Just a quick question to SketchUp team.
Are there any plans to improve UI for Mac users? It looks like improvement are only done for Windows?
You basically don’t have list view for material on a Mac and you can’t dock panels like in Windows!
Is it really so hard to achieve?
Material list will be the best feature for Mac. And docking option will illuminate a mess of plugins panels .
What do you think?
Cheers
I’m not a Trimble employee, so speaking only for myself. Don’t expect an answer here. Trimble employees have said many times that they are prohibited from discussing plans or future changes in a public forum.
That said, welcome to the frustrated Mac users’ club! We’ve been complaining for a long time about the numerous and seemingly arbitrary (i.e. a matter of choice, not OS restriction or style) differences between the Windows and Mac versions. Instead of fixing the divergences, the team has been increasing them, e.g. the new trays feature came out on Windows only. These make it unnecessarily hard to teach SketchUp and to answer questions on this forum.
Thank you for your reply. Oh, it is very sad to hear. Hopefully they will fix it next release. It just materials panels without list view make me feel very frustrated.
Anyway…
I can’t speak to the differences between the Mac and Windows version, but the Mac version is certainly in need of an “inter-facelift”. I’m speaking about everything that happens outside of the 3-D modeling viewport. The modeling functionality is brilliant, but the rest of the interface leaves much to be desired. It doesn’t seem to have changed since I first discovered the program nearly a decade ago. I find the task of managing scenes, materials, and styles to be downright baffling at times. There are numerous nonstandard clickable doodads and widgets. This is not purely an aesthetic issue, but one of usability. The interface could be updated, simplified, and enhanced to reduce clutter and confusion, resulting in a much improved user experience.
Is there an official place to suggest enhancements and feature requests?
-Steve
There is a feature requests category on this forum. You will get the best response if you request a single, well-described feature and present a good use case for why it is needed (general statements such as "it’s old looking typically don’t get much traction).
Sad to say it continues to be true that the Mac GUI doesn’t get much love. So don’t hold your breath.
Thanks for the response. Yes, sad indeed - especially given that it started out on the Mac platform.
-Steve