Sketchup Pro doesn’t offer revisioning other than silently remembering some version of the state of the model if the app crashes. This is of little help if you bugger things up in some other way and want to get back to a prior state of the model. Consequently, I tend to build models in new directories for each model or related set of models and Save As versions as I go, e.g. “drum stand 01”, “drum stand 02”, etc.
Here’s the problem: why doesn’t the app remember the directory the current model file exists in? It always wants to take me to the directory the app started up in, rather than that for the model itself. This is unnecessarily clumsy. Aside from going to the “Recent Places” menu on the dialog (which requires positive action on my part), manually navigating to the right directory (which is really annoying), or starting the app on the one model I’m working on (why?), why can’t the app remember the directory the model lives in and go there, always?
A user option for this would just be cluttering the Preferences window and cause confusion when you go between computers with different settings, especially when not knowing about the setting. Save As should always show the directory of the current document if saved, and only show the default location for models not already saved.
The current behavior fails the “principle of least surprise”: if you opened a file in a certain directory, why doesn’t a “Save As” save in that same directory?. Dumping everything into a single directory is bad practice from a management standpoint, let alone a recovery standpoint. (I continue to be baffled by SketchUp’s lack of revisioning functionality, which if it existed would obviate my feature request here.) Given that I don’t migrate between computers, the scenario you posit is a non-starter.
Why isnt Sketchup implementing such easy things? I mean, Im just interessted in it, because I need a work around for a bug of SU Scan Essentials, but I dont see them handling such bugs aswell. Bummer.