Saturday, July 01, 2006

COLLADA and Google

For awhile now, I have been updating my Open Source 3D web browser Whoola Cyberspace to use the new XML-based 3D format COLLADA. To my pleasant surprise, I recently discovered that the free 3D modeling tool Google SketchUp exports to the Google Earth format and that the Google Earth format is based on COLLADA. This means that it should be possible to load Google Earth formatted 3D files into Whoola Cyberspace, including the growing collection of free 3D models in the Google 3D Warehouse. I am very excited about this and I have already had some limited success in getting this to work.


Free Software Updates

The free Open Source office suite OpenOffice has been updated to version 2.0.3. I read that it includes security fixes.

Version 9 of the free web browser Opera is now available.

Java 6 Beta 2 is out.

You can find a list of additional free and Open Source software on the CroftSoft Links webpage.