Thanks for your SketchUp Ideas

Friday, October 1st marked the closure of our SketchUp Questions and Ideas Series. We want to thank everyone who participated; whether you provided an idea or a vote, we’re incredibly excited that you contributed. In the last month, 643 people have submitted 513 questions and cast 9,274 votes. Theses statistics are incredible – we’re thrilled to have an entire inventory of innovative ideas to work with when building out our next release.

Additionally, we’ve been very impressed with the eclectic mix of ideas on the Series. They range from large-scale, massive changes, to creative and interesting stylistic enhancements, to suggestions that enhance workflow. We’ve already responded to some of the suggestions in a previous blog post entitled Responding to your popular SketchUp Ideas. There are also responses (and an active, ongoing discussion) for at least the top ten ideas from both the “Ideas” and “Questions” series in the SketchUp Feature Suggestion Forum. Finally, I thought it would be worthwhile to discuss what looks like the top five ideas from the series this year:

Plugin Manager for Ruby Scripts
“Build a system that allows for Ruby scripters and their users to easily manage their collections of Ruby plugins within SketchUp. SketchUp users should be able to find, install and enable/disable new plugins (similar to an “App Store” model). Ruby developers should be able to market, distribute and maintain (upgrade) their plugins to SketchUp’s active user community.”
This was a top-voted idea last year as well, and I think it is clear to the development team that Ruby’s use has outgrown our original “Extensions” system for management. Doing this the right way is a really big project for the team to tackle and it wouldn’t happen overnight, but we’ll look into it further.

Improve Texturing Tools
“SketchUp users should be able to specify Cylindrical, Spherical, Cubic and Wrapped Projection in addition to existing Projected (“Planar”) and Auto-Wrapped methods. Additionally, SketchUp users should be able to adjust texture coordinates for any of these either directly on the model, or in a separate window on an unwrapped texture atlas.”
This was also a top-voted idea last year, and it isn’t a surprise that it rose up again this year. The problem is, adding these features would also add significant complexity to the SketchUp UI– which wouldn’t be a good thing for most of our users. It is worth taking a closer look at the problem, though.

Improve Toolbars
“SketchUp users should be able to lock the positions of toolbars against inadvertent edits. SketchUp users should be able to rapidly enable/disable toolbars without opening a menu multiple times.”
Several folks on the engineering team regard this request as closely related to #1 above, but others think you’re all asking for more control over the general “workspace” in SketchUp. Regardless, it is clear that some improvement to SketchUp’s toolbars (especially on Windows) would be of benefit to most of you.

SketchUp for Linux
“Desktop Linux users should be able to run a native port of SketchUp on their distro of choice.”
We hear this request all the time, but realistically we’re not likely to ever make a version of SketchUp that runs as a native client application on Linux. However, SketchUp can be run effectively on Linux using Wine, and we’re keen to improve that where it is practical to do so.

Improve Performance
“SketchUp users should be able to work with increasingly large and complex models with no perceptible decrease in performance.”
This year, suggestions that we improve performance by setting the “LargeAddressAware” linker flag rose highest in the voting. We work to improve SketchUp’s performance with every single release, though it isn’t apparent that this particular technology will be one which has much impact on SketchUp’s performance. We’re taking a closer look, though.

The series may be closed, but we hope this series is just the beginning of a continuous discussion on these ideas. We’ve taken the top ideas from this series and created forum threads on these topics in the “Feature Suggestions” section of the SketchUp Help Forum. Please don’t stop the dialogue! Now that the ideas are out there, we need to hear more specifics and consensus. Tell us what you agree with, or what you think is a waste of our time to work on. Be clear, be loud, and be heard!

Posted by John Bacus, SketchUp Product Manager