Newbie question on Mac toolbars

fredo6

I have got hold of a MacBook Air (borrowed, not mine).

I installed Sketchup and tried to configure my workspace. Here is my experience:

I did not find a toolbar with "New", "Open", "Save" icons. Where are they?
if you insert some icons in the main toolbar (like undo / redo), there appear quite small, even if I use the option "Large Buttons"
The toolbars for scripts are floating on the desktop, but there is no way to attach them to the main toolbar. So they take real-estate from the Sketchup main window.

Well, unless you have a big screen and can put the toolbar outside the Sketchup window, you really have a restrained viewport.

Did all Mac users suffer the same, or did I miss anything?

Fredo

Dave R

Fredo, you are seeing the normal SketchUp on Mac tool palettes and the top toolbar. I wish they could be docked outside the drawing space as they are on PCs but they aren't. I've put a few tools up on the toolbar but only the ones I use frequently. For all others, I only turn on toolbars when I need the tools. It's not as pleasant to use extensions as on the PC. Of course my MacBook Pro has a 15 in. screen and I use a 27" screen on my PC. More room for toolbars on the PC screen.

slbaumgartner

Some aspects of how the SU toolbars (aka "palettes") work on Mac are because SU on Mac is multi-document-interface (MDI) whereas the Windows version is SDI. Since multiple model windows can be open simultaneously in the same Mac SketchUp session, only the top-stripe toolbar is associated with a particular model window. The others all float free (they belong to the app rather than to any window). Equally important, they are not forced to the "top" of the viewing stack; they can overlay or be overlain by other things including the model window, inspector windows, and other toolbars.

So, yes, it is more challenging to set up your screen on Mac to avoid issues with the toolbars. The MDI aspect is a Mac thing, as are other basic Mac vs Windows notions of how a GUI should work (e.g. the single app menu at the top of the screen). But a lot of the SU problems are programming choices made long ago that Trimble seems reluctant to change (in contrast to the Windows version, whose toolbar system has changed several times). Most of us Mac SU users have given up griping about the difficulties and differences since nothing ever changes; we get used to coping with it as is.

As to your specifics:

So far as I know, "New", "Open" and "Save" are not included on any standard Mac toolbar. I have no idea why not, but they simply aren't there and aren't available to add to the top-stripe. Other than the top-stripe toolbar, SU on Mac does not even support creating or customizing your own toolbars (one could do it via Ruby code, but that's a different question). I frequently envy the gurus using Windows SU who can show a small custom toolbar with just the relevant tools when creating an animation to illustrate a procedure.
At least on my Mac, the "Use large toolbar buttons" setting affects only the free-floating toolbars, not the top-stripe, and it makes them unacceptably large. However, this may vary with the specific model of Mac and screen resolution.
The available "snap" behaviors of the toolbars on Mac are very limited. They will snap individually to the right or left edges of the screen, but not to the top and bottom edges. They also won't snap to each other in any direction and don't recognize the edges of the model window in any way. Combined with the inability to keep them reliably "on top", this means you have to carefully manage where the toolbars, model windows and inspector windows are placed else things will obscure each other. As Dave says, you may spend more effort toggling them on and off to maximize visibility of the model window.

Some of these gripes are reduced if you have a giant high-dpi screen (hence lots of real estate) or dual monitors. But many of them are just facts of life.

fredo6

Thanks a lot for these detailed explanations. It is clear that, unless you have a big screen, the usage of toolbars is going to be a challenge when you have many.

I see the issue with the MDI approach (so toolbar must be independent of model window), but I don't understand why the Sketchup team did not address some of the basic issues, such as the icons for New, Open, Save, as well as the size of icons in the main toolbar, the text size in most inspectors. After all, there seems to be many Mac users around, including Pro users.

Fredo

slbaumgartner

@fredo6 said:

I see the issue with the MDI approach (so toolbar must be independent of model window), but I don't understand why the Sketchup team did not address some of the basic issues, such as the icons for New, Open, Save, as well as the size of icons in the main toolbar, the text size in most inspectors. After all, there seems to be many Mac users around, including Pro users.

Fredo

We Mac users often wonder about the same things (and more). It seems that the Mac GUI has gotten very little attention compared to Windows and things like my.sketchup, starting all the way back when Google bought SketchUp and continuing through Trimble's ownership.