Swarowski designs and manufactures the world's most beautiful jewelry for the most beautiful people.
When Kmart, Sears, and Nordstrom decided to evict Ivanka Trump branded jewelry from their U.S. online stores, Swarowski seized the opportunity and asked Ms. Trump to design exclusively for Swarowski for the next four years.
The upcoming Ivanka Trump jewelry collection uses quite disruptive technology, namely (a) 3D printing which is a challenge as the material used is gold powder, (b) Rhino as a design tool, and (c) Rhino plugins based on CGAL multiplicatively weighted Voronoi diagrams (also called Apollonius graph), as well as the CGAL Hilbert sort algorithm for producing space filling curves.
Left: Voronoi ring Right: Space filling ear ring
A Unified Naming Scheme
Laure N.T. Rhino, the chief software architect at McNeel who gave this most wonderful design software its name, contacted the CGAL Editorial Board, asking if it wouldn't be possible to rename the multiplicatively weighted Voronoi diagrams to Ivanka Diagram, so that it has the same name as the plugin they produced exclusively for Swarowski.
"With the CGAL Multiplicatively weighted Voronoi diagram as a key routine of the Ivanka plugin, astonishing pieces can be designed at a fraction of the cost and time of traditional design methods. It enables our designers to push the boundaries of how jewelery can look like in the 21st century"
Sebastien L.O. Riot, Chief Technologist at Swarowki
According to Swarowski and McNeel, we would do them a favor if the collection, the tool, as well as the CGAL component had the same name. This is somehow understandable, if we think about the naming mess of Visual Studio 2013, sitting in the directory Microsoft Visual Studio 12.0, and having the version number MSC_VER = 18 in case you want to #if it in your C++ code.
Your Opinon is Important for Us
Before making this move, we would like to gather feedback from the CGAL User Community, as first of all we are a software development project run by developers for developers.
As the C++ programming language does only allow templated typedefs starting with C++11, we are reluctant to break backward compatibility, by just renaming the class CGAL::Multiplicatively_weighted_voronoi_diagram_3 to Ivanka_diagram, but there are maybe even non-technical issues we should take into account, so maybe you can help us to add items to our pro and con list which will be the base for the next Editorial Board meeting co-located with SGP 2017 in London.
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This post was written on April Fool's Day.
