Tidbits: solidThinking and SketchUp news

solidThinking News

solidThinking, Inc., has announced QuickStart Web Sessions for February. These sessions are one hour and get you going on solidThinking so your design work  can reach its fullest expression.

Scheduled sessions in February are:

• Feb 11, 2010 – 2:00 pm  EST – register
• Feb 16, 2010 – 10:00 am EST – register
• Feb 25, 2010 – 2:00 pm EST – register

In related news DEVELOP 3D the product design blog/e-zine has a good review of solidThinking here.

SketchUp News

The latest version of SketchUpdate Newsletter had a lot of key news in it. SketchUp Pro and free is now available in Brazilian Portuguese, Korean and Traditional Chinese, this is version 7.1

New Build

Starting the year off right Google has a new build of SketchUp (version 7.1) for both free and pro versions. Google says this maintenance release fixes bugs and deals with two security issues that were reported. You can download the latest build/release here.

Google is also reporting there is a very interesting thread on using SketchUp and LayOut or construction drawings in their SketchUcation forums here.

Architosh Forums Talk

This thread shows some innovative 3D work with Vectorworks in interior design, plus currently is ending with a chat about resources for obtaining pre-made Vectorworks friendly models.

Interior design with Vectorworks. This user has done a nice job.

Kind of a lively debate takes place here but it needs some correction. And it was due. We love the passion but like the views based on facts and experiences more. Regardless, CAD and BIM are religion to many and this is not going to go away anytime soon. Revit vs everyone else views are waxed over by user William.

The Future of the Forums

Architosh’s Forums have been in existence for nearly ten years. We had an early start but software companies caught on quickly and put up their own boards to address the day-to-day needs of their users. This slowly put our boards in competition with them for user attention. Their boards naturally being more focused won that battle easily.

Our boards have moved to demonstration, viewpoints and arguments and comparison posts. But we would much rather see those comments posted in our Comments section of our news and feature posts daily. In our best stories there is a healthy mix of reaction.

The future of our boards is not entirely clear to us. We have some options technically with where we can integrate the boards into our main site and into our Users for the main site. Currently we are fast approaching 1000 members who have joined Architosh proper. This group compliments are 1000+ ToshLetter group and supplements our Forum members.

With social media sites like LinkedIn and Facebook gaining the lion’s share of talk and debate, we see a future where we are able to dual-post information between Architosh proper and those sites. Sign into Architosh with Facebook credentials for example and your post comments on Architosh will show up on your Facebook Wall.

If you have any thoughts about some of this we’d love to hear them. We’d love to hear your views if you are a regular Architosh Forums Member. You can write to us at: [email protected]