02. July 2018

SketchUp + Visualizer

While doing some architectural visualisations recently, I got amazed by the tools available now. From costlier to the free versions, they are all around the place. However there are very few which work with the workflow of an architect.

saumya visualisation

The really nice tool in this space is SketchUp. Current version is only available for the web. However there are older versions available to download and they work offline.

The thing here is, SketUp does not support rendering out of the box. And for rendering, there are a lot of options available there too. However, I found Visualizer is a must tool. It is simple but very productive. Bad news is, they have stopped developing it, good news is, they made it free. Its available for download for free.

Gate

I found the combination version of SketchUp 2015 and Visualizer works best for me.

Gate View

Here is a link where there are descriptions and discussions to download SketchUp 2015 and Visualizer is already available for 2015.

Happy rendering.

28. June 2018

Firebase Cloud FireStore and checking existence of a Document

The thing is Cloud FireStore is still in beta. However, I find it quite stable to run my applications. It has got all the things to run a serverless application.

While this is a NoSQL database, there are Documents and Collections. I was suppose to check the existence of a Document before adding some values into it. There is an API which gives us exactly the same thing, exists.

docSnapshot.exists

The trick here is, if there is no Document creation involved before but still there are data inside that Document path (its possible) then the exists will always return false. To know whether the Document is actually created or not Firebase Console is a good help. In the Console the Documents which are not created will be shown as italics. Its a subtle but very informative visual separation.

Just make sure, you created your Document before checking it with exists.

Here is stackoverflow answer, which helped me in this regard.

Happy Coding.