Your Product Ideas in SketchUp 8

In October of last year, we opened a month-long series called “Product Ideas for Google SketchUp” in which we invited folks like you to post and vote for important features that you wanted us to tackle in the next version of SketchUp. In that series, 838 people cast 12,249 votes on 507 new ideas. I thought it might be worth looking back at the top vote-getters from that series to see how many we were able to build into SketchUp 8. By my count, we implemented about half of your top ten ideas:

1. Make SketchUp perform faster using _______ (some technology): This is something we’re always working on, and we’re committed to making improvements with every single release!
 
2. Improve Toolbars: We added a way to save and restore toolbar locations on Windows.
 
3. Angular Dimensions: We added Angular Dimensions to LayOut in SketchUp Pro.
 
4. Color Snapshot from Google Earth: Not only did we add a way to capture color aerial photos, but we also dramatically upgraded the terrain models you can capture.
 
5. Boolean Modeling Operations: We added a new “Solid” status for groups and components, as well as a full set of traditional boolean tools for SketchUp Pro users (Union, Intersect, Subtract, Trim, Split) that we call the “Solid Tools.”

We’re never able to build everything that you think we should build for SketchUp, but we do try to get a few popular ideas from the user community in every new release. All things considered, I think we did pretty well by your list from last year... and we’re going to try to do it again.

We’re nearing the end of this year’s Google SketchUp Questions and Idea” series, and I wanted to remind you all to head on over there to post and vote on your favorite ideas before it's over for the year. We’re closing the series on 10/01/10, so don’t procrastinate... Make your voice heard!

Posted by John Bacus, SketchUp Product Manager