A community chat about SketchUp's future

[tbd]

Mark: unless it replies with "reddit is under heavy load right now, sorry. Try again in a few minutes."

[Mark H.]

Hey all,

We're now live on Reddit; hope you can join us!

Mark

[thomthom]

So much for a chat... one has to wait about 5 minutes between each post...

[thomthom]

Now I have to wait 8 minutes...

[BrooksL]

Some SketchUp significant priority wishes off the top of my head...

1) make Layout dimension precision options match SketchUp's precision capabilities; layout looks like a very helpful application but it's not nearly as useful when it can't dimension with the same units and number of decimal places as our SketchUp models -- needs to at least do hundreths of a millimeter and thousandths of an inch, but would be best to simply match SketchUp's capabilities.

2) make the plane tools also respond to the arrow keys by forcing the plane orientation (because the point and line tools respond, I see new users [and myself] intuitively expected similar behavior from the plane tools -- and it would be very helpful!

3) make the plane tools capable of quick compound angle alignment similar to the protractor tool by holding down the left mouse button. When it was pointed out to me that the protractor can do this, I can see how it would be very helpful (and make for intuitive consistency) if all the native plane tools responded like that.

4) fix the errors in and clarify the documentation - especially for lowering frustrations of new users.

5) provide a couple of ways that the user can quickly kick or influence the inference engine to look for another inference or a specific inference in the same view vacinity - because it's really frustrating when a user (especially a newbie) frequently needs to zoom in very close or turn off a bunch of geometry just to get the engine to make the desired selection.

5a) some kind of selection filter influence for the selection tool could also be useful - sometimes (often) it's a royal pain to get a construction point selected by itself among a bunch of other geometry.

[solo]

I got distracted by the drying paint on my wall, far more interesting.

[Mark H.]

@Thom Thom -- we're experiencing that annoying delay as well. We are on 3 different networks and have set-up 3 different wi-fi hot spots to get off the same IP!

[thomthom]

Some SketchUp significant priority wishes off the top of my head...

I think they prefer to use the Reddit site - keeping the whole discussion in one place.

[pbacot]

I was hoping chat on the future of SU ala Trimble. A few hints anyway. It's sort of the usual wish list and the usual answers...

But cool of the SU team to do this. Hope more of this comes along.

Neat to see various greats like Daniel Tal chime in.

[thomthom]

Right now my brain blanked out. I'm sure there's tons of things I'd think of when the chat ends...

[Brodie]

Cool idea, I hope they do it again. Unfortunate that the format is causing so many issues.

-Brodie

[thomthom]

Very hard to follow the conversation eventually. No good way to spotting new posts.

[TIG]

Crappy !

There must be better ways to 'chat' than that - it was pants...
Not being able to post for another 8 minutes after making a brief comment is tooooo much...

There were some interesting posts but they were all subsumed in a quagmire of dross...

[Rich O Brien]

Skype?

Remeber when we last had that big pow wow

I found it interesting enough. Not the nicest thing look at but then I'm acclimatized to this place too much

[thomthom]

Not being able to post for another 8 minutes after making a brief comment is tooooo much...

Seemed to be for the first handful of comments. Maybe new users..?
I could eventually spam as much as I do here...

[d12dozr]

A bit more fodder for discussion, we just launched a new gallery of user projects. Notice anything new?

A bit late to the party, but that viewer looks awfully like a stripped down version of Sketchup running in the browser.

Could it be this is a preview of an official full version of Sketchup in the browser? ...that would be neat!!

[JClements]

Spread3D

A browser viewer via the newest Flash plugin

http://www.Spread3D.com

[Jim]

Spread3D

A browser viewer via the newest Flash plugin

http://www.Spread3D.com

Wow, that's slick!

[Tyler Miller]

That 3D orbiting feature is pretty cool. Not sure if it's new though

It's WebGL! Anyone else done that for SketchUp models?

That I know I was just unsure if this 3D viewer was new/ in-house developed or just using One already out there.

The Viewer was developed by the SketchUp team. It is not off the shelf technology. As ThomThom correctly points out, it is WebGL based. This technology is still pretty green, but holds great promise.

[Dan Rathbun]

I see the Trimble logo is appearing on some of the pages now:

http://sketchup.google.com/download/plugins.html

[kwistenbiebel]

It's so funny how that page gives a bit of a twisted view on plugins, especially on the photorealistic rendering.
Just putting in an alphabetic list isn't the way to go..
I mean: Arielvision? Caravagio Render? lol ... They look like ray tracers of the nineties .
When a Sketchup user is noob to rendering, they will get all lost in that list.