@redinhawaii said:

(where the pixels start to get too blown out)

That issue makes me think you are using raster rendering instead of the more useful - in my experience so far - vector style. Try changing over if that's the case.

@merc said:

I want to show an exploded view of an assembly, using guide lines to show where points will be connected.

In Layout you just draw the lines.... the inferencer will usually even link to the underlying SU model correctly. Set the dash style and you should be done.

@tfdesign said:

@charly2008 said:

I use an energy saving bulb 5W

You mean you can read under those horrible things?? Give me an 100w incandescent any day!

{blather, blather, blather}

What nonsense.

For a reading light you want somewhere between 500 and 1000 lumens/m^2. Let's assume a decent chair/light arrangement is with the light about 1m above and a bit to the side of the book being read. Thus we might as well guess at needing 500 lumens from the source and using a 1 sr solid angle.
A 100W incandescent will produce around 1700 lumens, which is an awful lot for a reading light unless you have a shade that really spreads that out and 'wastes' a lot. A 5W led will produce around 4-500 lumens. If you really need 1700-ish lumens, use a 15W led. Apart from saving power it will last many times longer. And to be honest a 100W bulb at that distance might feel like it is about to set your hair on fire.

If all the efficient bulbs did was let power companies charge you the same for less power, why would that be a problem for you? You pay the same. Stupidity about sending out inappropriate bulbs is a reflection on the company, not the technology of the bulb.

@tfdesign said:

Tim, you should count your lucky pebbles, because most of the electricity created in Canada, I believe, comes from the best power producing source know to man, hydro-electric power, but not all of us are able to benefit from such sustainable luxuries.

[/quote]
At 60% -ish it just about counts as most. But it is declining as more power is needed and no investment seems to be allocated to improving things. Dear Mr Harper and his dodgy religionist right-wing chums seem very keen on using up fossil fuels and indeed doing everything possible to hasten the end of the world. I'm not sure I agree about it being the best source though; dams and their lakes cause plenty of issues.

I favour burning Conservatives in a modern, well designed pebble-bed combustion chamber, or possibly the attaching of buttered cats to alternators.

And this doesn't have much to do with iPads. Which I very much like the general idea of, hardly surprisingly given that on three occasions scattered over 25 years I've worked on projects to develop something pretty much like it, right down to the cpu in use.

@linea said:

I haven't seen an ipad face to face yet but I imagine that holding a lightweight paper book (or something the size and weight of a kindle) is more ergonomic. I know you can't really compare the ipad to a book but it does look a bit clumsy to hold.

Weight is another dimension that makes a huger difference to functionality without any change in what the object actually does. A typical sized cellphone (weighs at a guess 100g?) that weighed in at say 3kg would be a massively (ooh the puns just don't stop. Try the veal, I'm here all week) different product despite doing exactly the same and looking the same.

@charly2008 said:

I'm just more old-fashioned. I'm sitting happy in my chair and read a book and need electricity only for the reading lamp.

Hmm, 60 watts or so instead of less than 5w used by an iPad.You power wasting scoundrel!

@flyhi said:

I can not submit professional work without page numbering.

You can do page numbers perfectly easily - just not automatically generated. Annoying, but not impossible to cope with.

Khai wrote:

@unknownuser said:

ppl are already writing it off as nothing but an enlarged Itouch.

If a bunch of people on a forum dedicated to design can't appreciate just how important scale is to an object then I really think something is wrong. Let's stipulate that yes, in raw hardware terms an iPad is 'just a bigger iTouch'. Which it isn't, not really since it has a different processor, but what the hell.

So what happens when you make a bigger iTouch? Well, the way you interact with it changes quite a bit and in ways that depend on how much bigger. Going from a 3.5" screen to say a 5" might not affect the UI much but could make it a real pain to fit in a pocket when it looks like it ought to. How about a 24" screen version? Would that be 'just a bigger iTouch'? What about a 72" one? How about a smaller one - 2" screen - is that just an iTouch? A 1" screen for wristwatch size?

Scale is crucial to how you interact with, make use of and perceive objects. If you don't understand that deep in your design bones, please don't design anything that people have to use, because you won't get it right.

No, not texture by bitmap, texture by making a profile and push/pull and trimming to an outline.

Imagine designing a house with board and batten siding. It's easy to draw the profile for board and batten. It would be easy to pull it out to make a simple rectangular wall. Now imagine you want a gable wall (let alone a more complex shape) - you could do it manually by various means of course.

I can almost see how to do this but I'm busy actually building a house and I don't like trying to write Ruby code so I'm hoping somebody else will like the idea.
This is a faint idea for how it might work-

On the left is the wall and the profile (the tiny bit near the origin)
Middle shows the profile repeated across the wall and pulled up
Right is battens trimmed to shape of wall.
Extra points for handling holes - ie windows - in the wall, re-entrant shapes, curved walls etc. If anyone can make it work on a sphere and spring I'll be seriously impressed.

Here's a use of LO& SU construction drawings that I hadn't expected.

I'm actually building the house (see above http://forums.sketchucation.com/posting.php?mode=reply&f=12&t=15911#pr234269) right now and during the foundation excavation I had some trouble explaining to the operator where he needed to dig and how deep. I didn't have any serious surveying equipment available so I couldn't do a typical transit layout, taking reference points and marking out angles etc. So I did some quick SU work to fit a set of triangles around the footing perimeters; anyone with a couple of tapes can lay out triangles.
My finished set didn't fit very precisely around the house but did always include every part. I drew up 6 triangles and then used LO to produce a sheet with 6 views, each one adding a new triangle to the one fixed line we had available.
It took a couple of hours working with the digger to convince him that by digging to my lines he would produce a useful hole in the ground but eventually it worked and the resulting hole will soon get its footings.

@unknownuser said:

Try solving this problem: Find a function F(x) such that the slope of F(x), the area under the curve of F(x) and the arc length of F(x) are all identical.

IIRC that would be e^x and its relatives.

@jonathanb said:

Hi,

I recently had to have my entire computer re-built. A painful consequence in having to reload everything! And not just Sketch up!

Backup. Backup. Backup. Backup.

Oh, and backup.

@3eighty said:

Im just waiting for "Sex With The Stars

Hmm, sort a porno version of the Uk dance/celeb program right? So that would be 'Strictly cum dancing'?

I don't need to get a building permit in our area (yeah, weird) but I do need decent plans for my contractors to work from. These are they -
http://www.rowledge.org/tim/page19/building/design_assets/Ashling%20Rd.pdf
Entirely SU/LO produced.

And here are some sample pages

@bjanzen said:

You can have more than one window open: Window->New Window for Page blah.

b

Oh, Duh! Perfect. Except we need the self-updating cross-references.

@mikeh said:

However, I'm still getting the beep anytime I select the EDIT menu as well as every time I right-click on a drawing. Was this the beep that was address and, if so, are there more steps I need to take?

Ah. Yes, you need to slap me upside the head to upload the correct file. I forgot that I altered the HousebuilderTool.rb as well. So here it is.
HouseBuilderTool.rb

@alan fraser said:

[attachment=0:1ylc1pw6]<!-- ia0 -->5302.jpg<!-- ia0 -->[/attachment:1ylc1pw6]

EDIT: Picture added instead of linked.

You left out the bit that makes a joke of the picture (not to mention that iPad does in fact have video out) and that is the important fact that for only $250 over the price of a cheap netbook you can avoid having to have anything to do with Windows. That is what will make iPads sell like hotcakes.

The layout file just needs the paper size setting correctly - you had A4, I had to change to US letter (why the US cannot use sensible sized paper I'lll never understand) and then it prints perfectly well.

I added a 5" line to test - that way you have a trivially easy way to check the scale.
Attached is the pdf version. Try it on your setup. If that doesn't work you have a screwed up printer system somehow. Can't help with that since I don't do windows.
Third%20attempt%20at%20Layout.pdf

@xrok1 said:

you're obviously a mac guy.
you're on the island you lucky bastard! i'm over in edson AB. are the flowers out there yet?

Sorry for not noticing this!
Yes the flowers are out, mostly. Winter was almost non-existent this year, though we actually had a flurry of snow last week.

On my iMac it was no problem to set the same (or very similar) options that Jim used and to print a page with the correct scaling. Part of the problem is that when just printing a page SU prints the visible area - so if your window shows a lot more than your model in the middle, you get a lot of white space. If you can make the window exactly the right aspect ratio andzoom your model to fill it exactly as you want it printed you'll get closer to what you want. Pretty tedious.
You could probably get the effect of drawing on a page sized area by simply drawing a rectangle of that size and, well, drawing within it. The pro version includes Layout, which makes for very easy assembly of plans and sections etc.

The smart thing to do for distribution would be to print to a PDF. Since any machine can print a pdf to proper scale your 'customers' would not even need to download SU.

Not specifically to do with Didiers metric version, but I recently posted a few bug fixes relating to door opening size/position and that infuriating beep every time you context menu on http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=26858

I'm thinking of breaking out the different functions and rewriting some of the less pretty code but to be honest I find Ruby such an unpleasant system to work in that it rather puts me off. Maybe I should just build an interface to Smalltalk.