Reading between the lines in my posts, you can see that this is a strategy of which our team is aware. SketchUp Free will likely work well (someday) in this kind of implementation. With a few caveats related to typical OS related operations like open, save, print, keyboard access, &etc. Resolution of those issues, as well as some others related to online collaboration through a platform like Trimble Connect, are what has kept us from launching an official implementation yet. In other words, I recognize the opportunity, know there are some implementation details which are still hard to resolve… and I don’t have any new products to announce today.
I (emphatically) welcome any hacking about with this kind of thing to explore capabilities and opportunities for yourselves. Please just remember that we do have some specific language in our Terms of Service against redistributing SketchUp without our permission- for reasons which are probably apparent to you guys anyway.
The 3D Model Viewer in the Details page of 3D Warehouse is a version of SketchUp Free which does allow you to embed our viewer in other webpages (or standalone applications). Eventually, we will wrap that in a fuller-featured embed API similar to something like YouTube’s API. I bet you could come up with some clever implementations around that as well? Maybe there’s a standalone desktop viewer for a model you’ve hosted on 3D Warehouse?
It is most likely faster because it is using CEF, not because it is a native app. Safari (and Microsoft’s Edge) are not yet as efficient running applications like SketchUp Free as Chrome or Firefox are. If you want to judge performance, look at your Electron app side-by-side with SketchUp Free running in Chrome.
Developers like to open the dev tools and see what’s there (sometimes there are friendly messages) and tinker around. If SketchUp Free had already a JavaScript API or if I found an unofficial internal API that allows me to set camera.eye and camera.target, I would probably connect it to the Gamepad API and use my SpaceNavigator like in a game engine.
For this exact reason, electron developers are often critisized that they lack a concept how to make use of package/dependency management systems. Bundling electron with a light-weight web app simplifies deployment, but users may end up with 5-10 “clones” of the almost same runtime environment. In times of deduplicating file systems this may become less a problem.
I asked for the thread to be unlocked not fully understanding what that actually means. I thought there would be more posts that I (personally) was prevented from seeing.
It looks as though the whole thread is now available for more comments.
While I don’t have much to say, I’m interested in knowing what others are experimenting with. Maybe (someday) I’ll have a useful contribution.