Progress bar and stop/cancel button (that actually works) should be standard on every bit of software; but it's as rare as unicorn teeth.

Basically every action should be wrapped in a progress bar type widget . The widget should have a timer setting so that it doesn't actually appear until ~ 0.3sec after the action starts, so that quick actions are.... invisible? quiet? whatever. For actions that will take an unknown or indeterminable time, the progress bar can do something like a random speckle patten - anything that says the system is still alive and working. The (very ancient) PERT workstations that ICL built in the early 80s used a similar idea . Acorn's almost as ancient RISC OS UI had an OS call (making it trivial for any app to be well behaved) to do the timed-busy-indicator. Any app that has an undo system should be able to cancel at any point.

What, me ranting about UI design again? Horrors.

..and having two pages open at once would help with my idea(http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=21810) for having internal links for cross-references; select your view on one page, menu->copy reference, go to other page/view, menu->paste reference. Similar for page references. This would address page numbering, view numbering, detail section numbering.

@watkins said:

Perhaps you could release your de-bugged version.

I'm perfectly happy to do so; if anyone wants to package it up that's fine by me; I guess Didier is the best candidate.

Here it is anyway - modified Housebuilder.rb with the door sizing fixed to compensate for the rough opening offset and the stupid beep fixed. There is still a huge amount that could be improved.
modified by tim Rowledge to fix a couple of bugs

Voxels have been around since at least the early 80s. I helped write bits of one of the early voxel based modellers when at IBM.

Aaaannd... now I've managed to remove a really stupid bug that made the system beep every time you click for a context menu and the selection is not a wall. SIgh.

OK, I managed to debug (good grief, Ruby is horrible) the issue with the door frame being offset (silly arithmetic error, easily fixed once spotted) and the weird-things-with-two-doors stopped after replacing the wall.

Interesting - a single link did eventually arrive at a place that didn't 404 on me. Sadly it only seems to provide the old and apparently buggy plugin.
It doesn't fill me with confidence to see right at the beginning of the HouseBuilder_extension.rb -

Floor tool

cmd3 = UI::Command.new(("Wall tool")) { Sketchup.active_model.select_tool HouseBuilder::FloorTool.new }
cmd3.small_icon = "HouseBuilder/hb_floortool_S.png"
cmd3.large_icon = "HouseBuilder/hb_floortool_L.png"
cmd3.tooltip = "Creates a floor."
hb_tb.add_item(cmd3)

Wall tool

cmd1 = UI::Command.new(("Wall tool")) { Sketchup.active_model.select_tool HouseBuilder::WallTool.new }
cmd1.small_icon = "HouseBuilder/hb_walltool_S.png"
cmd1.large_icon = "HouseBuilder/hb_walltool_L.png"
cmd1.tooltip = "Creates a wall."
hb_tb.add_item(cmd1)

Surely building two commands with the same name can't be a good idea?

I have been trying to build internal walls for a house design and decided to try the HouseBuilder. According to the Extension page on SCF there should be a version on the CRAI site but if I try to fetch anything like http://www.crai.archi.fr/RubyLibraryDepot/Ruby/HouseBuilder_extension.rb
I get a 404 error.

I did find an ancient original Steve Hurlbut copy on a japanese site but there seem to be a bunch of bugs in it - doors get offset 1/2" from where they shouldbe, odd things happen if you have a wall inside a component, truly demented things happen if you add a second door to a wall and so on.

Has the CRAI site gone away? Is it temporarily dead for tax reasons? Does anyone have a copy of the latest imperial measurements version?

@unknownuser said:

It isn't pollution that's harming the environment. It's the impurities in our air and water that are doing it.."
--Al Gore, Vice President

Actually that was a Quayle-ism, though that idiot Reagan uttered something similarly inane.

Jasper Carrott's take on the ultimate Country and Western song went something like -
"Since they took my momma off to prison
thing's ain't bin the same around the farm
now they gone and let'er out the gaolhouse
an'she drove her goddam truck into a train!"

Perfection in a single verse.

@xrok1 said:

go to my computer, right click on iphone then select import pictures and videos.

Why would I go to your computer?

Puzzled in BC.

All I can say is that I have seen ( and reported) this effect but not for a while. I wish I could remember sometihng about the circumstances and what I might have done to avoid it but.... nothing.

It's probably worth pointing out that Lee Valley have started selling the generic versions (ie no Festool logo) of these excellent cases. Not cheap....

Jean's idea is quite reasonable but perhaps alittle more complex than is really needed. There's nothing wrong at all with dozens or even hundreds of scenes; take a look at some of the models done for oil refinery planning.

However, you don't need to make an entirely separate scene for each view of each part, or even for every part. It's quite ok to have several instances of the part and align each one up for the view you need. You can dimension each one as required and put the dimensions on a separate layer would be my advice. If, like me, you are using LayOut you can simplify things a bit by making use of LOs ability to choose a view direction in each viewport and to do dimensions outside the SU model. Clearly, a scene with a single instance of a component can be inserted into an LO doc several times and a different view of the part chosen each time. Better yet you can have several parts in a single scene and so long as you stagger them the right way they will not be seen unless you align the LO view just right.

See http://sketchup.google.com/3dwarehouse/details?mid=8897f179f3a39153ad8e59ce1bc6436 and look at the 'parts' scene for an example.
This is the PDF generated from that model -
Rustic Pine Bed.pdf

I had another instance or two of this (kind of) issue last night. My (relatively) quick fix is to delete the offending view and replace it. This has the obvious hassle of getting it all realigned with the accompanying annotations, so it can be more or less quick depending..

I still can't work out a pattern of how it might get caused.

This sounds like a bug I reported (along with several other folk) around early December 09; Barry J. posted a description about how to check the LO file and fix it but I can't find it!

IIRC the essence of the problem is that occasionally a connection between some LO entity and another can get broken and sometimes LO copes and other times it goes BOOOOM!!!

That would have been funny, except that the iPad will run Skype and thus can make phone calls.

@kwistenbiebel said:

Indeed, the ipad should have had MacosX instead of IphoneOS.
Then we could run bootcamp on it and enjoy all our software through Windows, including Sketchup....

If y'want to use Windows on a tablet, buy a Windows based tablet. They're obviously much cheaper than any Apple product; oh, wait, they're all around 3-5 times the price of an iPad. Gosh. And they run Windows; hmm, wonder if they can boot a decent OS?

And yes, I have tried several and they were all very nasty.

The jumping around I've seen but not the random open/close of subsections. Unless what you're seeing might be explained by you clicking to open a subsection and then clicking where you think an item should be but the system actually deciding to jump the list and treat your click as happening on the item that is now wrongly in the place where your pointer was... that I've seen, many times.

@dave r said:

My brother would like this thing. I'd rather have it sound like the cigarette pack or the playing card in the spokes, though.

We used bits of card too, when of an age to play with bicycles. When older and more mature (yeah, right) a car owning friend had some sort of tape based doohickey that tried to make tire squealing noises when cornering. The technology of the mid 70s wasn't really up to it. I guess these days you could pretty easily make an iPhone app that used the accelerometer to work out a suitable noise to play through the stereo... hmmmm.....

@tfdesign said:

Have you noticed that the iPad with attached keyboard, bears more than a passing resemblance to the Xerox Parc computer?

Actually it's more like the original idea for a tablet from that group -1970 or thereabouts. And a lot like the old Active Book, or Momenta, or (blech) Go (all around 1990), or assorted Windows tablets from a few years ago (2004). Except it has the advantage of being made with the latest advances in cpu/memory/battery and so should be better hardware than the older machines. It has a dual core advanced ARM cpu running at 1GHz. That's more compute power than any laptop had just a few years ago and using less power than some cellphones without big screens. It has (up to) 64Gb of storage, more than most laptops blah-blah-blah. Are people really too lacking in imagination to come up with interesting ways to use something like that? It would make a great ebook reader (duh), a nice photo viewer (duh), a useful in-minivan movie/game player to keep kids quiet, a neat slot-in instrument panel for your car/boat/plane, a really good (and cheaper) house/TV/audio controller and on and on.

And what's with the idiocy about "it's only a big iPod touch"? Are people on this forum - mostly designers - really not aware of the difference in effective functionality that changing size can cause? The bigger screen allows different usage modality to that of the iphone/touch. A still bigger screen - say 30" - would allow still others and would prevent some that are convenient with a 10" screen.