for those interlocking puzzle designers that haven't heard... the latest burrtools has been released... here's the announcement from Andreas Roever, the author of burrtools...

Hello everybody,

I want to use this nice date (10.10.10) to announce that version 0.6.0
of BurrTools has just been released. This version has the following new
features:

- completely rewritten STL-export- and OpenGL-display-code, they do
now share a common base. With this come the following features:
o STL export for all grids, including hollow shapes for all grids
o STL export preview in the STL export window, you see exactly what
the STL shape looks like
o for the programmers: it has become simpler to support new grids
all polygon based grids now can create proper STL output and
code for the 3D display much easier, grids like the spheres stay
complicated, though
o bigger sensitive click spots for spheres, they also look better
o in the 3D view you can see the natural color and the color
constraint color
- improved STL export window (tooltips, ...)
- STL export displays the exact volume of the generated object
- add a new way how objects are rotated in the 3-D viewer (this one is
enabled by default. To try it click the object and then draw circles
around the center of the screen. The oly code would restore the
object to it's initial position when returning to the starting point.
This code now rotates the object around the z-axis.

This version also fixes a few problems:

* fix a problem loading puzzle files with complex groups
* deleting the last shape crashed the program
* make compilabe with gcc-4.4 and fltk-1.3

I want to thank Derek Bosch for his help in this release. Although we
had to start over twice he managed in the end to come up with the bevel
and offset code required for the STL export.

As usual windows binary, mac OSX binary, source code and user guides are available.

Andreas

Sweet!

My mac won't open it up, is it for intel macs only?

I'll have to try it on my PC later.

it should work on any mac running 10.4 (tiger) or later...
feel free to PM or e-mail me if you have issues with mac port...

-Derek

and if you downloaded the mac version, re-download it. I fixed an issue with the file browser on the mac.

Cool program... I'm definately going to be spending some (a lot of) time playing with this at school, where I lack other design programs!
I plugged in my 4 piece 3x3x3 puzzle just to learn my way around a little, and it verified that there are only two solutions!

A link would be nice. I'll try to get it working with ubuntu later if it doesn't.

sorry... here it is:
http://burrtools.sf.net

Tried that some days ago. I got burrtools compiled on Ubuntu 10.4, but I had to collect all the library packages required before. Now it works nicely on my Ubuntu system. I remember that the unit test cases did not compile because of a missing boost part, but they are not required for running BurrTools anyway.

If you have some questions, let me know. I might remember what I did to compile.

yeah, it does require a fair number of libraries to build... and I've never gotten the boost/unitTest stuff working...