Can I have a Gripes & Bitchin' for Su 2014 thread?
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@valerostudio said:
Was there really no way of making the old ruby scripts work regardless of the Ruby 2.0 changes? Cmon man! WTF 2014!!!!!
There really wasn't. Ruby 1.8 have reached end of life long ago and 1.9 is heading that way. Ruby 2.1 has already been released and Ruby 2.2 is due next Christmas.
Ruby 1.8 to Ruby 1.9 was the biggest change as the Ruby interpreter changed their core to a new one. There was no way for us to avoid plugins breaking as the development of Ruby isn't done by us.
The reason we updated was many. One of the biggest reasons was that Ruby 1.8 had no Unicode support so a large potion of our international user base experienced problems regularly unless they took extra care to use only English characters.
Another issue was that due to the lack of Unicode support we could not move the Plugins folder out of Program Files. This caused a number of security permission issues with plugins that haunted many users.
For SketchUp 2014 we included more developers than ever before in the testing. We even had an alpha testing phase so developers could get in early to update their plugins. Unfortunately there is always someone who we missed to invite and even of the ones we invited not everyone had gotten around to update.
I think extensions warehouse is at ~65% 2014 compatibility - though I suspect there real number is higher, it's just that some developers haven't updated their information yet.
It's unfortunate that extensions broke, but it really was a damned if we do, damned if we don't situation and going with the Ruby 2.0 upgrade was really the only way to move forward.
The lack of updates to the SketchUp Ruby API under the Google area gave a good stability for end users, but not good for developers in terms of lacking features. Eventually we had to do this, but it's not something we anticipate would happen often. It looks like the Ruby 2.x branch is being kept backwards compatible - which should allow us to keep up to date with Ruby while at the same time not breaking extensions.
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I was hoping for a tabbed plugin menu system where you could customise and organise plugins under different tabs depending on usage.
That way you would also have more screen for modeling. -
Could it be the 'large tool set' is less than 2 columns wide?
I try to put some icons in 2 columns under the large tool set and whatever I do I always end up with 3 columns. If I remove the large toolset it's fine but as soon as I put it back... 3 columns.
edit: also tried making a custom 2 column toolbar but as soon as I dock it, it reverts to a long one-column toolbar again.
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@pixero said:
I was hoping for a tabbed plugin menu system where you could customise and organise plugins under different tabs depending on usage.
That way you would also have more screen for modeling.That's a great idea, Jan...
Have you written it up as a wish/feature request...? -
I have to laugh, I found this in my inbox this morning:
http://www.formz.com/email/formz8betaannouncment_4_15_2014/formz8betaannouncement1.html
They "get" it.
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It's got to be said, that's the kind of progressive attitude I would like to see from the SU devs.
Sure you can do a lot of those things with plugins and I particularly love subD modelling in SU, but it would be great if we could see some sign that SUs native tools will grow to meet the needs, advancement and expectations it's users.
Put it another way, if all the plugins were to disappear overnight and you could only use native SU tools, how many of us would continue to use Sketchup? My guess would be 'very few' and both Trimble and John Bacus should find that very worrying.
The flip side of that is, how happy would you be to use software that has a pretty good range of native tools but offers very little room for expansion via plugins? It's swings and roundabouts really, but I think that the Sketchup way of doing things is probably the better option, but I don't think that means we should accept what comes across as a stagnation in the development of Sketchup.
Maybe some of the people who've been to this year's Basecamp will have a better perspective on what we can expect from Sketchup in the future.
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It's not 'proper' subD and no quads, but I'd struggle without it. How else can you do something like fillet the corner on a right-angle tube joint (which should be very simple)?
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sorry... i couldn't resist
I knew it would be Artisan - but as you said, real subd is something different... and it's really sad that sketchup still doesn't support it.
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Yes I agree, but although I consider it essential I suspect that the devs do not. With the average user in mind I don't think subD is something they will ever need or even be on their radar.
Even if you only look at professionals working mostly on architectural projects, subD or Artisan won't come in useful - unless you need to subdivide faces for displacement (now that function should deffinately be an essential part of the sandbox toolset).
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