Tony Buser’s Thingiview.js is an in-browser 3D file viewer powered by WebGL.  If you have a WebGL-enabled browser, you can view 3D files in your browser almost as fast as viewing them with a desktop application.

Now, Thingiview.js is available on Thingiverse! Just look for the little  cube icon next to the thumbnails for any STL file.  For example:

As a bonus, and as shown above, you can embed Thingiviews into your own pages! Each Thingiview page has an “Embed This Thing” button, which gives you the HTML to copy-and-paste into your site. You can even customize the colors!

If your current web browser doesn’t support WebGL, you might want to try the latest Google Chrome, which has WebGL support built in, or check out the latest Firefox and Safari betas.

The ability to preview 3D files in-browser has been on our wishlist for a while so it is great to be able to get this feature into the hands of the citizens of Thingiverse!

Please keep in mind that Thingiview is an experimental feature. If you run into any files that don’t work, please let us know!

The Popular Things section of Thingiverse has been a great showcase of some of the most popular Things ever posted to the site.

Unfortunately, this didn’t really reflect what the citizens of Thingiverse like right now. As a few things became really popular, they took over the top spots and stayed there.

We want popular things to showcase what the community currently thinks is the best stuff coming out of Thingiverse, so we’ve tweaked it to only take into account the last 30 days worth of “Likes” and other information.

Check it out! You’re bound to find something awesome in there.

The Creative Commons announced the Open Attribute project yesterday:

Open Attribute, “a suite of tools that makes it ridiculously simple for anyone to copy and paste the correct attribution for any CC licensed work,” launched today with browser add-ons for Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome. The add-ons “query the metadata around a CC-licensed object and produce a properly formatted attribution that users can copy and paste wherever they need to.”

…

Open Attribute uses CC REL metadata found in the pages to generate the attribution metadata. You might remember that we developed a guide with real examples to make CC REL metadata much easier to implement: CC REL by Example contains example HTML pages, as well as explanations and links to more information. If you’re curious to see how Open Attribute pulls the metadata, the guide includes a specific section on Attributing Reuses.

As you can see from the image above, Thingiverse already includes license information on the page for each Thing. That means that these add-ons already work for any Creative Commons licensed Things on Thingiverse!

We look forward to seeing more cool stuff from the Open Attribute project.

They say that sharing is caring. If that is the case, then I believe that auto-sharing is auto-caring!

Thingiverse can now automatically post to Twitter whenever you upload a new Thing, make a copy of somebody else’s Thing, or whenever one of your Things is featured! We’ll also show your Twitter username on your profile if you like.

Getting everything set up is easy! Just visit your profile, click on the “edit my profile” link, and look for the new Twitter section. Clicking the “Sign-in with Twitter” button will run you through the process to authorize Thingiverse to tweet on your behalf. Once you’ve done it, you’ll see something like this:

For the curious, the automated tweets look something like:

@schmarty: I made a Thing on Thingiverse! http://thingiverse.com/thing:1046 #thingalert

Enjoy, and be on the lookout for new features like this in the future! If you have any questions, feel free to drop us a line.

What is Flattr?

What’s that? You say you already know everything there is to know about the awesome European social micro-payment service, Flattr? How amazingly in-the-know you are!

Well, for the rest of us, Flattr is a flat-rate flattering system that lets you give (and receive!) cash money for things that you like on the web.

And now Thingiverse works with Flattr!

How it Works

First, you’ll need to sign up with Flattr, if you haven’t already. Once you’ve signed up and added some money to your account, you can start Flattring your favorite things, designers, and even Thingiverse itself!

But you said “receive”!

Indeed I did! Receiving Flattr’s on your things is as easy as 1-2-3:

1. Copy your Flattr User ID from your Flattr settings page.
2. Go to your Thingiverse Profile and click “Edit my Profile”.
3. Paste your Flattr User ID in to the Flattr section and save.

Once we know your Flattr ID, Thingiverse will automatically put Flattr buttons on your profile and on every thing you upload! Awesome!

Flattr works on a give-to-receive philosophy, so get out there and start Flattring! Check their website for more info about how Flattr works.

Thingiverse just experienced what we in the business call a “catastrophic hardware failure” – a hard drive decided to up and die, taking everything down with it.

Thankfully, Zach and I were able to tag team this problem and get everything migrated to another (better!) server, and restored from backups in about half an hour.  Yeah!

Unfortunately, the latest full backup we had was from this morning, so it looks like we lost data on about 5 things.  We have some partial backups of those and will try to restore what we can of them tomorrow.  In the meantime, if you uploaded a new Thing to Thingiverse today, please go ahead and upload them again.

In the interests of full disclosure, here are the Things we lost:

• Herringbone Geared Extruder Driver by rhys-jones
• Flessenschraper timschmidt
• Printed Quadrocopter by Zaggo
• Little Rocketship by mojomonkey
• C120 Webcam Security Mounts by pandelume

Thanks for bearing with us while we deal with this issue, and special thanks to the folks that dropped us a note to let us know that things were messed up! Our new server should be nicely RAID-enabled, so losing a disk doesn’t mean losing data!

Greetings, denizens of Thingiverse!

My name is Marty McGuire, and I am the newest developer to join the Thingiverse team.  As a long-time MakerBot operator and Thingiverse user, I am super-excited to do my part to make Thingiverse kick butt.  I’ll be working on lots of exciting new features, improvements, integrations, support, etc…

We’ve got many exciting new features and improvements on the way!  For example, one kind of email we see all the time are requests to change usernames.  Well, now (within reason), you can do it yourself!  Just log in to Thingiverse, go to your profile, and click “Edit my Profile”.

Unfortunately, I won’t be able to make it over to each of your houses for tea and cookies.  However, let’s not let that stop us from getting to know each other. I’ll be posting updates about what I am up to here on the blog.  I also want to know what you think!  Feel free to hit up the Contact link below to let me know what changes you’d like to see to Thingiverse, what you think we’re doing right, and how awesome it is to be a part of Thingiverse!

Marty has created an awesome Thingiverse Plugin!

For awhile now, I’ve wanted to embed an RSS feed of the latest stuff I’ve printed from Thingiverse on MakerBot 131′s page. To kick things off, I asked Zach to implement an RSS feed of the Thing’s I’ve Made page on Thingiverse. It’s been awhile, but I’ve finally gotten around to creating a WordPress plugin that I’m calling Thingiverse Embed.

Whistle by Zaggo

Better Living with MakerBot, Episode 2 You probably all know this situation: You're supposed to ref a soccer game in less than 1/2 an hour and you cannot find your whistle. You're screwed! But from now on you're out of trouble: Fire up your trusty MakerBot and print a new whistle in 26 minutes! This object prints the pea right inside the whistle. Since the pea is connected to the rest of the object only at one tiny point, it's quite easy to break it loose after printing with a small screw driver or tweezers. I probably pushing luck a little bit with bridging the top layer. So far I printed the whistle twice without problems. As always, I added the object as .obj file (wavefront), which can be imported into AOI and Blender. The gcode file is the one I used to print the whistle on the image. The gcode file contains an experimental raft with additional "blobs" on the second (interface) layer. You might want to generate your own gcode file with skeinforge settings, tested with your MakerBot. Be sure to setup Skeinforge to create an (almost) watertight object, since the whistle won't whistle if it's full of holes... [Update] I added a second version of the whistle. "Whistle_v2" is an attempt to fine tune the object a little bit. My brother (he's a pipe organ builder) gave me some tips how to optimize the whistles mouth. Whistle v2 should start whistle with less airflow than v1 and thus be (somewhat) less loud. I also downsized the pea a little bit and changed the shape of the lanyard loop. Whistle v1 is still available for reference and also since it's more "tested"...Since you blow the whistle with your mouth, be aware of possible problems concerning "food safety" of printed plastic. See the blog post "For foodies out there" ( blog.thingiverse.com/2009/09/13/for-foodies-out-there/ ) for more information.

This thing brought to you by

Check it out! you can embed snippets from Thingiverse and make a cool sidebar widget! You can see this example on the page for MakerBot 131.

We are planning on moving Thingiverse to a newer, faster server starting at 10AM Eastern time on Monday, Feb 8th. The transition should be painless, but it will probably take an hour or so for us to move everything over. Please bear with us while we do this upgrade. Once everything is done, the site should run much faster.

The gang who does the Radar series over at Babelgum came by the BotCave and made this video. They used Nikon d90′s and it turned out beautiful! Go to their site and check it out big.