Gadgetopia

A friend mentioned yesterday that LEGO just updated it’s Digital Designer (LDD) app. It’s a freebie Mac OS X or Windows app that you your kids can use to…

build absolutely anything… right on your computer. Then you can buy the real bricks to build your creation online in LEGO Factory, or you can print out an inventory of bricks and take it to any LEGOLAND theme park or LEGO Store.

I’d never used LDD before, so I downloaded it to try. First impressions weren’t great; it took a full two minutes to launch and load all of it’s brick sets. But once it was running, I could hardly pull my 7 year-old son away from it, and he was chattering on about it long after. You drag & click the pieces to assemble them, and you can swivel your assembly platform around in three dimensions to view your model.

Then when you’re done you can order all the pieces to actually build the model. Or if your kids are anything like mine, it’s just a matter of sifting through the box full of pieces they already have.