Sketchup Pro 2014 hangs every time I quit (Mac)
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my personal opinion is that, unless a plugin offers an 'all user' license they should install into the user directory...
Ask Podium why its not there already...
in the meanwhile, does SU run better without it?
hard to know without it installed or more info...
john
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podium again, huh?
when podium first came out on mac (maybe 2009 or so), its installer was doing the same thing only opposite.. it was creating a ~user plugin folder instead of going to the (then) proper location of Mac HD library..
that caused certain other plugins to not load.. they finally switched the installer to go to the right location then trimble switches the app support to the user library
out of curiosity, i'm going to install it in 2014.. i'll report back.
[EDIT] well, it's podium that's causing your problem.. i can say that with near certainty.
I just installed it and am getting the same behavior.. when i try to quit SU, it hangs then i have to force quit out of it..
gonna try manually messing with the install.. i'll report back.
[EDIT2] ..removed the SketchUp 2014 folder that podium's installer created in Macintosh HD/ Library/ Application Support.. the problem went away and sketchUp was able to quit normally.
i then placed the file SU_Podium_V2.rbs and the folder SU_Podium_V2 in the normal 2014 plugin location.. launched sketchUp and podium appears to run fine from this folder.. i then tried to quit sketchUp and the same problem occurs- a hang which requires a force quit..
i don't think there's much else a user can do to try to fix it.. you're going to have to contact Podium and see if they'll fix it.. (though, how this manages to make it to a released version is beyond me but...
)good luck
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We know about this, and we're looking at it. We have a more serious issue with multibyte systems that was introduced by how SU2014 deals with this stuff, that will be fixed first.
Although it doesn't really cause any problems (right clicking 'force quit' and waiting a few seconds isn't a massive inconvenience) we are going to fix it.
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@bigstick said:
...Although it doesn't really cause any problems (right clicking 'force quit' and waiting a few seconds isn't a massive inconvenience) we are going to fix it.
I take umbrage this statement for a number of reasons,
it causes lost of work if you have other models with unsaved changes open...
I have never seen or heard of a 'right click' item for 'force quit'...
You can't raise any context menu's at all in a hung app...
Many mac users will have 'never' needed to force quit an app before...
Most, will not realise you can, 'ALT click' the 'doc icon' and see a 'force quit' option...
Nor will they have 'Activity Monitor' open ready to pounce on wayward process's...
Many users lose many 'hours' of work waiting for the operation to complete, unaware of an 'issue', they then resort to a 'hard shut down' which isn't good for anything...
I think your remarks read as flippant and unprofessional coming from a representative of a 'commercial' plugin.
john
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You're right about 'Force quit' not being on the right-click menu in the dock, it's just 'Quit' but it works for me every time.
This issue isn't a problem in my office either. I do wonder whether you might be slightly overstating the case that users can lose several hours work through this bug. I don't actually see how it's possible. You can close files just fine. I'm not sure if you have seen the issue first hand, but if you are a Podium user and have lost work through this, please let me know.
I use Podium virtually every day, and haven't had an issue. From what I have seen, it's a 3 second fix each time with no issue, and actually only Edson has really identified this as an irritation. He's absolutely right of course, and it was really helpful that he pointed it out, which is why we will fix it, but we haven't had many complaints at all.
At risk of irritating you further, I actually think it is incumbent on everyone who is using a computer for work to learn how to use their tools competently. It's not like 20 years ago when we didn't have Google. There is a certain viewpoint that you shouldn't need to understand much about computers to do a professional design job.
I have some sympathy with this view - but only some. In the 'old days' before computers, you had to learn how to use technical pens, clean them, and how to scratch off lines from drafting film. You also need to learn how to hold your pencil and sketch so you don't smudge.
No-one in their right mind would expect most people to know how to map a printer by IP address, or diagnose network problems, but knowing what to do when an application hangs I would argue is kind of fundamental, and right-clicking on icons is intuitive. There are options to close applications this way on Windows and OS X, so it's not exactly obscure.
Personally I think people are a bit naive if they think they don't need to know this stuff, and are likely to have bigger problems than an app which hangs on exit.
Just for perspective, for my 'day job' I manage an architects section, and act as the IT Manager for a multi-disciplinary division in local government. We have a range of abilities in the office, from very IT literate, to "I don't want to know about this stuff, I just want to turn my computer on, draw and print." The latter viewpoint I find in just a single person out of maybe 50, and this seems be in tune with what I have found everywhere I have worked.
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@driven said:
I think your remarks read as flippant and unprofessional coming from a representative of a 'commercial' plugin.
john
Hmm, interesting. In the overall scheme of things, the issue as I've seen it is trivial, which is probably why you felt it sounded flippant.
We do fix everything we are able to. Podium is updated frequently. We have issues related to OS limitations, SU bugs, and peculiarities of the render engine. The unfortunate thing is that not everything is fixable.
The reason this issue hasn't been resolved, is that the changes to the way SU2014 deals with multibyte systems has created major issues with customers in some countries, and this is a much bigger problem, which has delayed the fix.
What's with the inverted commas around the word 'commercial'? Do you have any reason to suggest that Podium is in some way not good enough to be classed as a commercial application?
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@jeff hammond said:
i don't think there's much else a user can do to try to fix it.. you're going to have to contact Podium and see if they'll fix it.. (though, how this manages to make it to a released version is beyond me but...
)good luck
Thanks for the testing Jeff, but this doesn't fix the issue. It manifests itself when you modify geometry. For example if you start with a new file and create a rectangle, SU will close. Extrude geometry or apply a texture and it won't.
The install path is related to issues we have had with the Mac installer. We would obviously prefer to use the current user option, but there are problems with this that have taken us a long time to work through. These did create problems for Mac users, and there were no immediately obvious solutions from an end user point of view.
Unfortunately it's not straightforward, and we can't use an rbz.
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@bigstick said:
What's with the inverted commas around the word 'commercial'? Do you have any reason to suggest that Podium is in some way not good enough to be classed as a commercial application?
no. I have seen similar statements from 'voluntary ' maintainers of 'free' plugins and I tend to agree with them...
Thanks for furthering your explanation...
I haven't used Podium since SU v6 and it was the first time I had 'ever' needed to 'force quit' an app.
It was clashes from/with other 'plugins', so I moved all of them to the 'Podium' location [because you 'had' got the 'User' path right IMHO...]
At the time all renderers for 'mac' that used installers would hang 'SU' during work...
some would never finalise, others would, we where advised to wait for them to complete...
I found it such a pain in butt, I wrote a comand-line 'menu bar' app to kill 'SketchUp'...
These days I use and write my own 'fragile' apps and plugins, and a few of my SU ones use bin scripts and dylibs that all are fully self contained can be instal via rbz.
john
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Hey, Thanks a lot guys !
I had the same issue. -
force quitting doesn't take long per se but they might as well change the name from "force quit" to "force crash" because that's what you're doing.. crashing the app.. a crash report will be made and offer to send it to apple etc..
"how do i quit an app?" -- " oh, you just crash it.."
isn't very good programming mantra imo..and yeah, you can usually get away with crashing an app without consequence but it's eventually going to lead to a corrupt .plist.. "where's my entity info panel?" etc.. i mean, what happens if you crash an app while it's busy updating the .plist? that's why you want to quit a process-- so it can check that all the things that need done prior to closing have been done and it's not in the middle of another process
EDIT- but regardless of how minuscule of an issue you think it is or that it's really no inconvenience at all (as in-- i get what you're saying).. you're going to be very hard pressed to find a user that's ok with it and/or agree to use your software under the stipulation "oh- i just have to force quit this program"..
further, you're not even letting people know about the issue and everyone using podium is blaming sketchup as the bad guy.. honestly, it should be on the download page.. "use podium and you'll now have to force quit sketchup.. don't worry- it only takes an extra 3 seconds".. then see how many people download it
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@jeff hammond said:
further, you're not even letting people know about the issue and everyone using podium is blaming sketchup as the bad guy.. honestly, it should be on the download page.. "use podium and you'll now have to force quit sketchup.. don't worry- it only takes an extra 3 seconds".. then see how many people download it
Obviously you've got a point, but maybe you missed my comment where I said that we would fix it. Were it not for our recent discovery of the multibyte issue on Japanese installations, it would have been fixed by now. When that's resolved (it's a much more serious issue) this is at the top of the priority list.
It's not ideal by any means but really, it's not nearly as big an issue as you think. I think I've seen maybe one post on our forum about it, which is why I'm not fretting about it. However I am looking into how best to make users aware of things like this, and direct them to the most useful source of information straight away.
In the context of some of the other software problems we all have to deal with more often than we would like (Airplay from the Mac to Apple TV being broken for example, and let's not even start to talk about Heartbleed an UAC on Windows 7) our customers aren't getting particularly excitable about this.
But - it is an opportunity to re-evaluate how we look at some of these things in an effort to improve the software. There's always room for improvement
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@bigstick said:
...our recent discovery of the multibyte issue on Japanese installations...
I'll PM you on this one...
good to here your on the case for remedies and improvements...
john
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@bigstick said:
Obviously you've got a point, but maybe you missed my comment where I said that we would fix it.
nah.. i saw it and think it's good that you're going to fix it
@unknownuser said:
I think I've seen maybe one post on our forum about it, which is why I'm not fretting about it.
right.. because they're posting here and elsewhere (trimble forums and beta forums) about it.. sending other devs and/or users trying to help on wild goose chases to find out what's wrong with sketchup..
just from the first page of scf search results for "force quit"
http://sketchucation.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=11%26amp;t=54411
http://sketchucation.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=15%26amp;t=56948
http://sketchucation.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=517660#p517660 -
Hmm - interesting ...
I've been discussing some better ways of doing things with some of the team, and I hope we'll have a better way of dealing with issues like this soon.
Coincidentally I've just been told that we have a new version with a fix for this and am just about to download and test it. I'll keep you updated.
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I really appreciate the back and forth between all involved.
I want to reiterate what Jeff is saying regarding the issue not being posted on the Podium forum. The reason, I believe, is that people in general didn't know it was the fault of one particular plugin until we dug further and went through the plugins one by one. Very time consuming, even for the personalities which are more detailed oriented.
Bigstick, thanks for taking care of this, and I'm looking forward to your report on the issue.
Thanks again everybody!
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I can report that I've had the same issues as econmike1 but using Twilight often had to force quit from Activity Monitor or it SU 2014 would crash and want to report to Apple instead of a Bug Splat. Also can tell you I have a Mac HD/Library SU 2013 and SU 2014 folder with SU plugins
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Rant Warning:
with all these 'renderer' plugins the first question whether it is a single user, single computer license?
If the answer to both is 'yes' , then the developers should be installing it into your licensed 'User' folder, I can see absolutely no reason not to...
As of v2014, for them to place it elsewhere, requires them making all the needed folders, as SU no longer does.
If it is a "network" license, then the new folders could be in the "Shared" folder, and symlinked to each 'User' folder,
If it is a "any computer, one User" license, they each should be in the "User" folder of each computer,
The only conceivable reason to have an installer is to bury bits all over the system...
Regardless of how clever or complex they may be, it's a Plugin not a Primary app, if I un-instal the Primary app, I want all the plugins to vanish as well.
but maybe that's just me...
john
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This is a classic case of principles vs pragmatism. In absolute terms, of course you're right, and on Windows it's not a problem. What I found in the office was that security restrictions prevented any access to the 'Program Files' folders.
This meant that plugins couldn't be installed by anyone other than the IT department, because security permissions prohibit users being given Local Admin rights.
The move in SU 2014 to move this to areas where UAC doesn't get excited is a really big thing for my office.
On the Mac, it's the standard OS X installer that has problems. We tried doing things the other ('correct') way, but found that unfortunately it created significant issues for end users. The solution (for the moment at least) is to end up with our current installation path, which isn't ideal, but it does work.
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I've just tested a new build that fixes the hanging on exit issue. It has taken a while, but we think we finally have it resolved. I'll post an update when we release it.
Sorry about the delay - apparently it's been tricky to pin down...
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Is there any update on this fix for podium? I bought it, and I love it, but the crashing of SU is an issue for me. I also believed it was a problem with SU so I'm watching this post with interest.
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