Not for Chromebooks?

It looks like Mac or Windows is the only download choice. I am a technology integration specialist for a school district that issues Chromebooks to students 3 - 12. I was hopeing that students could use this for simple designs.

Thanks!

@stuw1234

I’m not sure that Chromebooks have the functionality to run a program like Sketchup, unfortunately. I know it can’t run programs such as Microsoft Office. It is actually a minimized system, intended to be used with limited applications (primarily, those programs that can be found in the Google Play Store). It is basically used for email and internet access, with not much more in the way of functionality.

~Drew

There’s an extension somewhere that would allow a Chromebook to access another computer to remotely run programs that the Chromebook cannot handle.

Chromebooks are good for consuming Google Services, email, content (including reading, education), etc. but not at the moment for content creation. SketchUp has a web viewer that should work here excellently.

If SketchUp decided to pimp up the web viewer to work as stand-alone “web app” it could be available for any system (Chrome OS, Firefox OS, Modern UI, and the mentioned browsers’ desktop runtime environments), and maybe with editing capabilities.

SketchUp’s desktop client application is not appropriate for the hardware and system of Chromebooks, without tinkering with the device to unleash its full power. It would more or less mean undoing/fixing your district’s decision.

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Now if you were passing out Surface tablets, it’d be a different story.

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But currently this would violate the standard SketchUp EULA. You’d have to get a special license to run SketchUp “in the cloud” for the students.

Really Sketchup should be pulling together versions that use Javascript and other means to deliver the content in a browser. Then there would not be a problem. My chromebook returns better browser performance than the (rubbish) new windows8 box I recently purchased.

hopefully not because a 3D modeler powered by JS would show near to no performance… at least for everything bigger than the House of Santa Claus…

btw, if you wanna use something browser-based you may want try Tinkercad.

just use Trimble Identity , it works fine!

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