Vision and feature requests

[DanRathbun]

@Tommy

A flaw in many other applications at the time (and this is still true today) was that features were added over and over again so that a once-simple application is now cumbersome and complicated. We wanted to avoid this at all costs. Which is why SketchUp integrated Ruby so that users could create those “missing” tools that are key to their workflow.

We get a lot of feature requests that “should” be part of the core and should be “easy” to implement. And in some cases, this may be true …, but it would fly in the face of our original vision for SketchUp: keep it simple, powerful, and accessible.

This is the most important (and profound) thing that has been said here on the forums, regarding SketchUp development and maintenance, in a long time.

It is definately very informative to the public, in understanding the Trimble in-house development philosophy for maintaining SketchUp.

(IMO, it should be quoted or pasted into this forum’s header “intro” post.)

It again reminds me of a “promise” made by Tyler Miller, Engineering Director at SketchUp, (some years and cycles ago,) that they would try their best in Boulder to avoid the traps of “feature creep” with the SketchUp application.

Everyone (who posts a feature request) should first be made to read the following wikipedia article:

Feature creep