[DEPRECATED][Extension] KG-dev CADoptimus - Component Manager - list, search and use your local and in-model components

DEPRECATED

in favor of ComponentFinder – FlexTools

List, search, find and use your components

With Component Manager one can quickly list, search, find and use any component, whether it is already loaded in your model or is located somewhere on your local system (or network drive). Make sense out of total nonsense: Component Manager does not only perform filename based searches but is capable of searching by mutliple embedded attributes. Looking for a specific component in a pool of unnamed .skp-files? Or maybe for a component with a specific value for any given dynamic attribute? Component Manager got you covered.

Component Manager would not be a Manager if it did not let you manage your components, both locally and externally. Starting from version 1.1.239 one can push and pull changes bidirectionally to xRefs. Or, maybe made some changes to a local variant of an xRef by mistake? No problem, with component manager you can revert back to their external xRef representation.

Download directly from the Extension warehouse: Extension | SketchUp Extension Warehouse

Updates:

1.1.239:

  • added xRefs: Track changes bidirectionally between in-model components and their linked external .skp. Push changes to xRefs, Pull changes from xRefs into your in-model components, or revert the changes you have made by mistake to your local representations.
  • Fixed a few bugs that occured on OSX.
  • Performance improvements.

1.1.238:

  • Support for SketchUp 2018. Currently both 2018 and 2019 are supported.
  • Support for Groups instead of Components only.
  • Fixed a few minor bugs.

1.1.233:

  • Added local library functionality.
  • Free version that has unlimited in-model component query functionality and limited up to 15 external components.

1.1.224:

  • First public release.
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Hooray, I just got notified it passed the reviewer’s sharp eye. You can now download the first public version here: Extension | SketchUp Extension Warehouse

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And, meanwhile it is time for a new feature.
In version 1.1.233 we added External Library Support. While listing and searching the components that were already present in your model was useful, things just got better. How about having a bunch of .skp files on your system with cryptic names? With version 1.1.233 one can point CADoptimus Component Manager to that directory and instantly make sense out of that nonsense.

Here is a youtube video showing that new feature:

I also decided to make this product a Freemium. So, all that good stuff of querying your in-model components as well as maximum 15 external ones come for free. To query a virtual unlimited number of external components one has to activate the Premium features.

For now I am afraid that only SketchUp 2019 (Both Windows and Mac) is supported, but I am planning on providing support back to SU17.

Kind regards,

Kenny

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Do you know about Component Finder by @Yoni ?

Shoot. I’ll have to take a look at that one!
Edit: hmm… it’s a great product it seems.

I guess there are now 2 things i have to do:

  1. Instead of starting to code immediately after having an idea at night, perhaps do some marketing research.
  2. Revise my idea of free vs premium.

Nothing’s lost yet, there still is some work to do to make component manager a real manager instead of a “finder”.

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it happens…

Extension Warehouse submission is ‘meant’ to have a condition to avoid ‘copy cat’ extensions, but it doesn’t appear to be as yoni’s version is in the EW…

I thought @ChrisFullmer was going to look into the definition of ‘unique’ after he, himself, made a ‘copy cat’ of @Aerilius’s material resizer.

as stands, it only applies to SU’s own product…

Unique: Extensions must not simply duplicate existing features or services of the SketchUp client—they must significantly extend some core feature or add entirely new functionality.

at the start, it was implied ‘unique’ would cover existing third party extensions if hosted on EW…

john

Don’t rush with that :slight_smile: (sometimes it is not the cost itself, but extra barriers that it brings)

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John,

I understand what you are saying. I sincerely did not meant to copycat. Some weeks ago I decided it was time to get started creating my own products, i had a pile of post-its with ideas and took component manager as the first one to create (tag manager as second, and yet to come “design options” and “timetracker” as third and fourth, still unreleased). Eager to get it developed and released I perhaps did not do enough research to see if there were other existing extensions doing the same.

I am currently not at my office, but, let me think over the weekend how I can give this extension some real uniqueness, or, eventually decide I got it wrong, simply failed on creating something new, and dispose it. But as far as i am concerned, i will focus on the uniqueness :wink:

don’t take me wrong, competition is healthy…

e.g. there are many renderers that all do the same thing at the end of the day…

when you submit an extension, EW ‘should’ inform you of competition already hosted…

personally, I would choose a ‘comp browser’ that’s optimised for mac’s, that ‘lazy loads’ all it’s resources only when I want to use it, and looks and feels ‘native’…

bit like my own version…

john

We did a comparison between the flextools plugin and CADoptimus Component Manager and we immediately noticed a major difference: Flextools is able to list and search components based on their filename, where CADoptimus Component Manager is able to scan the content of each file and perform searches on that. I have a folder with a bunch of .skp files with nonsense names and you simply cannot use it with flextools, since it uses the filename to search. With my extension however, that same folder is usable. See the following screenshot for a comparison:

And, when performing the same search:

Also regarding the search possibilities of my extension; not only the name of the component is taken into consideration, but actually any dynamic attribute it has, see the next screenshot, where I have added an attribute to “Marc” and am able to perform a search based on that attribute:

So, I believe this is not a simple copycat. Do you agree?

4 Likes

Nice!
(it couldn’t be a copy cat since you didn’t know about it)

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It would get really interresting if you could tag the components within SketchUp and the component manager could find them…
:smiley:

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That is possible in a certain way already, if you add a new dynamic attribute to your components. But, I believe the reason you want to tag is to quickly find them (obviously…) and that got me thinking about search presets, or some kind of “named favorites”, which would allow you to store a previous search. How does that sound?

I like the 'Frequently Used ’ menu found in many drag and drop type applications…

no need for me to mark them at all as they bubble up the list automagically…

far more useful than ‘Last Used’ IMHO…

john

2 Likes

I think both automagic favorites as the tags named by @MikeWayzovski make sense. Let me add that as feature requests and see when i am able to merge those in. Next few days i have to work on making Tag Manager a tad quicker.

I believe some key features that are missing to Component Manager are:

  • Being able to sort the list of component in various ways: Most used, last used, loaded in model
  • Being able to store in-model components into the local filesystem based library from the dialog
  • List what has changed: In-model updated in comparison to the library one? Vice versa? I noticed there are some x-ref-like extensions out there. Not really willing to duplicate the extensions out there but on the other hand it makes much sense to have such functionality in a component “manager”.
  • being able to open a library component in a new instance of SketchUp from the dialog, edit and being able to update if loaded in the model.
  • Currently only components are listed in the browser and not groups. It is possible however to also list those.

What do you think? What is for you a real missing functionality when working with components?

Hi, component manager with xref capabilities seems a lot more useful. There are xref managers out there but they don’t seem to have all this functionality

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How about listing in-model group “definitions” in component manager and also giving the possibility to select all instances in a model for a given definition? That would solve the issue I see in Eneroth Material Usage Inspector

Edit: not that there is a problem with that extension, but with the fact that outliner lists every group as “group”.

Hi @kengey,

what we have been missing is an “eyedropper tool” as the one in materials (hit B for bucket tool and then hit ALT in windows), but working for components in the viewport.

That would allow us to pick a component in the list by finding it in the model.

I see. But for what purpose? What would be the next step once you have it visible in the list?