@dan rathbun said:

One thing you guys lack.. is a "Yearbook" or "Meet the Team" page.

It's true that we haven't got one of those, but I don't know of any other team at Google that does, aside from executive management, for whom such bios are required by the SEC. I do understand people's desire to learn more about the team, however.

@dan rathbun said:

This is the first time I've ever seen anything resembling a list.. before your post we had to guess how many peple are even on the team. 5 , 10, 20?

It's obviously a matter of how one defines "team", but I hope that the comments at 3D Basecamp by John Bacus (SketchUp PM) and John Hanke (a Google VP) about the size of the SketchUp team are taken to heart. We've always been a fairly small team, which didn't change when @Last was purchased by Google (I believe it's one of our strengths). This is of course inconsistent with the expectation of the numerous folks who believe that an army of Google employees is (or should be) brought to bear on the development of SketchUp.

@dan rathbun said:

If users see and know how many there are, and who's who, and who is responsible for what, we won't have silly speculation.

I'm unconvinced! In my mind, there's nothing whatsoever that we can do to put an end to 'silly speculation'. Each bit of news we reveal only removes one drop from an infinite sea of speculation waiting to be splashed around. Of course, having a yearbook would only serve to feed more speculation with the news of every change, which would ultimately defeat the purpose which one would hope for it to achieve.

For those in the SketchUcation community who were able to join us at 3D Basecamp, I hope the experiences shared by members of the SketchUp team served to underscore the very personal and deep commitment each of us has to the product. There's nothing any of us can say that would be more convincing than the way we conveyed our excitement and passion for SketchUp while telling our real life stories over some of our favorite brews.

I hope it was also useful for the attendees to get a glimpse into what an extraordinarily difficult undertaking it is to determine how to balance the many competing factors that arise during release planning (including limited staff and time, infinite wish list items, complexity of certain changes/features, everybody's personal pet peeves, ever-changing market conditions, and consideration of the varied needs of the mind-boggling number of people who use our product every day).

I don't expect this to end any speculation, but hopefully it'll shift the focus.

Andrew

@thomthom said:

...or Google....? Is it on your agenda? Considering how many are moving to 64bit?

I'll pass on your suggestions. No promises.

Andrew

@chrisjk said:

Please, please, make SU capable of using all my CPU cores!

What specific operations do you believe would be best served by adding multi-core utilization? 3D is an inherently GPU-heavy endeavor and most real-time editing, orbiting, etc., can't really be improved with extra CPU cores. There are some areas where multi-core strategies can be applied; I'm just curious what items stand out in your mind.

Andrew

@pmolson said:

I will trust!

I just realized that I didn't finish answering your original question. At this time, there is no way to see the version number of the newly available installers before downloading them.

On Windows, even after download, the version number embedded in the "properties" pane will be incomplete (it will likely say something like 2.1.0.0.

On Mac, after you download and mount the DMG, you can then "Get Info" on the mpkg installer in the DMG and see the version number before you install it. By that point, I don't know that it's terribly useful, but there it is.
!["Get Info" on Mac Installer](/uploads/imported_attachments/TO7t_SU_Mac_Installer_Info.png ""Get Info" on Mac Installer")

Andrew

@martinrinehart said:

Does anyone know if there is a relationship between Bug Splat reports and getting bugs fixed?

Everything that has been said in previous responses is true.

BugSplat tells us how often bugs occur that have the same signature. Therefore, if we set out with the aim to fix some of our most common bugs, we start at the top of the BugSplat list and work our way down. Every time we do a maintenance release or major release, we spend a fair bit of time fixing as many of the most frequently occurring issues as possible.

Also, if a specific bug comes to our attention and it seems like a very big problem when it does occur, even if it doesn't occur very often, we will concentrate some effort on trying to establish how to reproduce it and whether we have any BugSplat data to help us dig deeper.

Yes, there's a big correlation between BugSplat and bug fixing activities.

Andrew

@kiddieboy12 said:

Life is all good!!
install C++ redistribute 2005 sp1
and C++ redistribute 2008 SP1
and you should be able to install, please close.

Hello. I'm sorry I didn't get back to you sooner; things were very busy getting our last release out the door over the holidays.

I am glad you found a solution to your problem. Installing the VS 2005 SP1 redistributable is what I would have suggested if I had been able to respond in time.

The part I find curious is that you also installed the 2008 redistributable. SketchUp is built in Visual Studio 2005 and therefore, that's the version of the redistributable package you need to install. Did you install 2008 for fun, because you needed it for another application, or because you thought SketchUp needed it?

I'd really like to know because I can't think of any circumstances under which you would have needed 2008 for SketchUp to function, so if you did, I need to investigate it more closely.

Thanks,

Andrew

@syman97 said:

I am also a system admin using a template acct. Can someone please help us to disable the login keychain?

Sorry, we've been pretty busy around here and haven't been able to look into this. I've sent a message out to the Mac gurus to see if anyone has ideas and can help immediately. Otherwise, unfortunately, it'll still have to sit on the backburner until we can get to it.

My gut feeling is that we may be able to get around it with application signing. We presently distribute SketchUp unsigned. If you, as a sysadmin, were to sign it using self-certified keys, you might be able to get around it. That's just a guess though.

Andrew

@dan rathbun said:

HLR.parent BUG SPLAT!

I've brought this to the attention of Simone, our Ruby QA expert.

Andrew

@gaieus said:

There will never be a SU version without bugs.

There was a bug-free version once. It only lasted a few days before we got bored of having nothing to do and hired some third-party developers to add a bunch of new ones.

Andrew

@sketch3d.de said:

@andrews said:

7.1.6863 German

are you sure?

Yes and no.

In my excitement to post that information, I accidentally omitted a crucial fact.

For all of the languages I mentioned (English, French, Italian, German, Spanish and Japanese), if you go to the "About" menu, the version will show up as 7.1.6860 on Windows or 7.1.6859 on Mac. That is a side-effect of the fact that the underlying program binaries for these installers is the same across all languages.

The version numbers I mentioned are how we track the installers for each language differently, which matters if you ever decide to try to install a different localized copy of SketchUp. As it happens, if you try to install English after installing German, it will fail with an error telling you a newer version is already installed, making you uninstall it first. That's because the installer thinks of itself by the version numbers I mentioned, even though the inner product sees itself as the same across the board. Therefore, if 7.1.6863 (German) is already installed and then you try to install English (7.1.6860), it'll fail.

But, that's pretty esoteric. In reality, you'll almost never see the installer version number.

Just consider 7.1.6860 and 7.1.6859 as the newest across the board.

Sorry for the confusion.

Andrew

I'm glad the word is getting out. I checked the forum quite a bit today to see who would be the first to notice.

The original post hit part of the information, but there's more to know... Especially if English isn't your favorite language.

Introducing...
Google SketchUp 7.1 Maintenance Release 2
...in six languages!

Windows:
7.1.6860 English
7.1.6863 German
7.1.6864 Spanish
7.1.6865 French
7.1.6866 Italian
7.1.6867 Japanese

For Mac:
7.1.6859 English
7.1.6871 German
7.1.6872 Spanish
7.1.6873 French
7.1.6874 Italian
7.1.6905 Japanese

This is a big step for SketchUp because it's the first time we've been able to release additional languages at the same time as English, all at the same revision. And for those of you who speak a common language that we haven't posted yet, I can tell you that we're working on a few others that are forthcoming.

Andrew

@pmolson said:

What I wanted to see was the version # of the new update download file prior to installing.
I can right click on it and look at properties and see that it is 7.1, but it does
not show the digits after the 7.1

In other words I want to see the 7.1.???? in the execute file prior to executing.

If SketchUp tells you an update is available, it's not lying; an update is available! When checking for updates, it compares the version number in your currently installed software to a file we publish at Google indicating the latest available version. If Google says there's a newer version, you'll get the pop-up.

Andrew

@dan rathbun said:

The following simple boolean methods produce a Sketchup BUG SPLAT!, instead of returning true or false:

**$stdin.isatty STDIN.isatty STDOUT.isatty STDERR.isatty**

Platform: Win32
BUG SPLAT! reports sent

Dan,

Next time this happens, when you fill out the Bug Splat report, put in some sort of keyword that will be easily searchable and then leave a follow-up here telling me what the word is. That way I can go easily pull the bug report and write something up.

Andrew

@gaieus said:

Thanks Simone for the insight - I was actually hoping that some of you guys will have a look at this as it is way beyond the tech skills of most of us here.

This one is a bit beyond Simone, too; he's really outdone himself this time.

@sheir said:

Hi guys,

Why my skecthup pro 7 , not have dwg in import list??

because I would like to import autocad file

If you are running SketchUp Pro 7.1 without a license and your evaluation time has expired, you will revert to free functionality. When that happens, you will not be able to use the DWG importer unless you use the DWG/DXF importer installer from the link that Gaieus provided.

Andrew

@bebert44 said:

Hi,
I just installed GS v7. All worked good untill I launch GS.

The program asks me what configuration by default (the first time I launched). I reply millimetres, and after that, GS7 don't start.

I have to shut down the application, with the vista tasks manager, and bye.

What is wrong.

I already re-installed, re-DL the application and re-installed.

The first time I launch GS, it asks what what configuration I want, and after that, bye bye.

Tx 4 your help

Hello,

I'm one of the authors of the Windows installer, so I'll try to help.

I have not seen this problem before. My guess is that it is not actually a problem with the installer, but a problem with your preferences file. I wonder if deleting your preferences and then re-running will allow you to get past the problem.

When you say, "bye bye", what do you mean? Does SketchUp crash? Do you get a BugSplat? Do you get a pop-up from Windows saying that SketchUp had to close and asking if you want to report the problem? If you provide some additional details, our tech support or QA folks may be able to identify whether your problem has been seen before and if so, possibly how to fix it.

Andrew

@gaieus said:

And the plugin is exactly the same importer there is in the Pro version (as I was told when asked if I should install for testing reasons when it was not released yet) so you don't even have to be afraid of any extra bugs it could involve.

For the sake of eliminating confusion, I can confirm this.

When you use the DWG/DXF importer installer that we're distributing, it enables the use of exactly the same importer as is available in 7.1 Pro. Also, aside from any improvements and modifications that were made in the 7.1 development process, that plugin is the same as what was provided in 7.0; it's not like it's a completely new/redesigned plugin or anything.

Andrew

@unknownuser said:

Sorry Andrew about that but I was unable to locate v6 within google? I'd happily delete the link if you can provide a link

Rich,

Part of the licensing arrangement we provide, and in some ways, a feature of Pro, is that we provide ongoing access to several back-revisions of the Pro product for download directly from Google. It is still possible to get the latest maintenance revisions of SU 5.0, SU 6.0, SU 7.0, and SU 7.1 if you seek the Pro product.

As for the free version, we believe it is in everyone's best interest (ours and our customers) to upgrade to the latest available and for us to concentrate our resources on using, improving, supporting, and patching, only the latest available free version. Therefore once any new version of free is provided, the download links for the previous version are taken offline.

@watkins said:

Are the .dwg and .dxf importers still available when you download V7 and V6 from the Google site, or have they been scrubbed?

We have not 'scrubbed' the importers from previously released versions of our software. If you download SketchUp Pro 6 or 7 from Google, you'll get the software exactly as it was released.

I should point out that previous messages made note of two different links from which to download SketchUp. One was for SketchUp Pro, from Google, and the other was for the free version of SketchUp, from a third-party site.

We recommend against ever downloading Google SketchUp from a third-party site, as one of the best ways to ensure your version of SketchUp is authentic is by downloading it directly from us. Just a word of warning.