Sketchup team, please release more features, sooner

SketchUp
1

I thought I’d start a feature request/area to chat about this as I am generally curious and hoping for an increase in development of the program. I remember reading I think on the last release of the major sketchup version article that now that there is a per year subscription, this means more features will be able to be produced faster for both platforms both Layout and Sketchup…

I think it’s important to give the Layout and Sketchup team some slack, they have made incredible programs, however I think at this point in the popularity of the program, we should be seeing a lot more development.

Sketchup and it’s real power in my experience lies in the plugins available, sketchup natively and by itself is quite powerful, but the plugins make it a much more powerful program. I wonder if the sketchup team is too relaxed since the advent of allowing plugins to be made for sketchup. Seems like years of my life go by and we are still stuck with the generic advanced attributes. I want to make a custom advanced attribute with my own attribute name, where when I click on a group or component the attribute shows up automatically and I just fill in the information. Something so basic like that still doens’t exist and yet this program is catered towards builders, designers, people who need to do things like this.

  • The generate report tool needs so much work, it’s really awful and it’s been like this for years.
  • The way materials are managed and componets are managed in the respective windows could be much much better.
  • Granted the plugin developers really do so much that it’s almost like the sketchup team doesn’t need to release those features natively, however when it comes to native quantifying of objects, naming and organizing those objects, in some ways this could be so much better and the rate at which this develops seemingly takes forever.

When I look at a small productivity company like clickup who are now quite big, it amazes me how many features they release each week. I’m not a software developer, but I really just see the production of the sketchup team being incredibly slow and painful, although the quality is mostly there, the production is not…

What are your thoughts?

2

Why reinvent the wheel? Such a forum already exists for SketchUp::

And for Layout:

The 3D Warehouse:

The Extension Warehouse:

And one for Developers:
https://forums.sketchup.com/c/developers/feature-requests/29

3

I totally agree with your ideas.

I actually started to create a little spreadsheet with all the feature requests i thought of, explained an categorised by priority. There a LOT of them

Obviously that takes time, and who has time these days?
But the old discussion topics arent that helpful - would the right people at Trimble read them?

There were some good bits of advice described in past discussions:
Be really, really

  • be very clear and consice about what feature you want, and what you need to acheive with it.
  • only one feature request per conversation
  • Give some context on your industry & workflow, give examples using graphics if possible.
  • Make sure your feature doenst already exist in SU (lots of things are hidden) or in an extension.

If anybody (with SketchUp Pro experience) wants to collaborate on a spreadsheet, I might be able to set one up in Google Docs and share it here.

4

Hey Sam, I sent you a message some time ago. I’m guessing you didn’t see it?