After struggling to use google drive for our company’s skp / layout file management, I finally broke down and decided to try Trimble Connect. I have been playing around with it for a couple of days and I got excited when I found “Trimble Connect Sync.” I got excited because it seemed to promise a future where I don’t have to do anything except to work in Windows Explorer, have a daily sync schedule, and occasionally click a manual sync button when I needed to share something immediately to my team.
I guess I’ve been around the Trimble block long enough to expect that it wasn’t going to be blazingly fast and have no friction at all, but this is dialup speed. I have no interest in the trimble connect app. It’s ■■■■, it’s slow, every computation in the already slow app has to be forced through an even slower http connection (Can we as human society please bring back software that you just have on your hard drive? Like, it’s right here and it’s fast and cheap.), and our trade is millwork so there’s no benefit from BFX / interoperability. We just want sync, collaboration, and version control. Do we just need to get LucidLink or something?
I guess I’ve been around the Trimble block long enough to expect that it wasn’t going to be blazingly fast and have no friction at all, but this is dialup speed.
that’s just under 2mbps, which is 35x faster than dial-up
Anyways, I just tested the speed and a 1.13GB file took under 100 seconds for me to upload the europe server.
That’s quite a big difference to your experience. Over 40x faster
I’ll try the US location next.
EDIT
Almost identical speed.
Something else must be going on for you.
Can we as human society please bring back software that you just have on your hard drive?
I don’t understand - You don’t want this, hence why you are transferring files across a network.
Trimble connect sync, layout and sketchup do work by files being on your hard drive - you are trying to upload them to the internet.
Hey. 2 users. Files opened from gdrive take 2-3 minutes to open if SketchUp doesn’t crash. Files opened from any other software open in 10-20 seconds. It doesn’t really matter how large the file is. So we’re forced to download to local directory before working on files.
It’s something I’ve tried troubleshooting in threads here before and I’ve AIed it quite a bit. Gemini claims that it has to do with gdrive for desktop constantly checking for changes to the file. We’re on windows.
I’m really not sure. Seems to be an issue relatively unique to sketchup, as I’ve opened giant pdf files and autocad files from the shared drive with no difference in the amount of time it takes compared to hard drive.
My workflow is to use our google workspace account with GDrive for desktop which adds a virtual hard drive to Windows explorer where we open our files from and save to.
You’re using Trimble connect sync, the standalone app? Or are you opening files from Trimble connect in the Sketchup UI?
As to the comments about the contradiction in wanting local software and wanting to share files, come on guys.
I’m trying and failing to use fast, lightweight local apps (SketchUp and Trimble Connect Sync) rather than stream work from the cloud via the Trimble Connect web app or the Trimble Connect extension in SketchUp. I’m talking about using apps that do one thing and do it well, rather than everything having to be a web app, which is a clear trend. Obviously in any case there would be a need to share files over the internet.
bmike, I’ve considered a networked drive as well, but with the $819 dollars a year it just seems like Trimble connect should be able to handle this. And we aren’t always in the same location. Sometimes we work from home.
FYI The files never actually stream, even when you use the trimble connect native function, they are downloaded first and then opened (over the same protocals that the sync uses)
When you save, they are saved somewhere locally and then uploaded (but this is invisible to the user).
This is functionally how any regular file works (PDF, images,DWGS) even if you are loading via something like gdrive or dropbox. As a rule, they all cache, rather than “stream”
Even if you are using the web app, there is a .skp downloaded and sitting in the background
If you create a new empty Connect project and sync a single 200 MB ZIP file, how long does the upload take from start to finish?
That will narrow down what part of the actual sync is taking time.
I feel like I need to qualify why I don’t want to do that. It’s not like it’s a big deal to download files from drive, work on them, and upload when you’re done, it’s just that any manual task will be neglected at some point. One day I or someone on my team will be too busy and forget to do it and it will cause a problem. It needs to be an automatic process, or at least a prompted/reminded task like with github (what we’re currently using).
I’m pulling the same project directory to my designer’s computer on a different connection and it’s 12kb/sec. I think it’s because it’s a bunch of tiny files. Profile builder profiles. I’ll test it on a single large file and report back. Thanks guys.
Having used it pretty heavily for a few days, I can say definitively that Trimble Connect (Sync, Windows Desktop, Web, the two completely separate documentations that are published on the internet about how to use them, take your pick) is probably the worst software experience I’ve ever had. And I’ve used Oracle and Intuit products.
Yeah it just seems to exemplify all of the stereotypical characteristics of bloated legacy software. Takes longer than an operating system to load up, no tool is where it makes sense intuitively to be. There are half a dozen ways to do any given task. The things that people would actually use it for, like automatically syncing or notifying a user of changes to a working directory before they start working on outdated stuff, it can’t really do. And its slow. Most of all, its slow.
I think that regular people just don’t realize how fast computer hardware actually is, and how fast software actually should be. Go play any video game made in the last 20 years. Or open a few million object skp file and spin it around some. I wonder how many of the original chads who wrote SketchUp are still there?
