I wholeheartedly agree about the discouraging rate of meaningful development of Layout.

I make thousands of pages of docs with Layout and, while it is better than any alternatives I have cone across, it is definitely not a top tier pro software, imho.

I wrote up a slew of posts a while back that suggested many substantive changes that would make all the difference in my day to day workload. And, for a short while, members of the development team were actively responding to my suggestions and even intimating that some of them were going to get fast tracked.

And now, maybe 1 1/2 years later, how many of these have occurred? Exactly none. Very discouraging.

And, for what it's worth, the changes to the leader text tool are horrible and I hate hate hate it's operation now. It truly is a crappy tool that takes an inordinate amount of time fussing with.

And the lack of ability to place dimensions on either side of the dimension lines (as works beautifully in SU) with a right click or keyboard shortcut wasted so much time over the course of a few years that it borders on the ridiculous.

And, for goodness sake, Layout just takes too darned many mouse clicks to do anything. The act of placing a dimension, moving the text to the end of the dimension line, edit the text, and then move on to the next takes something like 6-7 mouse clicks and an escape key click to boot. do that 200 times a day and there are hours wasted over the course of a week.

And that layout forgets what is active if you switch to another software and then come back is infuriating and again causes a myriad of unnecessary mouse clicks.

And, as you mentioned, the lack of a Ruby pipeline really holds the whole thing back. Imagine SU without plugins and I imagine a SU I couldn't use as my main software.

I could, and have, go on and on about this, but I know my words are completely wasted as nothing substantive will ever come from them. Do a search for OTB posts concerning LO if you care about my many many frustrations and appeals for improvement that didn't fall on deaf ears but obviously fell on ears incapable of actually doing anything about anything.

Makes you wonder what the development team is doing? Is it one guy sitting in a cubicle throwing darts at the wall? Come on Trimble; throw a bone to the Pro users!!!

Another vote for being able to turn it on and off with a hot key.

I find the bounding box distracting and mostly unnecessary; especially when editing groups/components.

just my $0.02

Hi Dukejazz, thank you very much for your prompt response and acting so quickly. I, for one, will really appreciate the change from 9 to 2 (I think that having all the information in one or two locations will make it easier for us to keep up with all the information you have been compiling). And I also appreciate your efforts with respect to all the 3D printing information; I don't want you to think that I was trying to say that your contributions have not been useful.

I removed my sentence with ridiculous; I certainly wasn't trying to affect web search,etc.

Thanks again!

*** RANT ON****
Is it really necessary to have so many similar 3D printing threads? For a Sketchup forum, having 9 different threads showing up regularly with the "show new posts" option, with seemingly nothing but inconsequential cross-linking as the content is pretty annoying, in my opinion.

Perhaps the Mods could condense some of these into a just one or two that Dukejazz can put all his links in?

Do we really need a separate thread for current news, tradeshow news, technology news, new machine news, 3D wild west news, 3D print rc cars and boats thread, 3D print medical industry thread, 3D stories thread (!?), and new 3D stores thread?

RANT OFF

Dave, I think that is a bit of a generalization and perhaps a misrepresentation of who would appreciate this functionality.

I, for one, am not a beginner, and I would highly benefit from being able to turn snapping on and off with a keyboard shortcut.

Of course, since I have posted a plethora of suggestions for improving Layout and SU over the years, and not a single one has been incorporated into new versions, even when there has been dialogue from the developers acknowledging the usefulness of my suggestions and intimating that they were going to address them in new updates, we are just wasting our time even talking about this.

To be frank, the lack of meaningful updates to LO in particular is disconcerting and disappointing. It could be so much better...

Hi Jim,

I am experiencing an odd behavior with your Plugin.

If I open the Plugin window everything works as expected.

If I close the window, however, I can never get it to come back on without completely quitting SU and starting over.

Also, I flip between SU and LO with command/tab shortcut on my Mac. If the Plugin window is open while I am doing this, then, when I flip from LO to SU, the curser is unable to click or change tools unless I click up in the menu bar first. If the Plugin window is not open, then everything works as expected.

I am using SU 15.0.9349 and LO 15.0.9349 and OS X 10.10.1

I've trying to integrate Skalp into my normal workflow, but the experience has been less than satisfying. I sent the following report to their support team 5 days ago and, other than three automated responses saying they got my report, there has been no response at all. I figured it couldn't hurt to post it here, too, in the interest of jumpstarting a dialogue. And, I was wondering if anyone else was experiencing these weirdnesses.

Hi! I have been using Skalp (or trying to) since a few beta tests ago and am now trying thee first release version. I thought you would be interested in hearing my experiences.

I am finding Skalp inconstant and frustrating enough to stop using it as part of my regular workflow.

I am running OS10.9.5 and SU 2015.

Some of my frustrations include:

1. I am experiencing lots of peculiarity with respect to consistent scene display.  I have my scenes set with skalp sections and everything is perfect for a while, but then, with no warning, a particular scene won’t display a section correctly.   Sometimes it won’t show the section, or it will only cut part of the geometry, or it will display nothing.

2.	I had a file with Skalp sections.  As an experiment, I unloaded the skalp plugin and erased all of the skalp layers.  Before I did that, I copied all of the sections.  Once everything Skalp related was deleted I pasted the sections back into the model.  These sections acted very oddly and I ended up having to delete them.  It’s hard to explain, but sometimes the active section wouldn’t update in the scene, or a scene without an active section would inherit the active section from another scene without me updating the scene.  In the end, the entire file had to be deleted to get sections and scenes behaving properly.  It was if Skalp left vestiges of itself in the file, from before Skalp had been deleted from Sketchup that negatively impacted the model.

3.	Once I had all my Skalp layers and sections arranged per the user guide, I went into layout and started setting up viewports.  I had unending issues with the viewports not correctly displaying Skalp scenes!  The viewport would go completely blank sometimes (editing the viewport and zoom extents did NOT bring anything back; the viewport would remain completely empty, regardless of scene chosen).  Once it displayed empty, I had to delete the viewport and set up another one to get my scene displaying again.  Some viewports were showing lines in the section that did not appear in the sketchup scene; very weird.  The issues were so unending that it was completely unusable.  And yes, I was updating the Skalp sections for Layout, per the user guide.

4.	Skalp will inconsistently  fill in section faces.  I noticed this particularly when I had faces inside solids, which I needed for the section to show the line between joist and flooring, for example.  I had a cladding layer that was an extruded rectangle with inside faces to show the border between 1/2” sheathing and 3/4” siding and Skalp would never close off both the 1/2” and the 3/4” portion; it always left the 1/2” portion un filled.  I obviously can’t use Skalp if it can’t predictably close all the faces.  And if Skalp doesn’t display the face, then what can be done to coax it to display a face?  I assume nothing, so, if it doesn’t show a face, then I am out of luck?

So, all in all, a pretty disappointing experience. especially since I had such high hopes for what could be a fantastic extension to sketchup. I want this plugin to work beautifully as it is very impressive when it works correctly and predictably and I would always use it if I could produce drawings to my satisfaction. At least on my system, I would not call this a release-ready version. It is a start in the right direction, but not, in my opinion, ready for prime time.

Thank you for taking the time to read this. I haven’t seen anyone else complaining on the sketchucation site, so perhaps I am having isolated issues and, hopefully, I am missing something basic in the instructions, but I am pretty confident I am following the protocols laid out in the user guide.

I think it pretty slick how you have set up so one can make multiple changes without closing the dialogue. I guess I just assumed that the apply button was for changing the attributes of an existing layer and that, if I was making a new layer, that the done button would create the layer with the choices made as a default. Love the plugin, btw! Thanks for updating it.

Well, no I wasn't actually. I just went back and realized that I created the new layer name, made my visibility chooses, and then hit done. doh.

It is amazing how well it works when one hits apply first.

Thanks guys, I'm sorry to waste everyone's time

I am. It is creating the layer after I do, but the layer visibility is as if I set it to always visible for existing and new scenes, regardless of what I input. I went back to using your old create hidden layer plugin which has been indispensable to me for years and it works fine in SU2015

Yeah, TIG, you had every right to be confused as my original post was, in fact jumbling layers and scenes. I have edited it to reflect what I am seeing correctly.

In short, no matter the settings I choose in the plugin, I get a new layer that is visible on all existing and new scenes.

Sorry for the confusion.

I am running mac 10.9.5 and SU2015. This plugin is not working at all on my system. It will create a new layer, regardless of visibility settings, but this layer is visible on all existing and new scenes. It is as if I had used the + button in the Layer Palette.

It was installed through the Sketchucation Plugin

Thoughts?

Good to know, John, thanks! Maybe this weekend I'll dip my toe in the water with one of the office's iMacs.

thread hijack off

@driven said:

@chuck,
OT: you on Yosemite yet???

No, I haven't upgraded yet. Read a bunch of online discussions of Yosemite issues that put me off for a bit.

How has your experience been with the new OS?

I save a new version of every file I work on each day I work on it, with athat days date in the file name. That way, I have a comprehensive backup set of files that I can cross-reference with email dates, etc if any questions arise.

I also command S in a compulsive manner.

I have never used autosave as the impact to my flow was always annoying, especially on the big files. I was just watching one of Sonder's Layout videos and he kept getting stalled out by his autosave and that just reminded me that I will never use it.

I also stopped using create backup, after years of using it, when I realized that I had never once used a backup file for anything and I was filling my hard drive with backups of every day's backup I was already making.

Your milage may vary, but I use neither, ever

I, too, have been here since before the Google acquisition. In fact, I believe Kris, Coen and I had a short live video conference on maybe day 2 of this forum starting to be our answer to the loss of the @last forums. And, believe me, the sense of loss when that forum was shut down was tangible and gutting.

I love this place; it is one of the friendliest, supportive, helpful, and informative sites I frequent and I appreciate the heck out of everyone who has contributed to making this our new Sketchup home. I give exactly zero f&^*s what it looks like. There are great people here and that is the important thing. And the negative Nancys can pretty much pound sand as far as I'm concerned

Would be very helpful to be able to import DWG/DXF files

It would also be really very helpful if we could import DWG/DXF files

@frederik said:

I'm sure the LayOut team won't forget you/us...

However, please remember that there's app. a year until next release...
I wouldn't expect much of these feature requests to make it into a possible maintenance release before SU2015...

Guess we shouldn't have expected them at all...

@marcdurant said:

Don't worry, I haven't forgotten. I actually started hacking around on #10 while riding the bus up to BaseCamp on Monday. It's something I've been wanting to do for about a year but haven't managed to fit it in yet. #2 and #9 are also on my personal list.

I'd love to be able to report back that we're addressing every item, but understand that your list represents about a release's worth of effort. Multiply that by every wish-list out there (granted, there's some overlap) and I'll be busy until I retire. Which isn't a bad thing, but does explain why there are a lot of disappointed wish-listers out there.

Marc! What happened!? A brand new layout and not even one of my list of suggestions was addressed!?

I have to admit that that is pretty disappointing.

To be perfectly honest, the entire layout 15 update was pretty anemic, in my opinion, though I do love the 2 segment text tool; that is a nice touch.

I read through my list and pretty much everything I wrote then is still a valid suggestion and it would sure make my day if we started to get some developer traction on them.

Help, Marc, help!!!