How to build Assimp, the Open Asset Import Library, on Mac OS X

Assimp is an open source C++ library to import and export several 3D formats. According to the features page Assimp can import Collada, Blender 3D, 3ds Max 3DS, 3ds Max ASE, Wavefront Object and many other formats.

I wanted to build it on my Mac, to use it in a project of mine and I discovered that it is very easy.

First of all, you have to download the source code from the download page. For production software they recommend (of course) to download the release version packaged in a ZIP archive (at the current state of Assimp, the release version is 3.1.1). But, if you want to work with the bleeding edge code you can clone the Git repository.

The build system used by Assimp is Cmake. Therefore, download Cmake for Mac OS X from this link: Mac OSX 64/32-bit Universal (for Intel, Snow Leopard/10.6 or later), and install it.

When done, extract the archive of Assimp in a folder of your choice (I suggest to create a subfolder named Assimp in your ~/Documents folder).

You'll get a folder named assimp-3.1.1 (the version number depends on the current release).

Then open Cmake and insert the source code folder and the build products destination folder.

Click the "Configure" button. And choose "Xcode", from the popup menu in the modal window that appears, and select "Use default native compilers".

Configuration process should start. The "Configure" button updates its label with "Stop" and the progress bar should run.

At the end of the process Cmake will produce an output like this.

Now, you have to click the "Generate" button to automatically create an Xcode project.

At the end of the process you will get a Xcode project in the build destination folder.

Open the Xcode project and build sources as usual.

Done.

Three Web services to automate posts sharing towards several social networks

In the latest years, Social Networks and other related services (like blogs) spread all over the Web. I can list a large number that I frequently use: Facebook, Twitter, Google+, YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest, Vimeo, FeedBurner, Flicker, Tumblr, Foursquare, SoundCloud, Blogger, Wordpress, Issuu and many, many others.

Recently, I found myself needing a new utility for my projects. In fact, in middle 2013, I founded a live music event in my city: the Muzik! Zyklon. It took not long before I realized that I needed something to deliver news (and especially Muzik! Zyklon related news) towards several different social networks and services at the same time. If I had my own Web hosting service, I could develop some PHP code to achieve the wanted result. But it was not the case.

Though, at the current state of development, the major Social Networks (Facebook, Twitter,  Google+,  Tumblr,  ...) have internal options to integrate each other. Twitter, for example, includes Twitter for Facebook to share contacts and automatically post twits to your Facebook timeline. And Facebook offers its own Twitter API based App to share Facebook posts to your Twitter timeline.

But, what if you want to share your Blogger posts towards your Facebook timeline or a Facebook page that you administer? So, I searched in the Web and found and tested three services that can work for you (if you have my same needs, of course).

The first one is IFTTT. IFTTT means "If This Then This". Essentially IFTTT lets you create little recipes. Recipes are composed by an event (the first This) that happens on the source Social Network (that could be the publication of a post on Blogger) and an action (the second This) performed on the destination social network (for example, to publish a summary of the Blogger post on Facebook). IFTTT offers a visual User Interface to create your own recipes or you can pick up a recipe created by other IFTTT users.

One of the limits I found is that IFTTT handles only one Blogger blog per user. I have more then one blog and I would like to deliver my blogs posts on different Facebook pages.

The second one is Zapier. Zapier recipes are called zaps composed by a trigger and an action. It works almost the same way of IFTTT though Zapier is not fully free. It allows up to 100 tasks per month with a free account. Though Zapier seems to support a lot of services (called apps; IFTTT calls them channels) while IFTTT supports 124 services.



The third and latest service is dlvr.it. dlvr.it provides routes, instead of recipes or apps; source and destination instead of trigger and action. Like Zapier it has a free plan and upgrade plans. The most interesting feature of dlvr.it is the queue ability. dlvr.it permits you to add interesting news you picked up from the Web to a queue and will publish them to your networks when people is online to gain visibility. This feature could be very useful especially for independent projects, open source projects, organizations, agencies or companies who need to be visible.

My conclusions are that in the latest years several external services covered the lacks of the major social networking platforms offering a wide range of services to permit the final user to perform many tasks.

My only concern is that solutions are scattered around the Web and entropy is constantly increasing. :-P