Extremely Impressed with my.sketchup & iPad dreams & beta signup?

I’m extremely impressed with what you’ve accomplished with my.sketchup.com.

As a long-time Sketchup user dating back to the @last days, it’s great to see Sketchup continue to evolve. It’s amazing that the my.sketchup.com web version contains all the essential features of the desktop version, in a very nicely streamlined and clean UI. It’s almost like a reimagining of Sketchup’s interface, staying true to the original, but modernizing and cleaning up a bit the UI. So pass my congrats on to the team!

The grouping of the tools on the left and the panels on the right hints at what could be an awesome mobile version e.g. for iPad. Clearly there would need to be a bit of work to support touch input without keyboard modifiers, but it seems like this is tantalizingly close. Currently I use Sketchup on both Mac and Windows (MS Surface tablet). Using it on the tablet is incredibly natural, as natural as pencil and paper. Unfortunately, the MS Surface as a product is poor quality, glitchy and a bit of a mess UI-wise. Nowhere near the quality of the iPad, unfortunately.

So, all of this is just to say that it would be great to see the current iPad Sketchup viewer app evolve to get some editing capabilities along the lines of what we see with my.sketchup.com. I’m sure this would help to put Sketchup in front of new audiences, as well as appealing greatly to the traditional architecture and design crowds who are making more and more used of mobile platforms like iPad. Something I for one would definitely pay for.

I also see that some Sketchup “comeptitors” like Autodesk and Archicad have done some interesting iPad apps, although so far none of them really have the appeal that Sketchup has in my opinion.

If there’s ever a chance to beta test new editing features in the mobile app, who should I talk to?

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Could there be “SHIFT”, “CTRL” and “CMD” touch areas (buttons) on the lower left of the status bar that working the same as the keyboard modifiers ?

Could there also be the arrow touch areas on the status bar for axis & plane locking ?

(I never have had a tablet so not sure how these kind of things would work.)

Hi there,

Thanks for the kind words- we’re all super excited about the progress we’ve made so far, but even more so for where we’re taking this stuff next!

You’re not alone in recognizing an opportunity to have a version of my.SketchUp running on tablets, and I agree that it feels tantalizingly close. We do have some tough interactions to resolve given the absence of a traditional keyboard and mouse, but we also have some good ideas about how to take advantage of multi-touch.

We’re not ready to make any product announcements at this time, but I can tell we have a shared idea for where the opportunities are for the future.

john
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John, it’s great to hear that there are ideas for the future, even if you can’t announce anything publicly yet. As I say, I’d love to signup to any beta program you might have, to give feedback on those tough interactions such as precision editing (maybe similar to how the magnify tool works in the iOS viewer app), modifier keys (maybe on-screen buttons along the lines of what Dan is suggesting, perhaps labelled “copy” instead of “ctrl” when using move tool, etc). Let me know if there’s an avenue to get involved in that when the time comes.

The problem is that all the help files and tutorials will be saying “hold Control key” (or “hold CTRL key”,) and changing this for one platform edition will just complicate the online help (and other documentation,) as well as confuse users moving back and forth between desktop and mobile editions.