Google continues to impress me with their latest free application, SketchUp. It’s a 3D-modeling tool that’s so fun and easy to use, I’d call it a toy if it weren’t so obviously powerful. Just walking through the tutorial this morning had me saying “wow” outloud several times. You can model your fantasy house, and add it to Google Earth at your own address.
I’ve been all over Google’s stuff lately. Gmail for Domains lets me use the incredible gmail interface for my tcob.com mail. Google Desktop takes the small-applet/widget movement, organizes it, and makes it useful. Google Calendar is already the coolest app for managing my personal schedule.
I’d like to be able to add Picasa to this list. It’s also great at what it does, editing and organizing your photo library. But it’s based on the idea of saving your changes to the database. This is a neat idea, but I need the option of easily applying those changes to the original file. Until then, it’s all about IrfanView.
Just so it’s clear - Google hasn’t really done anything that interesting here except: 1) buy SketchUp and 2) release a limited version of it for free. 2 is definitely a great idea and kind of an initial effort towards segmented market pricing like in this great post from Joel on Software. SketchUp has been around for a while (I first heard about it from Kevin Kelly’s very interesting Cool Tools blog), but only a select few architects knew about or could afford it - by “releasing” the stripped down version for free, Google is, apparently, keeping their buzz factor high without actually doing as much work as it looks like. Under “similar trivia” - what’s the recipe for Google Maps? Lots of smart people and elbow grease? Maybe, but “acquire ~10 companies” would be a better answer. The SketchUp acquisition and release is kind of weird though. The only place I see it fitting in with Google’s business at all is as a platform for making Google Earth models. Maybe that’s a lot bigger than I expect, but it still seems pretty weird. Anyway - SketchUp is definitely amazingly amazingly awesome software and it’s great to see a free version available for the masses.