I’m sure you had bottom line considerations in mind when you made this decision (as a business owner I certainly don’t blame you for that). None of us outside of Trimble understand the realities of how you came to this plan but here we are, and you asked for our thoughts so here is my 2 cts…
I was a professional AutoCAD user when a client brought SketchUP to my attention (2006). She really liked the idea of seeing a 3D model of her house. She said it was free so I downloaded it and powered through what was a pretty easy learning curve. I got the bug and modeled the whole house and quite a bit of the structure as well then moved back to AutoCAD to do the prints. I did another couple projects like this and eventually admitted that this was a program worth the money that was being asked. Over time I completely ditched AutoCAD and my workflow is all in SketchUP and LayOUT at this point with very few exceptions.
Concluding thoughts:
-Please don’t underestimate the how many users the robust free version has brought into the fold of paying customers.
-The development of LayOUT is what allowed me drop AutoCAD. It could use plenty more development and could bring in more professionals
-If you make the Pro version a cloud based program I am completely out of here as soon as I can find another option. I’m going to start exploring now because I don’t want to be left in the lurch for some surprise update concept. Cloud based programs for my design-build process are a deal breaker, no way they would work for my company.
-I get you may be hoping that more free users buy a license with this move but the barrier is too high. Watch the sales figures, consider a lite option if you need more revenue. This is sad to say but if makes me smell blood in the water, feels like a desperate move. I really hope I’m wrong about that.
Thanks for the fantastic program and the request for feedback. I hope this program can continue to grow and develop in a positive way.
That has been discussed in the past. The problem that has been brought up about this aproach is that users could do professional work in any of the free versions and rent a license only when they need to export DWGs, and not the whole time they’ve been working on the project.
Thats when there was a Make option, what I am suggesting is removing Make all together (keeping the Free Online option) and just have a Rental Pro option.
It’s each to their own on DARK THEMES, for me, as I work loooooooooong hours on Architectural projects, dark themes do help my eyes from the typical ‘snow-blindness’. I’m still surprised SU-HQ don’t offer an alterantive option on this like most professional software companies. Anyway, my resolve for companies that don’t, I take care of that by using STARDOC-WINDOW-BLINDS, they have some really great themes by Pro-users, so it’s a big-up to STARLIGHT…
I’ve actually withdrawn the requested changes to the Dark Reader extension, as my changes have gotten too complex and working around Dark Reader’s quirks and shortcomings just doubles the complexity.
So I’ve copied half of what I’ve done over to a new standalone Chrome extension, and it should be better than just a set of tweaks to Dark Reader, and more maintainable in the long run. (Ie, he was taking far too long to respond to change requests, and this cannot be so as SketchUp Free sometimes has several build releases a week.)
I’m the opposite. After ~35 years staring at computer screens, I’ve been getting “snow blindness” too often when the background is white. It sneaks up on me and all of a sudden there’s a blind spot right in front of me. Cannot watch TV, drive, etc. for a day or two afterward.
The web interface of SketchUp Free is the fastest way Trimble could choice in order to kill SketchUp!
The WebApp is missing all Ruby Plugins & Extensions … and people need to re-learn again the software (the GUI of course). Moreover, internet connection isn’t fast and always available in all Region in the world… we need a standalone software. A lot of my students doesn’t understand why this change of view for SKP! SKP MAKE and SKP PRO are the best solutions Trimble could follow… and the ever-grow numbers of installation and users worldwide confirm what I’m saying.
I think I posted a link earlier to how ProVUE Development is now doing such a thing with their database program, Panorama. You buy credits and then use them up. If you use the software constantly, a “year’s worth” will last you a year, but if you use it infrequently, it will last you longer. Conversely, you can also use more than one copy at a time if you need to. That way the feature set is the same for everyone, but those who aren’t pros who use it every day don’t have to pay up as much.
@CJT1963 and @DanRathbun I think adding themes is a great request on several levels. After many years of requests, SU finally has an accessibility menu Preferences geared toward making SU easier on colorblind eyes. Usability and eye health are important. I recently installed f.lux, that incrementally warms the monitor display as the sun sets, on my desktop to spare my eyes from excessive blue light and use a good monitor.
But it sounds like Dan has started SU Free’s first extension, albeit limited to use in the Chrome browser. I’ve been wondering for a bit how many other custom browser extensions can enhance SU Free functionality. Something like adding a Logitech mouse driver to Chromebooks via the Chrome Web Store so SU keyboard shortcuts can be added buttons on a gaming mouse or even run a 3dconnexion navigator. People in the Chromebook product forum have been pining to use cordless mice and enhanced mouse function for years - but needs a driver. Then one starts to wonder if specific SU tools can be added via the Chrome Web Store…
I feel it’s right to expect a lot. The Pixelbook 2 (the high-end Chromebook) is “…approaching parity with the Mac and Windows” to at least one Forbes reviewer who compared one Macbook Pro model to the Pixelbook as well as several other reviewers. The web ‘limitation’ is becoming less of an issue. Yah, the Pixelbook 2 is around 1000 USD. But it doesn’t seem that long ago when a good price for a HD was gauged to be a dollar per MB (back in the Win 98 days). Fast forward to today when a 1 TB Seagate SSD HDD hybrid drive cost me 76 USD.
Anyone here going to miss 32-bit NVidia drivers? Apparently those are going bye-bye after this month. Things are changing. Accordingly, I think I will be aiming my expectations for SU Free quite high.
I was very sad to see that SketchUp Make didn’t have an update in 2018. So I checked out the free web based app and this is my feedback:
It looks great. I love the interface.
I like the fact that I don’t have to install software on my PC or laptop.
Unfortunately it works slow. Annoyingly slow. When I save…oooh. I just want to get out of it.
Downloading my work takes a long time. I have to open Trimble Connect. It is very slow… And my internet connection is fantastic. I download files with with a speed of around 25Mb/s.
Working in the web app is also slow. The render is slower on web than it is in the desktop version(Make). I have a GTX960, an octa core processor, 16gb of RAM and a SSD.
It doesn’t have keyboard shortcuts for the tools.
In my experience, working with the web app is generally a bad experience. It is hard to use, despite its pretty interface. I will reinstall Make and use it for as much as I can.
Please, if you can, drop the web version and support the free desktop version of SketchUp.
Thanks for the feedback, and by all means continue using SketchUp Make as long as you like. We’re still early in the development of SketchUp Free and we have quite a bit of work still left to do. Thanks for giving our new baby a close look.
Performance is difficult to judge, but I assume you’ve come to the conclusion you reached by comparing the performance of SketchUp Make directly against SketchUp Free using the same model, same computer, &etc?
We do the same kind of tests internally, though I haven’t yet got a formal announcement to make about comparative performance. Our expectation going into the development project was that we would lose quite a lot of raw performance by running through the browser; recent developments with WebAssembly have surprised our team with their execution speed. Javascript executes slower than native compiled code, but not really by that much. Graphics performance (via WebGL instead of native OpenGL) is very near to native in most cases.
Performance while saving and opening models will depend on your network topology and on your physical proximity to our datacenter. It will always be slower to load a model over a network than it is to open it from your local disk, but we have the ability to take advantage of your local browser cache to manage that latency. Modern cloud infrastructure (we’re using Amazon’s) is pretty amazing at rebalancing itself dynamically to maximize performance.
Of course, if you have exceptionally large/complex models, your experience may vary. And for that reason, we’re keeping our old desktop applications available to everyone in addition to SketchUp Free.
We do support all of SketchUp’s default keyboard shortcuts (some caveats apply: the browser ‘steals’ a couple of them in ways that we can’t yet work around) but maybe what you’re really hoping to see is a system for managing your own custom shortcuts?
In principle I see the logic in the comment. But wouldn’t that further increase the R&D expenditure as well as long term running costs for a limited use application?
However, the Trimble Development Team already has some experience with Chromium, as they’ve already compiled it for the SketchUp Ruby API’s new UI::HtmlDialog class.
I think creating a small application that is really just a wrapper for a browser engine could fix a number of Free’s issues. The window chrome with address bar, tabs, links and all that noise would be cleaned away. Shortcut collisions would be solved, and, maybe most of all, it would feel like a proper application and not a web app.
I think Spotify uses this technology.
For users this could be an alternative to run in in a tab in their browser.
@jbacus, It seems to be much more responsive to orbit and drawing, than it does under full blown Chrome. And much faster loading as well! (Old Toshiba Satellite i5 notebook with Intel HD4400 graphics.)
Although copy and paste from the dialog into SketchUp proper is a “no go”.
I understand the desire to move toward cloud based program in order to stop people from using it for commercial purposes even though those people will figure out a work around anyway ( Like Warez! ) and It’s all well and great that Sketchup is trying to get SUFree to run extensions and perhaps the 3D Connection mouse so that it’s comparable to SUMake!
But the real question still remains, how does any of this solve the problem for those of us with “no or slow at best” internet access?
My vote!
Keep SUFree
Keep SUPro
Add a (paid) lite version for those of us that don’t need and can’t justify paying for all the features of Pro but who still need the ability to use without internet access!
If you remember the early history of Adobe Photoshop, you might recall that they implemented their own virtual memory system before the Macintosh operating system did. That’s how they were able to handle large images with rich color palettes as early in the development of the platform as they did. Well before any other application could do the same. Not quite like implementing their own OS, but similar in some ways.
The only thing I have remaining of my first PowerMac is a screenshot of a Photoshop error message:
“The Photoshop Accelerator for Power Macintosh requires a PowerPC 601 processor. It will not run on your totally cool new whizbang hardware.”
Yes, I had a PowerPC 602 processor, if remembering right. The “accelerator”, I think, was just another of Adobe’s enroachmentsin the OS’s territory.
Yes, manage custom shortcuts comes first - as far as issues related to keyboard shortcuts are concerned.
(Browsers have a bunch of keyboard shortcuts. A few of those browser shortcuts are the same as some of the default shortcuts in SU. At this time, browser app developers cannot override browser shortcuts. Give this issue enough time, this limitation should change.)
