Another broad area of "wishlisting" is how we can best handle the problem of our scripts accidentally clobbering other people's. It's great that Ruby is such a flexible language, but we've all seen situations where two of us choose the same name for something and everybody loses.

RickW has suggested to me that we form some sort of "official" policy and/or repository for handling this problem, and for reducing code rewriting, so that we all benefit from the collective knowledge of the group, but as of yet I haven't pulled together a proposal for the community. What are your ideas?

Some possibilities:

Create an "official" means for extending Sketchup.rb, along with a versioning system, so that we can extend the base API.
Create some kind of name-spacing convention that we can publicize and encourage folks to use.

I'm sure these are things you've all been talking about (I'm still catching up on back-messages.) I want something that's easy for people to use, from novice ruby programmer to expert. If it's too hard for people to understand and adopt, then we're wasting our time... What do you think? I'm all ears.

I was able to confirm this on Windows XP. I'll follow up internally to make sure this is fixed in SU7.

Hey Fredo,

As Rick said, this is a known bug to us, and a very annoying one. I wish I could say there's an easy workaround, but the behavior, I have been told via folks at Apple, is a fundamental WebKit problem. (We are still pursuing a fix.)

To answer your questions:

1. You're absolutely right.

2. There is not a simple workaround. The only way to make this work is to build your javascript code to be asynchronous. As you're probably discovering, this leads to JS code that is necessarily more complex. If you think of SU as a "server" that you're making asynchronous requests to, you can use code patterns that you might be familiar with from Ajax programming. You can build complex UIs this way, but it's not easy.

3. A fix for this is at the top of my personal list, but I do not expect a solution in time for SU7. No promises... but maybe we'll have a fix for an early maintenance release. Another thing we've considered is either building or working with the community to build a ruby/js bridge library that abstracts some of this, but it's just design discussions at this point.

Hope that helps. When SU7 goes live I'll be able to provide a more in depth discussion of this whole issue.

Cheers,

Hey guys,

My goal is to check these forums every day to see if I can be of help. I'm one of the "new guys" on the SketchUp team, having been with Google for about a year, now. In my day to day job I mostly work in the Ruby API, so I'm in the same boat as you in regards to its capabilities, and I'm an internal advocate for improvements.

Maybe a moderator could split this into a new topic? I'd love to hear everyone's wish list.

In any case, I will do some research into these posted bugs and confirm that they are in our internal tracking system.

Cheers,

Hey Jan,

I really wish I could be more clear, but we're talking about timelines that aren't set in stone. I'd rather be vague than be disappointing!

I understand your frustration. Let me restate my post to be: this bug has been fixed and will be available in our next release.

Hi Chris,

This is a known issue to our team and should be addressed in a future maintenance release. I'm not aware of any workaround, unfortunately.

On PC, I prefer EditPlus. You can get a ruby syntax highlighter from their website, too.

-Scott Lininger
Google SketchUp Engineer

Hey Guys,

Scott Lininger here. I'm a programmer on the SketchUp team and will be spending a lot more time around these parts in the future. I hope I can help folks out with the Ruby API. (Though the experts on this forum know the API as well as I do.

I've met a lot of you in various other virtual haunts. Hiya everybody!

-Scott