Why not use plugins?

Alan Fraser

I started using plugins right from the start. At first I used to check the Ruby forum on a daily basis to make sure I didn't miss anything, but it's simply getting too hard to keep up now. I actually don't use that many on a regular basis...maybe a dozen or so. I think that's mostly because I've got too many loaded and can't see the wood for the trees. I'm still using the old Menus.rb that came with a ton of the original scripts....most of which I never use. I think I'll really have to make time over Christmas to sit down and have a good clear out; maybe use organizer instead, so I can keep track of what I've actually got loaded.
The ones I find most useful are those directly connected with mesh editing. I use most of Chris's, Fredo's, a few of Todd and Rick's and one or two by TIG. The ones I do use are absolute life-savers.

It doesn't surprise me at all that most SU users don't use Rubies. We've found this in idependent research at FormFonts. Although the usage of SU by architects is second only to ACAD, well over 90% of them appear to be using the plain vanilla version...quite often a couple of releases back, due to inertia on either their part or that of the IT department....with no enhancements whatsoever...not even components...just the sampler that comes with the program or those obtained by the linkage to the 3D Warehouse. They've never even heard of Sketchucation...much less Smustard or Didier's site.

david.

@thomthom said:

@david. said:

Personally, I don't use 3rd party plugins. If I need something not built-in, then I'll write the plugin myself. IMO, installing 3rd party plugins is a security issue that is ignored by most (as far as I know). I'm not willing to take the chance on that possibility, even though it may be small.

How do you decide on what applications you install on your computer?

I purchase them from reputable companies. Corporate disclaimers aside, I feel reputable companies have a vested interest in making sure the software they sell is safe. And, there is the issue of bugs. No software is perfect, so some bugs will result in security risks. Knowing that, I will take a certain level of risk. I don't download unknown, untrusted applications from someone I don't know and who may live half way around the world. Even then, I always scan everything I install/download. Since Ruby scripts can be scrambled, I can't review them easily prior to running them.

@remus said:

David, i find your position a little strange. You would willingly invest lots of time redoing whats already been done when checkable ruby exists (in 95% of rubies at least.) Compare that to running binary files on your machine: you have practically zero control over what they actually do and no way of finding out (except in the rare case of an open source program, although this would still likely involve intense scrutiny of a lot of code which could take a long time.) Seems like a contradiction to me.

See above. I find it a bit strange that someone would install a script without having a high degree of confidence that it isn't malicious. I'm not saying that most scripts are malicious or the developers are malicious. I'm saying that it is not worth my effort to do that research. I also happen to enjoy writing my own scripts. That is worth my effort. No contradiction at all.

tfdesign

@alan fraser said:

Although the usage of SU by architects is second only to ACAD, well over 90% of them appear to be using the plain vanilla version...quite often a couple of releases back, due to inertia on either their part or that of the IT department....with no enhancements whatsoever...not even components...just the sampler that comes with the program or those obtained by the linkage to the 3D Warehouse. They've never even heard of Sketchucation...much less Smustard or Didier's site.

This is a very true, very well perceived observation. In fact the architect who I work for still does all his drawings by hand! I have to transfer these drawings into QCad (I don't have the budget for ACAD- not even LT, and he doesn't have the time to learn CAD), then into SketchUp (I will be buying Pro very soon). The only reason I have played with rubies is because I'm a freelancer. The rest of the department (which is part of a college) is connected via the IT department, who still use XP. My colleague who sits opposite me, uses Creative Suite 3 still, because IT can't afford to upgrade due to a very tight (and largely non-existent) budget.

Personally I think Google should licence all the best stuff (like Autodesk used to) and integrate it into SketchUp, rather than people having to seek these plugins out.

tfdesign

@david. said:

I feel reputable companies have a vested interest in making sure the software they sell is safe. And, there is the issue of bugs. No software is perfect, so some bugs will result in security risks.

Safe? Security risks?? I know that the American military were once hacked into because they were running Windows, but don't you think this level of thinking is just a touch on the side of the paranoid?

putnik

tfdesign, "just because you are not paranoid doesn't mean they are not after you"

If I don't use SketchUp for a little while I start forgetting shortcuts, workflows etc. But because of its simplicity it extremely easy to get back into it again. Using many plugins takes this away. I have many rubies installed but use regularly only a dozen maybe.

broomstick

@solo said:

Stay away from the 'free-porn.rb'

Lol

Personally, I don't know what I'd do withiut plugins. I am used to automations, coming from ArchiCAD, and all of the plugins I use ease the workflow while making design. I love, in this matter, the delete coplanar edges plugin, I just looooooove it.

As you may know, I am italian, and as far as I know one of the few who has an updated blog in Sketchup in Italian. Here in Italy SU is used only to Sketch (when it is used at all), only because plugins are all in english and people will not bother to investigate more.

What I try to do in my blog, is to tell people that there is a very easy way to do things. But it seems people won't listen to me

jwlyon1

I've been a ruby convert since I took the "advanced" sketchup class many years ago...

But it wasn't until I really started cruising this forum that the mind boggling power of su+plugins became apparent.

I think though, there are people out there who work just fine without them. More power to them! But I love new add ons for my favorite software!

NewOne

Please excuse my (foolish?) question, but: why not use plugins???
Because are not officially recognized by google? Or because they add more facilities than standard SketchUp? I have an other question then:
Why people use AutoCAD 2010 ?? AutoCAD 2000 isn't good enough? Ok, let's put it this way: After (IF) Google will decide to add some of what plugins offers to us now, in their standard Sketchup package, what will do those who choose to not use plugins? Will stop using SketchUp ? Because is not "pure" ?

I'm really confused now... I feel sorry for those who use SketchUp, but are not aware about SketchUcation, or don't know about those great plugins. But I don't know what to say about the others who prefer the hard way for some (unclear religious ) reason.

PeterCharles

So much software has the ability to gain extra productivity through macro languages. The MS range (Word, Excel etc) have VBA, AutoCAD had Lisp and now has VBA, Inventor (and SolidWorks) have VBA. Any programme worth it's salt has the ability to do this. SU has Ruby, it would have suited me better if it had VBA, but I understand why Ruby was chosen.

Why aren't Rubies used more, in the same way macro's in other pieces of software aren't used more, only a small percentage of users write them. You name the software, most users use it straight out of the box. Such is life.

Cyberdactyl

Hi,

Thought I'd throw my 2 cents in.

I use plug-ins sparingly. At least for me, plug-ins can be a sweet and sour experience in that a specific plug-in may be too much trouble to learn well for the little gain in time. But many are well worth the effort. Much of the time I'll be so involved in something that I tend to forget about a plug-in that applies, unless the problem is too big I 'must' reach for the plug-in solution.

Like 'apps' on an iPhone, it's now getting harder and harder wading through nonsense to find really useful stuff.

As to 'gurus', I've found one should be VERY careful using that label or anything similar, in ANY endeavor, most especially for themselves. It can be quite embarrassing boasting about a skill-set level then come across someone that is a magnitude better.

Ecuadorian

I must reiterate my wish for a one-stop place to get SU scripts. Something like cnet's download.com or like Firefox's add-ons index, in which anyone can download anything without signing up, and there's also comments and ratings for each download. The wonderful thing about Firefox's plug-ins is that finding and installing them is a straightforward process, not even requiring you to know where Firefox is installed in your computer. Perhaps that's why Firefox is so well-known for its extendability, while most SketchUp users have no idea about rubies.

Also, forums, as the great time wasters they are, are sometimes banned in the workplace. That includes SketchUcation; it is banned in a big company here in my city (I tried to access while visiting them). A non-forum place to get plug-ins would greatly simplify things for SketchUp users.

Jim57

It took me a while to nerve up. Just to figure out what rubies were took some digging. I rember the embarassment of asking a couple newbie questions about something that seemed so obvious to others.

It's hard to imagine not being on a forum about any difficult program. SU isn't hard to start, but it has a very long learning curve, especially if you aren't an architect. I've never been into simplistic design and the tricks are what's taken me so long.

With the dyslexia and it's very hard to get information from manuals, and some short term memory issues make it hard to remember how to ask the questions, even.

I havew three suggestions about rubies:

put a big easy to see link about expanding SU on the About page. When you are selling people on the free download, tell them here is how you can learn about the program, here is how you can learn about expanding it, largely for free. Then show a tutorial about installing and using a couple popular rubies.
centralized index. Great if it has user reviews, fantastic if it has links to download. Ask developers to register their rubies.
make a way to manage them. I defy anyone but the geekiest of geeks to remember all the parts of a ruby you installed two years ago should you need to uninstall it. You have to install to test them, but what do you do with the ones you don't need? If you don't take them out right away, they sit in the Plugins folder, a potential conflict for the next earth shaking script that uses a common name.

How are we supposed to debug, throw everything out and download afresh? If so, we have to keep a separate database of where we got it and hope the site is still active. How about automating that, making a script log a part of SU?

For all the power of rubies— I'd say more than half of what we consider SU is these scripts— the developers sure don't seem to take much responsibility for integrating them.

I hear the howls— Yeah, guys, I'm glad 7.1 didn't break anything that I downloaded for 5 or 6. I'm sure you busted your butts and thanks for that. But if scripts are so important, and if most of the flexibility of the program comes from them, give us some management tools— on the website and in the program.

Panga

I started using Sketchup just after version 5 was released by @Last. I visited the @Last forums regularly in order to find advices and tips to learn sketchup for my work. Then, when those forum were closed, I jumped on sketchucation where most of @last forum members seems to go. From the @Last forum until here, I always used plugins, even before masterize the skecthup tools. All of them helped me a lot during all my works.
Those plugins became just essential for me.

Doing without plugins...a stupid way for me. It's really not a big effort to understand the way to install and use them, so I think that people don't use these just by ignorance.

tfdesign

@panga said:

Doing without plugins...a stupid way for me. It's really not a big effort to understand the way to install and use them, so I think that people don't use these just by ignorance.

Do you not think this is a rather arrogant attitude to adopt? I have just modelled an entire 600 year old gothic church, in SU7, without a single plugin. Today I threw out SU Animate because it kept crashing SU. I agree with Toxicvoxel. CAD managers hate things like this, and it is easy to see why. A good, well designed CAD systems shouldn't have to have externally developed tool plugins. The functionality should already be there, within the toolset.

toxicvoxel

[I haven't read the whole thread so my apologies if this has been noted before.]

Some fundamental reasons why plugins are not used:

1.CAD managers hate them.
IT/CAD managers know that their responsibilities increase exponentially with the number of
applications they support. Deploying a suite of scripts developed by enthusiastic albeit amateur
developers can be a huge responsibility as they can easily be broken by OS /host application
updates and script incompatibilities. Some company IT managers feel so strongly about this that they will not even try to solve the problem but will simply reformat and reinstall a partition image
containing a standard application installation set on the user machine. The larger the company the more difficult it is to find a balance between maintaining robust system stability and deploying new technology.

2. Scripts create lock-in.
However useful they may be, they are often bound to a specific application or application version
with no updates available because the developers are no longer actively developing the system.
(Especially true when it comes to free and shared scripts.) This leaves you with the option of
staying with an older version of the host application or to upgrade and discard the script. (- Hell, this even happens when I upgrade Windows!)

Another aspect of this syndrome is that one becomes so dependant on the customisations that you
cannot move on to new and a better design technology when it becomes available.

The answer to this possibly is to build customisations in an application-neutral way so that
user investment in learning & deployment do not become redundant when the next generation of design software takes off. From a developer's perspective developing with such a strategy brings the benefit of portability but possibly at the expense of tight integration with host applications.

3.Management have burnt their fingers.
I know of a few examples where a company had the benefit of having a proactive CAD manager who had over a period of years developed the CAD production system through customisation. When that member of staff left the practice there was nobody that could pick up the system and support it. After struggling for a few months the management pulled the plug and issued instruction that all software had to be replaced with standard installations with a complete ban on customisations. When the the support issues start to negate the productivity benefits, the use of plugins no longer remain a viable option.

Panga

I don't think it's arrogant, and maybe I expressed myself the wrong way. I'm only speaking from my experience. All thoses plugins helped a lot in the past, and are still helping me today.

I totally agree with the fact that all the tools that those plugins offers could be implemented in SketchUp, but I'm not sure this is the good way for two reasons :

Not everyone needs all the functions that those plugins offers, and SkecthUp is aim to be a simple and intuitive software. And for this, the native interface and tools panel of SU are good.
Then, all thoses plugins can slow down the system and make it unstable sometimes, as you mentioned.

I'm happy for you that you success to make big and detailled model without any plugin. But just tell me, what should I have to spend three hours on a work, that a plugin is able to do in 5 minutes, and as a landscape architect, I can tell this is often the case...

Then, you tell that a well designed cad system shouldn't to have externally developped tool plugins : I think this is arrogant. Because telling this, is telling that people who makes software are "gods" and all those great guys working and adding essential functions through plugins are just foolish guys, don't you think ?

The time where all software makers worked alone in a closed world is over, today the community is here to help people and software makers.

Without any arrogance and animosity, see u soon.

PeterCharles

@unknownuser said:

3.Management have burnt their fingers.
I know of a few examples where a company had the benefit of having a proactive CAD manager who had over a period of years developed the CAD production system through customisation. When that member of staff left the practice there was nobody that could pick up the system and support it. After struggling for a few months the management pulled the plug and issued instruction that all software had to be replaced with standard installations with a complete ban on customisations. When the the support issues start to negate the productivity benefits, the use of plugins no longer remain a viable option.

The only managers who get their fingers burnt are the incompetent ones. The ones who invest in new application, have it installed in 'out of the box' form then wonder why they they don't get the productivity return they anticipated!

Our first CAD system was chosen by an engineer who then had the sense to allocate one of the users to be the 'development' draughtsman who went on to create a whole raft of macro's that doubled productivity. This system was later dropped in favour of AutoCAD (as you can pick up an ACAD draughtsman outside Woolworths) and out went the customisation of the old system, and down went productivity (although the new management failed to notice this).

When Inventor was introduced one key reason was it's ability to produce flat pattern dxf files. But the laser didn't like the files produced 'at the click of the button' and management kept saying that Inventor didn't produce dxf files. I had many heated discussions saying it was our problem because we wanted dxf files with bells and whistles, and these could be produced with the correct workflow and customisation. It's all in the box, you just need to use it. It's a bit like sitting down to a steak and using a spoon because that's all that's at your place setting even though a box of knives and forks is at the end of the table.

Marian

I worked these few days with Paint dot Net, the SU of the 2d world, free and Simple. I hadn't realised that it had plug-ins at all, i just didn't question it, that's what i got and that's what i used.
I think this is the reason why most people, not businesses, don't use plug-ins is they just don't know or think that they exist, out of sight out of mind, most probably don't bother to take a look in the installation folder to notice there is a plugins folder.

I think if Google advertised the existence of plugins, added a small tutorial to the ones that explain the basics when you first install SU, the users which would use them would at least double.

liam887

I modelled for 3 yrs without using any plugins. Not serious work just playing about while in college. When I started getting better and posting some of my work at scifi meshes some of the other users who use SU pointed me here.
I was amazed by the range of plugins, by this time I was aquatinted with 3dsmax so knew about subdivision etc but to actually have it in SU was amazing. Haven't looked back since.
But everyone is right about google, they should include some of these plugins and more people would get involved. SU is thought of as a sub-standard package you wouldn't believe the bad press I get when I tell people I use it lol eg:

%(#FF0000)[Buggy Virus | Fabled Legendary Member
jaw drops

god...]

%(#00BF00)[liam887live | Member
To many peoples suprise I only use google Sketchup. Its a free software that anybody can use and you dont need a supercomputer to run it you should give it a spin. Ive got the pro version but the only difference is I can export to other file formats, all the actual toolsets and interfaces are exactly the same and there is nothing you cant model in the pro version you cant model in the free version.]

Buggy Virus | Fabled Legendary Member
%(#FF0000)[Oh wait, these are sketch up models, I thought they were .3ds files.

They are still good, I'm just not in as much awe as I was before.]

It goes on with many more examples.

I think google need to make more people aware of the plugins, after conversations ive had with people they see put off initially by SU imagining it to be the most inferior package you can get. I wonder what the story would be if @last still had it not an internet superpower.

Marian

@unknownuser said:

Buggy Virus | Fabled Legendary Member
jaw drops

god...

liam887live | Member
To many peoples suprise I only use google Sketchup. Its a free software that anybody can use and you dont need a supercomputer to run it you should give it a spin. Ive got the pro version but the only difference is I can export to other file formats, all the actual toolsets and interfaces are exactly the same and there is nothing you cant model in the pro version you cant model in the free version.

Buggy Virus | Fabled Legendary Member
Oh wait, these are sketch up models, I thought they were .3ds files.

They are still good, I'm just not in as much awe as I was before.

This is weird, i usually get even more amazement after I say I made that with Sketchup not less.
If they think SU is so primitive why would they be less impressed with a good model and not more, it would mean it was harder to model, right?
Humans, who can understand them.
I usually get something like this "I love your work, you should move on to 3ds max or in the very least Blender".

I agree that i should probably learn another application, but something complementing SU modeling, not switching to that completely. Why fix something that ain't broke?

@unknownuser said:

I wonder what the story would be if @last still had it not an internet superpower.

Probably a better product...for architects, but not free, and not used by so many as it is now. Besides who knows if it would have survived this crysis period. Su now is pretty well known and that drives sales, if you look at google trends for the word Sketchup you notice a significant increase from 2006 onwards.

Also here is the word Sketchup compared with the term 3ds max in google trends....."Fascinating!"