Second Edition of “Architectural Design with SketchUp” is almost here!

After the success of the first edition of my SketchUp book, I went back through the text for the second edition and updated quite a bit of content. My main goal was to keep it highly relevant for as large a variety of SketchUp users as possible and at the same time provide thorough yet easy to follow […] Read more..

Favorite Places mapping web app is now open source

I decided to make my Favorite Places web app (that was the basis for the UMass Favorite Places site) open source. You can now find it on my GitHub page: https://github.com/alexschreyer/My-Favorite-Places In doing so, I made a bunch of improvements and squashed some bugs. Don’t forget to look at the readme.txt file. Please drop me […] Read more..

Oh no, what happened to Google Maps???

I just updated my Android maps app to the latest version – only to be forced to look closer at Google Maps’ design updates. And I must say I don’t like them at all!!! But first the positives: It makes sense to maximize the map’s screen real estate. It didn’t in the past make any […] Read more..

Read your SketchUp news right inside SketchUp

Have you ever wanted to… make sure you never miss a blog post by the Trimble SketchUp folks? stay up-do-date with your favorite SketchUp blogs? follow what’s going on at SketchUcation? keep an eye on Twitter and Facebook? make sure you never miss any of my blog posts? do all of this while you are […] Read more..

Google

Who’s got the best aerial photos: Google, Bing or Esri?

On the day of the 9/11 anniversary, I was looking at Google Maps (as you can see – on the iPad). Because I also have the Esri app installed, I went to check out their (and Bing‘s) imagery as well, which led to an interesting discovery that neatly illustrates quality differences between all of these prime mapping […] Read more..

More from Google: 3D Warehouse changes

On the heels of the announcement that SketchUp has been sold to Trimble comes another announcement from Google, this time related to Google Earth. As described in various press releases and posts, Google will – among other changes – implement automated building (and vegetation!) generation from flyover data for major cities. The following video explains this: […] Read more..

“Favorite Places” presented at NEARC Spring Conference 2012

Together with a colleague of mine (Sasha Stepanov from Campus Planning), I just presented the “My Favorite Places” website (and the UMass “Likes/Dislikes” site) at the 2012 Spring Conference of NEARC, an ArcGIS user group here in the Northeast. All in all, this was a great event (held at beautiful Smith College) that allowed me […] Read more..