Help with toolbars

honoluludesktop · 24 Dec 2010, 03:45

When I see 6 rows of on screen tools on some peoples sketchup windows, it occurs to me that there should be another way to organize menus, I took a quick look at the api with this in mind, but couldn't find a method to trigger a set of icons perpendicular to the edge of the SU window. What does it take to create new methods to the existing classes to do this? This is beyond my current level of skills, any volunteers?

Dan Rathbun · 24 Dec 2010, 06:11

The placement of Toolbar(s) is a per-User setting. And that is really the way it should be. So there is likely never to be an API method (or methods,) to move the User's toolbars around.

Sketchup is "supposed" to remember where the user has previously moved the toolbars, and attempts to restore them to those same locations when the user displays the toolbar again. (There are still bugs in this system, but things have gotten a bit better with SU8.)

The main problem you'd have moving toolbars with code (besides making users angry,) is that they are handled differently on the two platforms. Your extended Ruby methods would need to be cross-platform (half Windows, half OSX) so you'd need to be adept at programming both platform GUIs.

On Windows, you would need to use MS Windows API calls, either in a C extension, or through the Win32API extension from Ruby. (A toolbar is just a window with it's border and captionbar turned off, that is populated with buttons.)

On OSX (guessing here,) you'd make calls through either the Cocoa or Carbon libraries.

honoluludesktop · 24 Dec 2010, 11:25

OK Dan, Thanks for the explanation.

Dan Rathbun · 24 Dec 2010, 22:05

@honoluludesktop said:

OK Dan, Thanks for the explanation.

No problem ... however the UI module and it's classes (Menu, Toolbar, Messagebox, etc.,) do need an overhaul (extra functionality as well as bug fixes.)

You will likely see some of the pesky bugs (in query methods,) for Toolbar class fixed in the next maintainence release.

risoto1978 · 22 Mar 2011, 21:07

@dan rathbun said:

Sketchup is "supposed" to remember where the user has previously moved the toolbars, and attempts to restore them to those same locations when the user displays the toolbar again. (There are still bugs in this system, but things have gotten a bit better with SU8.)

Hi Dan,

I work with SU 8 on a mac since short time and got an issue with the toolbar position. It actually does weather remember the last position of the toolbar nor which toolbars are supposed to be open. I then learned that it showed the toolbars from my last session when opening the last file I worked with. So I thought that the toolbar settings are saved in the documents which is not very useful but I could live with that. So I tried to save my toolbar positions in a template hoping that SU would then load all the toolbars I had the last time. but unfortunately this was not the case. Actually it saves or does not save toolbar positions radomly. Some stay and others do not. Unfortunately the one I need do not stay. Is there any way to save the toolbar position and the setting of which toolbars and windows are open so that I do not have to redo this everytime I open SU?

Dan Rathbun · 22 Mar 2011, 23:38

Hello Christain... you describe a Mac quirk.

I believe that there is work-around for that, but I am not a Mac user.

Can any Mac guys explain to him how to get new toolbars to save position ?