@remus said:

Tim, when you get other media players weighing in at 2.9mb (foobar) than you cant help but laugh at itunes' rather large 80mb.

Only if those other media players include all the resources to do as much; otherwise you're not comparing like with like. iTunes is a bit more than just a player for mp3 files. It's a music, video and software store. It's a music visualisation machine. It manages my iPhone data.

If you don't want what iTunes does, don't use it. That's just fine, even sensible. If an 80Mb download is a problem for you because of net access issues, then you may have to find an alternative and you have my sympathy for being afflicted by restricted net access - it's a pain in the arse. But if you have decent net access and you want to connect your iPhone to your Mac the simple way.... it's the simple way. My life is too full of important things to worry about such matters. Just like I don't fret that the cable company 'wastes' all that bandwidth sending me Faux News along with the stuff I do want.

Large software used to annoy the hell out of me because it seemed so terribly wasteful to someone that used to write software to be delicate, efficient, effective, exciting. But it's the way the industry has gone and all my fulminating can have no effect but giving me a headache. Get over it or get high blood pressure.

@xrok1 said:

i didn't check the app itself but the download was 80 meg.

And it includes all the executable stuff and a whole pile of resource files; menu labels and UI components in every language you can imagine and many you can't. Different languages can require altered icons because of the different lengths of words (think - English -> 'engineering', German -> 'ingenieurwissenschaften' and so on) and then you need (probably) a different layout to make it all hang together.

At some point I imagine someone will make smarter download systems that respond with a package customised to suit the language etc settings on your machine. Till then, be happy that you can download software to do all sorts of neat things.

There is/was an album called 'Twisted christmas' (I think). Tracks incude(d) 'grandma got run over by a reindeer' (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9jmr0MgFKU) and 'walking round in womens underwear' (http://acme.com/jef/netgems/womens_underwear.html or http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=foybsDsn5hk)

There's been a lot of discussion about this, mostly for architectural work, so take a look at http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=15911

Occasionally LO will go apeshit on me. Most of the time it works very nicely but just occasionally it seems like nothing will work. this is pretty much the optimum way of driving one nuts since finding a pattern becomes very difficult.

However, it's been through this cycle enough time now that I think I can see the glimmerings of the root of the problem.

Typically I get blowups (often complete blowup with no crashlog let alone a bugsplat) when a view is rendering. Since many of my LO pages have multiple views it has sometimes been very tedious to work out which view is causing the problem. Sometimes things are easier if I turn off auto updating, sometimes not. In a few cases changing the style associted with the view seems to solve the problem.

In the most aggravating cases I've had to delete the view entirely and rebuild it, which of course means all the LO annotations and dimensions have to be redrawn at a considerable cost in time. Right now I have an LO file that simply won't load and render, should anyone want something to (perhaps) assist in debugging. Luckily I also have one that works so I can keep on with my project!

@marko said:

I also read a post saying only the Mac version does tables. I run SU on both PC & Mac so would I be better off using the mac?

Yes, in the sense that LO on OSX makes use of the standard text widgety-thing that has its own support for tables and list (as well as the typically expected fonts and stuff). They're not, to be honest, particularly good tables or lists and some of the effects you get when editing are decidedly non-intuitive.

Probably better for anything beyond very basic would be to import a PDF previously produced by Pages or Numbers or even (shudder) Word/Excel. Obviously, producing a PDF is trivial on OSX since you can always just print to pdf.

I have no idea whether you can import PDFs on windows.

@jcharltoncarp said:

Hi Tim,

Sorry, I didn't want to step on any toes.

Oh, no problem at all; I don't have any toes anywhere near anything to do with Windows!

It sounds like you had some really annoying issues but if it was a while ago and you have any need to try again it might be worth it. The recent versions of both parallels and fusion appear to deal with printing and sound and so on very well. I very rarely use parallels - only to do with work stuff when a windows prog has to be compared with legal claims or security issues etc - and it mostly serves to remind me why I have a Mac.

@unknownuser said:

Really? Do you have any sources for this info or is it something you concluded based on your own experience? I installed a plain-from-the-store copy of vista under parallels on my iMac and it runs no more horribly than on a vanilla PC. I have several colleagues that run various versions of windows and linux/unix releases for software archeology reasons and all report no special

Really? Do you have any sources for this info or is it something you concluded based on your own experience? I installed a plain-from-the-store copy of vista under parallels on my iMac and it runs no more horribly than on a vanilla PC. I have several colleagues that run various versions of windows and linux/unix releases for software archeology reasons and all report no special issues.

You might be seeing the effect of the 'show section planes' switch being global. I'm referring to the toolbar button that (on my mac) looks like a yellow easel for some reason. If you turn on visible section planes and change scenes then they will be visible in the new scene, a bit like the 'show hidden geometry' menu option.

There is a switch in the style edit window for section planes as well as section cuts. If you turn on section planes and update your style and switch to a scene with a different style you should notice the section planes disappearing and reappearing when you swap back again.

So I think you might need to
a) create a new style with the section planes turned on
b) set your 'map scene' to use that style
c) make sure your other scenes don't have section planes turned on in their style

So far as I can tell most of the default styles actually have the section plane turned on already so most likely you'll have to create on with it turned off and use that for the non-map scenes. Depends on what styles you have loaded I guess.

@layziefj said:

Hi

I've been trying to apply a material to a layer and it doesnt seem to work.

If you're wanting to apply a certain material to everything on a certain layer then

turn off all other layers
select all
apply material
turn other layers back on

@remus said:

Personally id be extremely surprised if the human race survived long enough to see the sun die.

Maybe, maybe not. The sun is a big hunk o'star. It seems to be so quiet and stable. Until you know about some of the solar flares that have been tracked in recent years with devices like SOHO. One decent sized flare aimed straight at Earth would have a good chance of wiping us out. Could be on its way right now. Right.... no {fzzzzz No&%^carrier@####$@

@tig said:

In addition to that... IF you don't have any obvious snappable vertices etc in these components but you still want a 'snap' point in them then place a very short piece of line at the spot in each component where they are to 'mate' - so it's effectively a snap-dot

Or use a guide point. Pretty much tailor-made for this purpose.

@jaxcoffee said:

Can't fix things on this rock, why waste time and resources looking to go somewhere else.

You know why the dinosaurs became extinct? Because they had no space program.

The sun will die. We should be somewhere else.

Do any of you people have the faintest idea how much work it takes to maintain and improve a piece of software like SU?

I've done complex software for years and I've also done a moderately complex house design in SU/LO. Apparently quite well, according to various people. In my opinion software is typically one to two orders of magnitude more complex. Bear that in mind next time you feel tempted to slag off someone.

Fascinating and wonderful as some of the plugins are, don't forget that without the large amount of work required to provide SU and the external plugin api there wouldn't be any of them.

@logscape said:

Hi, I'm new to LO. I would like to know how is the correct way to import cross sections from a SU model

What I've been doing is to make a scene in SYU that has the relevant section plane active, use the 'add section cut-face' plugin to add faces across the cuts, manually delete the spurious ones, apply colours to match the parts that are cut and sometimes selecting the edges and unhiding them. Then align the cut face in the scene, save the model and send to LO. I haven't had any trouble with making dimensions snap to the places I need - perhaps having the filled in cut faces is the key?

In LO I just select the relevant view and scale and style. I get this sort of thing -sample sections.pdf and yes, LO doesn't always do a perfect job of the rendering for some reason. Sometimes it comes out beautifully, then you change something, update and it leaves out some edges or whatever. Odd.

@matteo said:

yes, you are right Juan, I'm experiencing that Layout 2.1 is very solid and stable.

Yes and no, in an odd way. I go for days without any problems at all in LO and then suddenly (with the same model!) have a patch where it blows up anytime I look at it the wrong way. I had a spate of total 'poof' crashes a couple of weeks ago; no crashlog, no bugsplat, nothing, just ... gone.

@xrok1 said:

well for me (and i think a lot of others) part of the joy of owning a pc is to see what you can get out of it. anyone can get a mac (or brand name pc) off the shelf and use it. so what! its like buying a hot rod and not tuning it? why? integrated graphics, integrated sound, phewey. give me upgrades or give me death.

If that's what provides fun to you, excellent. It's a harmless hobby, not terribly expensive, potentially useful to others and maybe it will even result in you (or someone you inspire) producing something we all benefit from. I used to do it too. These days I get my kicks from other aspects of building and customising and for my computer I just want a decent tool that does the job I need with the least amount of intrusion into my thought process. I find that anytime I need to have anything to do with Windows it annoys me. So I avoid it as much as possible.

None of these arguments are ever soluable because they are about what an individual likes to do and there are at least as many ways as people. Hand tools or power tools, pc vs mac vs *nix vs pencils, ford vs chevy vs real cars, biplanes vs monoplanes, gas vs electric, right vs left, stockings vs tights, blondes vs redheads and on and on.

@solo said:

These are desperate Mac days.

Sure - 'beleagured Apple Computer' and so on. They really are having it tough in these trying economic times. sales are drastically down, not making any money, laying off everybody.... oh, wait, no. Dang.

If you don't like Macs, don't use them. I can't stand Windows - so guess what? I don't use it anymore! Wow, we can all be happy. You can feel smug about only paying $X for your box and I can feel smug about being less annoyed by my computer. Everyone wins!

And while you're claiming that you Dell/HP/whatever is so much cheaper than an Apple, somebody else will be sneering at you for having wasted money on a pre-built machine when everyone knows you can build your own monster machine sooooo much cheaper by getting a case from here (just take care putting your hands anywhere inside it, sharp edges dontcha know?) and a motherboard from there and a CPU from this guy down the bar and a disk from Fred who seems to get them off the back of delivery trucks and download some OS from a radK00l site. And somebody else will be sneering at them for being such a dweeb for wanting a computer in the first case because pencil and paper is the only honest way to draw and dammit you should bake your own charcoal anyway and make paper from the rest of the tree you felled your own self - using an axe you made from a bit of flint and some sinew taken off the limb you had to amputate last week after a hunting accident.

And as it happens I have built my own computers before now. I built the motherboard, helped design the cpu, helped write the OS, made a case. Buying a Mac is a lot less painful.

@sketchup guide tommy said:

Hi Everyone,

@tim said:

there is a really annoying wait after stopping moving before they re-appear.

It sounds like folks have pretty much explained this behavior. We knew questions about this functionality would come up, so we wrote a Help Center article to help explain what's going on:

Error 404 (Not Found)!!1

(sketchup.google.com)

OK, I have a little more info to add on this issue.

Firstly I really don't see it as being related to the suggested link because it is so intermittent; this is a fairly small model with not much in the way of complicated shapes and crucially it can be moved and rotated without dropping the textures and dimensions almost all the time. In order to trigger some "gosh this is taking along while Ill just simplify the render a while" condition some other time consuming activity must be being triggered in a confusing way. It doesn't happen every day, nor every time I open the file, nor as a result of changing view type or whatever. It is apparently random.
Secondly, when it does start to occur there is a very strange way to stop it happening that I discovered by accident. I simply swap to another scene and back. Almost always there is a scene (I have maybe 15 scenes in my file) where all is fine and going back to to the troublesome one after visiting that 'good' scene stops the problem. So, problem in sceneA, swap to sceneD, go back to sceneA, no more problem in sceneA. A couple of times I have followed this procedure and not fixed the problem but swapping to sceneX and back works.

All rather odd. Dontcha love software?

Good news; I just realised that SU 7.1 fixed this problem. You get so used to seeing something that occasionally it takes a nudge to notice it has changed....

It makes for a nice improvement in my house plans, so thanks SketchUpGuys!