Hi Steve, thanks for posting and welcome to our user forums. I hope you find this is a place that is worth coming back to again. Lots of good and helpful people here. We appreciate the support you’ve shown for SketchUp over the many years you have used it.
If you are an educational user of SketchUp, I’m sure you know about our special programs for Students and Educators. If you qualify for those programs, SketchUp Pro, in the latest desktop client version, is either free or cheap for you.
Unfortunately, this one isn’t going to be easy or come soon. We need support from 3D Connexion to be able to access their devices from the browser, and we haven’t got that yet. I just popped over to their website to see if there is something new available to us, but I didn’t see what I needed on first glance. I sent off an email to see if there’s some help to be had. But this one probably will take time.
3D Connexion support is the only specific thing you mentioned as missing in SketchUp Free, but there must be some more things on your mind to qualify our browser implementation as a massive step backwards. What else are you missing? Can you share anything more about the kind of work you’re doing with SketchUp Make today?
Thanks, Liam- I appreciate the support. As you observe, it is tough to make something entirely new stick in the software development world, but we’re all very excited and energized by the adoption of SketchUp Free so far. Only a small percentage of users take the time to post in our forums (or in any forums on the internet), and a disproportionately large percentage of them are typically folks with a beef to share.
I am keen to support end-user development in SketchUp for Web in the future, but as you guys have seen me say several times already, this is a tough project that isn’t going to come soon. We’re much more able to implement the sort of features that are most commonly accessed through an extension right in the core application. That’s the path we’re on for now.