Cool new toy–Lego Digital Designer–it’s an app from Lego for designing Lego models. It’s Java-based and works on OS X and Windows. Engadget claims that you can get Lego to sell you a custom set of Legos generated automatically from your model, but I couldn’t exactly see how to do that in the UI during the 15 minutes that I played with it.

One thing that that became really obvious while playing with this–it’s a lot easier to manipulate 3D objects in real life then it is on the computer. I had a really frustrating experience trying to build a simple little house with this, while the same sort of thing would only take a couple minutes with box of real Legos.