If the cost is too great to be included, these features could be in additional modules which could be purchased separately. Including the improvements made to Make, you should add some professional tools to create B-Spline & Bezier Curves, Architect and/or Woodworking building tools, simple rendering, UV control, real animation, GPS/GIS and procedural support and more. Next develope the Pro version into a real 3D product. I bet a large number of former free users will pay for this version. Charge people a reasonable price, say $50-$125 cdn. Apple controls their apps/games to improve reliability, do you not control the extension warehouse? Add some features (at the minimum, the extensions developed by Sketchup) and develope Make into a consumer level product. You should only allow extensions that are fully tested, alone and in combination. Despite Microsoft trying their best to ruin things, Sketchup should be (after all these years) alot more stable than it is, isn’t it time to fix it? I believe it is time to upgrade the display, it looks to me like 256 bit VGA. I would recommend, bring back Make and continue with the online version. There are significant security barriers in place that are very difficult for malicious folks to bypass. You might argue that using a client application inherently protects you from attacks, but unless you’re also isolating your system from the internet as a whole (never connecting to shared networks, never installing software, never opening email attachments, &etc.) you are still vulnerable.Ĭloud computing, especially on devices like Google’s Chromebooks, really can protect you and your data very effectively. Storing your data in a professionally run data center (like those we operate on Amazon’s infrastructure) means you get access to much more advanced anti-intrusion measures than you’re likely to be able to manage as an individual. For example, the WannaCry ransomware attack.
Less frequently reported, though undeniably more widespread, are the regular intrusions into personal computers and private data centers that are also happening with distressing regularity. There have certainly been some high-profile security breaches of cloud services in the news lately. I don’t even consider using an online only application of any kind. That’s really the best way to steer SketchUp Free into becoming what you want it to become. If not, I’m open to talking about why and what workarounds are available in the meantime. While we work hard to keep SketchUp both as simple and powerful as possible, remember the words of Thelonius Monk “Simple ain’t easy.” If you speak up about the features you’re missing, you may find we can add them without much fuss. Because we’re careful, old builds of SketchUp stay viable for a very long time. If there are SketchUp features you depend on but can’t find in SketchUp Free, you can always switch back to the desktop application. Given we can’t yet reach 100% feature parity between our SketchUp desktop applications (SketchUp Make and Pro) and browser-based versions like SketchUp Free and SketchUp for Schools, we’ve kept stable builds of SketchUp Make (2017, 2016, 2015) available to everyone for free as well. You should expect to see things change over time, but we’ll never deliberately leave anyone without a way to use SketchUp. But we do recognize the importance of universal access to SketchUp’s core modeling features and see the value in sharing them as widely as our business will support. Not all aspects of that model are appropriate to discuss in a public forum like this one. I think it is natural to speculate about the business model that supports our development work. If there are specific questions you’d like answered, I will answer them as specifically as I am able. Also know that there are members of that team (me, for example) who have been working on SketchUp for more than a decade and a half. Please know that the full SketchUp Free team follows threads in this forum. Thanks for the continuing thoughts, everyone.