Sketchup licensing

SketchUp
1

Does Trimble ONLY do subscription-based licensing anymore?

Recently started taking some college classes and that allowed me to buy SU with the student discount. HUGE difference in price.

My problem is that I can’t justify the amount of money required to buy SU at MSRP. I know there are free options (web, SU17), but I’m hooked on the full suite now.

I could even swallow paying the MSRP if that gave me the right to use that version as long as I want. I get why vendors switched to a subscription model, but for someone like me that just does this as a hobby, there is no way I can justify that amount of $ every year.

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3

Yes. Permanent licenses are no longer available.

4

GRRR! At least if they let you continue using it after subscription ends but with no upgrade path. Making you pay every year is … well can’t be NSFW here!

5

Are there ways to create “macros” in SU? I could create something that would do a normal save and then also create a 2017 copy with the same name and append “_2017bkup” to it.

If I have to rely on remembering to do this manually each time, I know it won’t happen all the time.

6

As you are on Windows you could use this extension in SketchUp Make 2017, to open more recent files:

https://extensions.sketchup.com/extension/39811dd4-8f44-4aed-bd20-c83f196c55b1/eneroth-open-newer-version

7

And going in the reverse direction there’s a plug-in that speeds up saving back to an earlier version - jf_save_as_menus.rb.

You can do it natively, but it takes several more clicks.

It adds a menu JF Save As to the File menu, with a sub-menu of all earlier versions to choose from.

You can add a shortcut to save back to a particular version with a key press or two-key combination. I use Ctrl+S (on Mac) to save back to v2017.

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8

Thanks for the tip. A couple of follow up questions:

  1. Is plug-in same as extension? If not, where would I search for plug-ins?
  2. I searched the Extension Warehouse using 3 different search strings and each of them came back with no hits: “jf_save_as_menus.rb”, “jf_save_as_menus” and “jf_save_as_menus*”

Can you point me in right direction to get this plug-in?

Thanks.

9

It is same.

You should search in the forum :wink:

Changing Default Save File - SketchUp - SketchUp Community

(Copy the file to your
c:\Users\your_user_name\AppData\Roaming\SketchUp\SketchUp 2021\SketchUp\Plugins\
folder and restart SU)

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10

The terms are often used interchangeably, but while all extensions are plugins, not all plugins are extensions - usually, older ones.

An extension has a particular form. In a slightly simplified description it consists of a single .rb file, (usually) in the Sketchup Plugins folder, which loads and registers the extension, and a folder of the same name as the file (without the .rb at the end), containing code in one or more files and subfolders that does ‘the work’ of the extension.

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11

Thanks for the explanation. That makes sense

12

Jim Foltz’s code is a single .rb file, so a plug-in but not an extension.

Forgot to mention that an extension’s code is compressed into a single zip file, then the file extension (.zip) is changed to .rbz, in which form it can be installed from the SU Extension Manager in versions of SU since about v 2016 or 2017.

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13

The “plugin” is just an old name of the “extension”. Regardless if it is distributed as single .rb file or packaged into .rbz.
These are working the same manner, just some of it will not fit to the current “rules” of how to make a proper extension… :wink:

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