Sketchup 2014 Retina Macbook?
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Hi,
I'm currently using Sketchup 8 on a Macbook Retina. Most of the time, I use my setup as a desktop with two external displays and the laptop lid closed.
I only noticed the other day however that when using the laptop screen out and about, some items are displayed really small. These include the points (midpoint, endpoint etc), and also when editing a scene name, the text is far too small.
I've searched and found some threads talking about this issue, but what I haven't found is whether or not this is still an issue.
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Has this been fixed on 2013 or 2014?
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Does Sketchup release interim updates to fix bugs and other issues in-between the main releases?
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If the answer to the above question is "yes", do they go back as far as to still support Sketchup 8?
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And finally, if both the above questions are "yes", how do I find the update?
Thanks
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I believe there have been some fixes for Retina displays with SU2014. They are certainly working on it.
They do issue maintenance releases once in awhile but SU8 isn't supported and hasn't been so you shouldn't expect any updates for it. SU2013 is also extremely unlikely to get any additional updates. As with any software company they are putting their time and money into the current version.
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Bugs have been submitted to Trimble about the issues you list with Retina, but as of the current release of 2014 none of them have been fixed. The workaround for the scene name edit is to use the Scenes manager, where the text is large enough to see. There is nothing you can do about the others.
Steve
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I never noticed that about editing scene names-I guess I don't use the retina screen as much as I thought for SU. I use it often enough for drawing and it IS hard/impossible to see selection and various inferences. Looks great but not for serious work. It also cannot display some plugin menu bars correctly. I hope this is a universal issue with some other SW affected and Apple will have to figure it out. We have incredible resolution now--it's a shame that that does not always mean we can see graphics more clearly.
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Thanks for the replies, but it's a shame they still haven't fixed it.
The inference points do seem to be the main issue. Although I can still model using the retina screen, It really slows down my productivity.
I think it's something Sketchup will have to change rather than Apple, as other companies have had to also adapt their Apps.
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Although this topic title is "Retina Macbook", this issue is not a specific Apple one (or Retina one). Quite a lot more devices have now a high-dpi screen (with significantly higher resolutions and still increasing).
As long as a situation is never found in the outside world, it is hard to support it in software (because it is a "dead" code path, never really tested). That means even if applications have been saying they were "dpi aware", possible issues were never noticed all the years before, and they now appear distorted with some elements tiny and some elements overflow their containers. The only solution is that developers themselves use the devices they build for.
When rendering (of the user interface) is done by the operating system, your operating and my operating system may be fixed to do it perfectly right (same for browsers).
But for all rendering that a third party application does on its own, it might need to be fixed/adjusted by the individual application developer, or scaled up by the operating system (and then blurry).
It's a compromise between sharpness (and tiny or distorted UI) and usability (upscaled UI but blurry). -
As I said before, it is being worked on by the SketchUp team.
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We'll see progress only after releases. Not many people (or developers) do experience on their own what this talk is about, so I think it is important for us to identify and name what the issues are.
I experience it especially as a problem for plugins (webdialogs), and plugins are not only made by the SketchUp team.
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@pbacot said:
I never noticed that about editing scene names-I guess I don't use the retina screen as much as I thought for SU. I use it often enough for drawing and it IS hard/impossible to see selection and various inferences. Looks great but not for serious work. It also cannot display some plugin menu bars correctly. I hope this is a universal issue with some other SW affected and Apple will have to figure it out. We have incredible resolution now--it's a shame that that does not always mean we can see graphics more clearly.
No, it's a Trimble/SketchUp issue, not Apple. It stems from the way SU sets up OpenGL to utilize the Retina display at full resolution. There are places they did not take into account the tiny size of a single pixel (or where the way they tried did not work as expected). Alas, the combination of Mac and Retina is such a tiny fragment of the market that it does not seem likely that fixing this will get priority...
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Aerilius makes valid points. The issue is not with pixel counts as such, but with high dpi. That is, small physical pixels due to high pixel counts on a small screen. That's why people using 26 inch monitors with comparable pixel counts have not been beefing about this - their physical pixels are large enough to see (ironically, just about double the size from a MBP retina). But the pixel counts are going higher and higher, even on large monitors, and sooner or later Trimble will need to find a way to cope with this. In the meantime, we will have to live with it...
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@aerilius said:
We'll see progress only after releases. Not many people (or developers) do experience on their own what this talk is about, so I think it is important for us to identify and name what the issues are.
I experience it especially as a problem for plugins (webdialogs), and plugins are not only made by the SketchUp team.
I had opened a thread about that to see if we could help, waiting for the SU Team to adress the problems. This was about the display of text in the viewport, but apparently, this concerns the small inference marks as well.
Note that Charly2008 has advised on a solution to the problem of Retina with a 3rd party utility software. See this post.
Fredo
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@fredo6 said:
Note that Charly2008 has advised on a solution to the problem of Retina with a 3rd party utility software. See this post.
Fredo
Charly2008's suggestion modifies the logical dpi used by the display system, which causes OpenGL to scale logical pixels onto the physical pixels. Whereas this makes displayed items larger, it can also cause the screen to become slightly blurry because unless the logical scale is an integer, the system has to interpolate pixels. Aside from the blur, the effect is the same as if you had a lower pixel count screen in the first place.
For many resolutions you do not need third-party software. The "scaled" option on the Display Preferences lets you choose among a variety that Apple has set up. The third-party software just offers a greater range of choices.
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@slbaumgartner said:
it does not seem likely that fixing this will get priority...
Besides the growing mobile ecosystems, there hasn't been much innovation on the desktops for a while. In fact, high-dpi is on of the few innovations still happening there, and in all desktop operating systems. I am very hopeful SketchUp has reasons to work on it.
At least for the Ruby plugin developer talks (maybe in another thread), does it make sense to keep the discussion generic? Since the Ruby API is cross-platform, and since high-dpi screens come up for both OSs that SketchUp supports, the solutions that we work out apply equally to both.
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Sorry for offtopic but I have a question. What about other graphic issues in Sketchup 2014 under Retina MacBook pro? I'm struggling with the selection tool. When I drag and select multiple items with it, rectangle (box) outline is not appearing. Items are being selected but without a contour is really hard to tell what will be selected. So irritating. For windows users is either unselecting hardware acceleration / use fast feedback under OpenGL tab, or just changing graphic card driver. Under macosx I could not find the answer.
Big thanks in advance
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Could SU allow the color of the lines to be modified? I think that would at least help with seeing the lines. When I click on my line it turns blue, that blue is so close to the black line that it makes my head hurt. Red, orange ????
Perhaps someone could get that done at SU?
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@tcalvin said:
Perhaps someone could get that done at SU?
you CAN set the 'highlight' line color, I think it lives in 'Styles' options or from Ruby...
Sketchup.active_model.rendering_options["HighlightColor"] = "Pink"john
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Yes, you could edit the color of the selected lines under Styles>Edit>Options (the blue icon). If you want to make that change good for all subsequent models, open a blank file, edit the color, update the style by clicking on its thumbnail and save as a new default style.
When you open that new session will you take a look at the In Model components library. Send me an e-mail and let me know what you see.
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I like a bright magenta for my highlighting.
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