I feel that the management of icons used for commands in SU could be improved. I have about 180 and that’s hard to search through.
The first problem is that there seems to be little logic to how they are ordered when you look through them to customize your task bar. I think when new ones are added, they do tend to go on the end of those already existing but I am not fully sure even of that.
The ones that are related to a particular extension do seem to be next to one another but as there is no divider between them and icons used by other extensions, it can be hard to know which go with which.
It would be nice to have the option to group and sort them in the way that suits you best. Alphabetically is one obvious way but a better one might be to have folders that contain the icons related to particular extensions. Maybe just the native SU ones would not need a folder. Even just having vertical spacers between groups would be a help.
You can close the toolbars you don’t often use and use the menu to navigate to those functions instead. The menu typically have a better organized hierarchy as the EW entourages developers to to put all entries for one and the same extension into one sub menu.
Also, there should be quite distinct dividers between different toolbars. Are you not seeing these dotted handles?
I don’t know if you are sarcastic. I haven’t used SketchUp on Mac myself but whenever I hear about it it is because things doesn’t work. One whole major version was without antialiasing, toolbar buttons don’t update their state, the material browser seem to obfuscate the conceptual model of materials in SU and the list goes on. The UI looks good though. Kinda like the web version.
That is funny, whenever I hear about Windows it is because things doesn’t work.
And still… people manage to get things done.
8 years ago, I switched back to Mac after a brief period of using windows. Did not want to spent half my valuable time on managing a OS, just wanted to draw stuff. Open the lid, draw something, close, come back and open again etc.
For support purposes, I have a Z-book. It will not run more then an hour, then I would have to charge it with an 3 pounds heavy cord that weighs more then my little Macbook.
I now again spend more then two hours a week on managing an OS.
You can learn to appreciate the Mac, with Windows, you can learn to get irritated.
8 Years is a long time ago. I would spend 1 hour a month managing windows 10, usually just checking what the updates are going to do. That’s it. Got the new timeline feature the other day, I quite like that.
Windows is very much just open and get to work.
Believe it or not MS are at the cutting edge of many things, but old notions are hard to shake even when they aren’t technically true. Kinda like “Macs don’t get viruses”.
I don’t think so but, being a Brit, it’s easy for irony to slip out!
I went over to the light side about five years ago and haven’t looked back. I held back for a long time because of the cost, but it’s the old thing of getting what you pay for.
If SU is a bit peculiar in OSX form, I wouldn’t blame Apple. I understand that developers have to concentrate efforts on their biggest market and that is bound to be PC owners. So perhaps you can forgive a bit of eye off ball when dealing with a minority.
Isn’t it a question of risk? If it’s true that Macs are much less prone to viruses, that’s still valuable, no?
Also, I went onto my wife’s laptop to update the OS the other day and found that you have to pay a walloping great wedge to get it. I mean, pay for an OS???
The Mac supporters and the PC supporters are a bit like the Montagues and the Capulets…
SketchUp is using the standard “Customize Toolbar…” UI available for all mac apps that use a toolbar. The problem is that the apps usually come with a small fixed number of icons to choose from. I love SketchUp’s extension system, but the number of icons can get out of control and it needs a search feature. This won’t be easy to fix as they’re using the standard OS UI for customising the toolbar and it just doesn’t have a search bar or other feature to help handle hundreds of icons. There’s not even that much room to use lots of icons on the toolbar. After so many, you have to access them from a menu at the right hand side, depending on the horizontal resolution of your screen.
Pay for software? Yeah, why not. An OS is a huge amount of work.
Apple makes plenty of money from selling the hardware so that funds development of the OS. Apple used to charge for the OS too. It was about £100 for every major version of OS X until they decided to give it away for ‘free’. MS can’t do this as most of the hardware Windows runs on isn’t sold by MS.
I don’t really want to get into this argument but if you can’t guess which side I’m on, look at my profile.
Life is risk.
But security through obscurity is delusional.
I would rather know and accept the risks than have a false belief that I’m immune to them.
Using a computer is like driving a car. Some basic training, followed by common sense and maintenance. Learn where your risks lie, take appropriate actions, keep things up to date.
After all you wouldn’t drive a rusted, death trap, car 100mph around a corner would you?
And yes you do pay for the O.S what do you think the “Apple tax” is?
I can price and build a “pc” with the exact specs (actually better specs because Apple tends to use old tech that you can no longer buy) as the high end desktop macs for half the price, including a fresh windows 10.
So by my calculations (in my countries money) windows 10 is around $250, the price difference between the above systems was $5000.
There are several places in the SketchUp GUI on Mac where long ago the developers took the path of adapting a system library element rather than writing one themselves, leading to significant differences between the SketchUp GUI Mac and Windows versions. One example is the original subject of this topic: the way there is only a single customizable toolbar and the awkward panel for managing it. The materials editor is frequently mentioned also. Despite years of criticism, the SketchUp GUI on Mac has largely remained frozen as is.
I’ve never seen a comment from an actual developer about why they did that or why they don’t address the complaints. Perhaps thinking these OSX widgets would be familiar and comfortable to Mac users? Perhaps because starting from scratch would be more work?
Whatever the reasons, making this into a Windows vs Mac diatribe isn’t useful. That’s an old and stale argument in which the positions on both sides are so rigid that we aren’t going to solve it here.
LayOut seems to have been designed by Mac users. In Windows the Edit menu is usually only for editing the open open document but in LO it is also used for program wide preferences. The dialog windows also have the affirmative/default option to the right which is a Mac thing.
. SketchUp on Windows isn’t anything like this. This doesn’t make any sense.