihr mir etwas Anerkennung! Ihr habt das komplette Design samt Fly-Out Fenster kopiert. Dabei habt ihr es nicht einmal für nötig befunden den “Einstellungen” Dialog zu ändern. Ein echtes Copy & Paste Meisterwerk. Danach wurde wohl noch ein Praktikant gebeten zwei, drei Dinge abzuänderen? Die Farbe, eine Beschriftung, sogar einen Button… Wenigstens einer in dieser Klonmaschinerie dürfte wohl mal über Einsteins weise Worte gestolpert sein, worin der Schlüssel zur Kreativität in der Geheimhaltung der eigenen Quellen liegen soll.

Ich denke mir steht durchaus ein wenig Anerkennung für Arbeit zu, die ich in den Entwurf dieses Gadgets gesteckt habe. Wenn schon nicht das, dann wäre es zumindest angemessen gewesen ein klein wenig mehr Geld für die Entwicklung desselben auszugeben und tatsächlich ein Gadget zu entwerfen, anstatt nur meines zu kopieren!

So muss ich mich jetzt wohl indirekt dadurch geehrt fühlen, dass mein Entwurf als DIE Vorlage schlechthin für RTLs offizielles Gadget Verwendung fand. Danke, denke ich!

In this post, I’d only like to share the final result. More precisely, I’m showing two videos of the actual hardware piece rendered by a software called Eagle3D (or more precisely rendered by POV-Ray based on the script generated by Eagle3D). The result is just amazing. See for yourself!

By the way: Both these videos are using YouTube’s new HD features. To get an impression of how much of a difference this makes, check out the standard quality videos here and here. And as a final note: This tutorial did help a lot in figuring out how to get YouTube to generate a HD version of my uploaded videos. You need to upload your videos in exactly the right format, otherwise YouTube just doesn’t do any HD!

For many 3rd party installer systems, using Microsoft’s compatibility wizard will solve the problem. Just tell the wizard that the program requires special permission and ran on older OS version (e.g. Vista) and it should install fine. Unfortunately, this usually doesn’t work for Microsoft Installer packages (*.msi files). Here’s a short tutorial on how to still force those packages to install (taking the Samsung LightScribe software as an example):

1. Hit Windows+R to open the “Run” command prompt and enter %TEMP% to open your temp folder. Select all files and hit Delete. Confirm and just ignore all files you can’t delete.
2. Run LS_Update_1.14.32.1_.exe, which will extract the installer contents to some folder in your temp folder and start the installation. At some point the installation stops and you’re told that your OS is not supported. DON’T hit OK now, leave the message open!
3. Go to your temp folder and look for some cryptic folder like {C1EFD9F9-2726-4203-A83F-848D81B32CD9}. This folders contains the extracted content from the above installer (including the actual MSI package). COPY THE WHOLE FOLDER TO SOME PLACE SAFE (e.g. your Desktop), as the temp folder will be emptied once you exit the setup procedure. After copying that folder, you can now confirm the “OS not supported” message. The installer will exit and the temp folder be emptied.
4. Go to your copy of the former temp folder (e.g. on your Desktop) and locate the MSI package in it (e.g. LS_HSI.msi). Right-click it and select Edit with Orca (Orca is a Microsoft tool to edit MSI packages and is included in the Windows SDK which can be downloaded here).
5. Now, while there is now absolute standard way how MSI packages check the operating system version, this check usually is part of the launch conditions. Therefore, in Orca, select LaunchCondition under Tables and look for something suspicious like ( (VersionNT=500) OR (VersionNT=501) OR (VersionNT=502) OR (VersionNT = 600) OR Installed ).
6. Delete or modify the above condition to meet you needs and hit Save.
7. Close Orca and run the MSI package by double-clicking it. The program should install fine now.

This is not a universal tutorial for all MSI packages out there. It requires some thinking of yourself once you opened the MSI file in Orca, as the OS checks don’t always look the same, but the trick works for quite a lot of Microsoft Installer packages out there.