About

Aplo is built by me, Michael Loistl. I have been making content and tools for architects since 2009, and drawing buildings for a long time before that.

I spent about twenty-five years as a Baumeister in Austria, and as far as I know, there is no clean English word for it: roughly a master builder, a licensed trade that covers designing a building, calculating it and running the site it goes up on. Drawings, structure, detailing, the people on the scaffold ... all of it.

Which means the drawing, the calculation and the site were one job, not three. I drew the detail, and some months later I was the one explaining it to the joiner who had to build it. That is a fast way to learn which lines on a drawing carry information and which ones are decoration.

Then I changed careers. Since 2011 I have been writing software, mostly Ruby. I never left the first trade behind, and in 2009 I started working with Revit. Out of that came revit-content.com — families, content and tooling, first for myself, then for architects and engineers doing the work I used to do.

In 2025 I moved to SketchUp, and I enjoy it far more than I expected to. It is fast, direct and forgiving in a way BIM packages are not, and it stays out of the way while you think.

What I miss is everything behind the geometry. After seventeen years of BIM I keep searching for things that are not there: a wall that knows its own layered structure, an opening that knows its head, jambs and sill, a model that can be scheduled rather than counted by hand.

To be honest, I am probably still thinking too much like Revit. I have a year in SketchUp, not a decade, and some of what I consider missing may just be something I have not discovered yet, or something SketchUp is right to do differently.

I'm working on all the modelling and architectural tools that I want to use myself. You can find all the toolset I work on in modelling and architecture.

I would rather be corrected early, which is why I am building Aplo in the open, and why I write down what I am making, what breaks and what I got wrong, in the journal. I would sooner hear about a wrong assumption now than ship a Revit impression of BIM.

---

Say hello

Aplo is in early beta: the modelling tools are free to download below, and the architecture tools follow. When paid plans open, the first hundred to subscribe keep the founding rate. Tell me the most tedious thing you do in SketchUp. Or what you miss. Or, just as useful, what I am missing. Write to me at michael@aplo.studio, or get each new entry by email.