Google OS

The internet is a-buzz about the just-announced Google OS, expected to be released in 2010. This is a major contender to Microsoft's dominant Windows OS, found on PCs world-wide. One article I read mentioned that this is the first effort to de-throne Microsoft's OS, but that certainly isn't true. Is it the first viable effort? Perhaps.

I have been saying for many years that Microsoft is and has been in a position to make your lives easier, but is a company committed to its profits. Any company not committed to its profits in some manner is probably hurting itself. However, Microsoft has held the dominant position in this space for over a decade. Why not make an OS that doesn't need constant, bloated updates that (in some cases) cause more problems than they solve? Why not make it load considerably faster than it does after a 5-year redevelopment cycle? Why not make it easier to simply get on with what a user wants to do on the computer, rather than have them wait for simple instruction executions and have to fix weekly (sometimes daily) computer glitches?

This is what appears Google is trying to address for the common user with their new Chrome OS. It should simply work. Not everyone is a gamer, a hardcore computer user, or has time to fiddle with computer issues. In fact, one might even say that Microsoft should be sued for causing world-wide waste of time and money. That may be a bit extreme and, certainly, one could say that Microsoft's products, for all their faults, have also opened up markets for IT professionals who fix such issues. Google is taking a very different approach.

Some say that Google shouldn't have any more dominance than Microsoft. I don't disagree, on many levels. Yet, I can't help but feel that we're better off. I don't pay for Gmail, Google Docs, or pretty much anything Google has managed to push out to the web community. That's a very benevolent push for what I've been able to do with those services on a daily basis. Even this very blog is evidence of a Google service that I don't pay for, but allows me to do what I need to.

The Chrome internet browser may be a good contender for the browser market, to some degree. However, Firefox and Opera have a much better design for rendering pages, keeping web standards in place. For me, they have provided better web security than any other browsers. I don't need another one. As far as I can tell, Chrome acts more like Internet Explorer in how it renders web pages. That's a bad thing, as web designers struggle to keep web pages looking the same for every user. Sorry...I'm digressing.

I would say don't bother focusing so much on the Big Bad Google as a monopoly, but on pressuring Google to finish what it starts. Google has a history of starting many services and applications that never seem to finish in development. Let's hope Google makes it to the finish line with their upcoming OS.

Home Sweet Home 3D

It seems that open source has become more mainstream these days, and while the open source operating systems are still struggling, the applications are thriving. One of my recent favorites is Sweet Home 3D. It's a great interior design application that allows you to model the inside and, to some degree, the outside of a home or building. It favors the home user or interior designer, but for a free app, it's very powerful.

Few 3D modeling applications are easy to use, are free, and can perform architectural renderings to scale. Sweet Home 3D can do all of those things and more. You can use the existing library of 3D furniture, windows, doors, and more. You can even export your creations in a few popular formats, for use in other 3D apps. You can export your floorplan and/or your 3D rendering of it as an image. I rely on this app to help me create rooms to scale for use in Cheetah3D, my 3D app of choice.

Another huge benefit to this wonderful gem, is the fact that it can run on Windows, the Mac OS, and/or Linux. I have successfully added 3D models of furnishings from Cheetah3D to Sweet Home 3D and back again. You can add textures to the floors, walls, and other items in Sweet Home 3D to give them a more realistic feel. The rendering isn't quite as sophisticated as most 3D applications, but it doesn't need to be. I have included a picture of a quick 10 second mockup of a bedroom, to show you what this thing looks like. Draw the walls in the floorplan view using an intuitive snap-to-and-measure user interface, drop in furniture, which automatically turns appropriately towards the inside of the room, and simply save the file either in native format, as an obj, or as an image.

There's much more to this application, but I suggest you try it out for yourself. This one goes down as one of my highly recommended apps of all time. Find it at http://www.sweethome3d.eu