A couple months ago, I made a 3D model of the Clock Tower in Santa Cruz and submitted it to Google Earth.  It has finally been reviewed and has been accepted into Google Earth!  If you want to see it, just search “santa cruz town clock” in Google Earth and make sure the 3D Buildings Layer is turned on. There is one strange part though, on the top roof level–the appears to be a small hole on one of the edges that looks into the untextured interior (a light blue color). I overlaid the original KMZ file on the Google Warehouse with the 3D Buildings Layer, and the problem does not occur in the original, so Google must be doing some additional form of compression on buildings added to the Google Earth layer. I’ve posted in the Google Earth Group to see if there is a fix for this, but other than that small inconsistency, it looks great!

I just released a semi-minor update to Musical with a much requested feature.  The 2-octave stacked keyboard is now mapped to the physical keyboard.  This means that the keyboard is now “multitouch” (well… you can play more that one note at once at least, although its more difficult on the keyboard than the screen).

The reason I was able to release this is because I finally gave up on Dell after they shipped me a new SSD… for my laptop… which they have (see last post) and borrowed another machine to use for developing.  I’m currently in Tahoe with a friend for a weekend of skiing (I’m posting this from my laptop tethered to my G1), and about 4 hours after we left, FedEx finally delivered my laptop.  Again, thanks Dell—a little late.  Hopefully I’ll be able to release some more updates this weekend, but it depends on how good the skiing is (it’s supposed to be pretty bad—icy and it might rain/snow).

And finally, Musical has hit 500 reviews!  It’s currently at 507 reviews (4.16/5), 33456 downloads, and 15043 installs.

Side note: Google is planning on releasing the Market in “Germany, Austria, Czech Republic, Netherlands, and Poland in the coming weeks”.  If anyone wants to waste 10 minutes or so, I would love to be able to translate the very limited amount of text in the app to other languages… otherwise I’ll have to either limit it to the English speaking locations or use the dreaded machine translation.

Those of you who have been keeping up with my blog know that about 3 weeks ago my Dell laptop completely died and wiped its SSD (I had backups, so nothing was lost).  Despite my pestering, Dell refused to just send me a new SSD to install myself and instead required me to send in my entire laptop.  The laptop was supposed to have been back last week.  I have received no updates at all, and their chat support hasn’t been able to do anything but assure me it will be back soon.

I finally received a package from Dell.  It was in a box smaller than my computer.  I opened it up, and there is a refurbished SSD.  No instructions, no invoice, no return label… just a small bag with an SSD.

Dell, you have just blown my mind.  You refuse to send me an SSD, then 3 weeks later, you send me one, after you have already taken my computer (making it a completely useless gesture)!  Finally, you included nothing but the SSD.  What am I supposed to do with it?  Am I supposed to install it in my laptop that I don’t have and then return the old SSD that I don’t have with the shipping label you didn’t send?

Thanks Dell… (I’m writing this to take up time as I wait in the 60 person line for chat support-I’m number 26 now)

My laptop’s SSD died a few days ago (completed wiped itself), so I’m going to be taking a break from developing Musical until Dell fixes it (I’ve arranged a repair and the box should be arriving soon). I super lucked out though and have a 100% up to date backup (I didn’t lose a single thing). I was going to try out Windows 7, so I made a full backup of my SSD to an external HD and then wiped the SSD to install Windows 7. A few hours later, the SSD was gone (and, as much as I’d like to blame it on Windows 7, I don’t think it’s possible). Since I did all of my Android development on that machine, I’m just going to wait until Dell fixes it, then restore my backup. If Dell takes an outrageous time (which is completely possible–they already mixed up my phone number with a random business customer also in Santa Cruz and tried to schedule a repair to fix a cable on my Latitude notebook… nice try Dell), I’ll have to setup one of my other laptops with the Android SDK. Whatever happens though, I will post updates here on my blog. The frustrating thing, is that I got a SSD based laptop because of my terrible HD luck (every hard drive I’ve ever had in a laptop has corrupted itself)–apparently my plan worked out great…it only lasted a few months before completely destroying everything (although it was also my first Dell laptop, having previously used IBM ThinkPads and HP consumer notebooks, so I can always blame it on Dell). Thanks Dell!

This summer I decided to teach myself SketchUp (by Google) by making a model of the town clock in Santa Cruz to add to Google Earth’s 3d buildings layer.  I went out and on a nice day and took about 80 photos from every angle and of every surface.  I went through each photo until I found the best view of each surface, then I meticulously edited it in photoshop and made perfect textures for all of them.  I started modeling and finished the entire top half.  Then I got busy…  Summer was quickly coming to an end and I had to tragically push it back into my started but never finished folder.  Now, 6 months or so since I started, Winter break provided the bit of free time I needed to finish it up.  And so, I present to the world (which doesn’t care has been waiting patiently): the Santa Cruz Clock Tower.

The model is available in the Google SketchUp 3d Warehouse by clicking here.  From there, it can be downloaded into SketchUp or viewed in Google Earth.  It’s currently in the approval process for the Google Earth 3d buildings layer, and if it gets approved, it will automatically show up in Google Earth for everyone (who has the 3d buildings turned on).

UPDATE: Google has now generated a “3D View” of the model that you can rotate with javascript on the Warehouse page.