jianshen

Impressive work!

I'd love to see Google Doc's revision history applied here so I don't have to worry so much about losing my work.

As a coder who does 3d modeling, I've always been irked by the lack of version control in the modeling world (Airplane_013a.mel - what was in this file?). Git worked ok and github is doing some interesting stuff with STL file previews but it's still very disruptive to the creative flow. Again I'm super impressed and this is just a suggestion that might bring us 3d modelers out of the dark ages of file management.

Cool, thanks for the pointers!

A bit OT but what are some of the most successful open source game titles out there? I'm writing a game server backend right now and didn't find very many projects where I could read good quality game code. (I come from the JS web app world where everything is out in the open so I'm super biased)

I can't find the original article but this might explain the change.

The Lego business was on a serious decline a decade ago (2003ish) while it was still a family run business. They knew they needed to get out of "pure" Lego and diversify (licensing, older demos) but went about it the wrong way (trying to become a lifestyle brand). What we see today is a turnaround effort by brought-in CEO Jørgen Vig Knudstorp who figured out how to help the Lego brand adapt and survive the changes in the market, one major component being all of the tie-ins to the entertainment industry. [1]

Today, we're seeing a decline in toy sales due to video games [2], something which Lego seems to be ahead of the curve on as well. I'm just glad they still produce the Technics line.

[1] http://www.economist.com/node/8083013 [2] http://kotaku.com/toys-are-dying-and-its-all-video-games-fau...

Damn... I remember learning about yahoo.com for the first time at a Barnes & Nobles when I was actually looking for books about the WWW haha. Two other guys in the same aisle were exchanging bookmarks in person. Anybody else remember writing links down on paper?

Great list!

I remember coming across this other "Learn Front-end" list: https://github.com/dypsilon/frontend-dev-bookmarks on HN a little while ago and thought it was a great example of just how scattered Web-FE education still is. Everyone has their own favorite "book" and there's no K&R that you just pick up and read.

This is a refreshing reminder to dig deeper. I'm always waiting for the right tool to come around to do the job (cheap hi-res 3d printing for example) but sometimes a good enough solution just might be sitting in front of you. Thanks for this!

Nothing like this will ever be easy or decided in an instant. A close friend of mine once categorized these types of decisions as "choices no one should ever have to make."

Once you're faced with them, you learn something new about yourself and no one can prepare you for it. I find comfort more in the fact that a decision is made rather than dwelling on the consequences because life is just too precious to be spent on resentment and regret. Sometimes, just having a decision made can be the best possible outcome...

I'm an avid Sketch-up user (printing primarily with the Replicator 2) but I've been super impressed by www.tinkercad.com lately.

It's browser based (WebGL) but surprisingly powerful.

Apps Scripts are pretty amazing. You can add custom UI elements to Google Spreadsheets and have it talk to external services (even your own).

My team is currently using it as a makeshift JSON level editor for a mobile game where each tab represents a collection of objects and the schema is defined dynamically by whatever is in the frozen header row. (think Backbone collections and models).

Also check out http://www.spreeder.com

A different approach but also bookmarklet

It's an interesting contrast to Jim Davis's Garfield, which was created primarily for commercial licensing.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/quora/2013/03/26/is_garfield_supp...

What price range do you consider "poor people art"? If an artist (even an amateur) spent say 20 hours on an original piece that you absolutely loved, how much are you willing to pay today to that artist?

I've always loved that thread because there's such a huge history of progress. It'd be interesting to see the OP come back in a year to implement one of these exercises and compare the quality of the code from where she started.

I know this is a niche feature but I think it's an important differentiator (and something that I love After Effects for).

I'm probably the only person who's excited to code up my own Arpeggiators and Rhythm pattern generators...

Connect this to the Shapeways API and you've got one helluva powerful toy...

3d Printing needs as much software iteration as hardware iteration. G-Code generation/slicing algorithms don't receive enough attention IMO. I just tried finding the Skeinforge repo and came up empty [1]. :(

[1] http://fabmetheus.crsndoo.com/

Tangentially, are there any open source alternatives that mimic the "Save for web" functionality of the Adobe products?

I feel like this black box functionality has made Adobe products almost mandatory for web designers and I'd like to see innovation in this area.

I'd love to see a tool that better takes into account color space issues with varying monitors (PC vs Mac) right from the start.

Great to hear. I'm all in favor of letting the market decide. :)

While I love the idea of connecting supply and demand for a niche skill, I worry for folks in the Motion Graphics/Post Production world who are already being paid very poorly for their work [1]. I just hope this product doesn't trivialize the amount of work that goes into video editing and post production. Great idea otherwise.

[1] http://www.wired.com/underwire/2013/03/oscars-vfx-protest/

It's cool. :)

Hey that's my photo of the GOpher! :)

[1] http://www.flickr.com/photos/jianshen/8080852738/in/photostr...

Very interesting feature. App associated with web page must be free and "meet a quality threshold" determined by Google.

[0] https://developers.google.com/+/web/signin/android-app-insta...

Thanks for sharing this.

I can't help but see parallels here to Hollywood and the struggling actor. "Things are great! I've been in a few indies you probably haven't seen..."

I hope in time, with more stories like this, the mainstream will better understand the more human side of an overly romanticized place.

RubyMotion is a huge win for me because of the super low friction toolchain. I don't ever have to load XCode and I can automate the build process however I like because it's all command-line based.

I was convinced the moment I checked out https://github.com/HipByte/RubyMotionSamples and just started typing 'rake' in each directory not ever having to setup directory paths for xcode project settings.

Ouya is running a Game Jam for its first generation of games: http://www.killscreendaily.com/create/entries.php

My impression is that they want to become the center of Indie Game development.

The sun totally took me by surprise. I work with folks on other continents and it would be amazing to see a timelapse visualization of check-ins on this thing in relation to the sun.

I just visited Shenzhen for the first time and was quite overwhelmed by the scale of construction that's going on in China.

This timelapse video does a good job of capturing that feeling: https://vimeo.com/53043267

Yup! The one day courier service is one of the big draws of the site besides there being a shop for just about anything.

I don't think 'creative' denigrates regular coders precisely because the term IS from the Advertising industry where there is a clear delineation between "creative", "sales" and "business". [1]

Ad Agencies/VFX Companies/Design Firms tend to have a "Creative Director" [2] where a Creative Coder would report to and up until recently, their roles would not exist in traditional consumer/enterprise web companies.

Put another way, it's still blurry if someone in such a role would report to an Engineering Director or a Creative Director at a company that had both groups.

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=ad+agency+org+structure [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_director