Joining the SketchUp Community

On Sunday I joined the SketchUp Community forum. After introducing myself, I opened my first topic: Aplo: modelling tools that think in buildings.

It got one reply, from one of the forum's Advisers: how does the tool know it's a wall, and how does it behave when it meets a T or a corner? I answered, and the same person came back with a link to Profile Builder. It groups profiles into Assemblies, a layered wall the way Revit does it, and has a hole tool to cut openings through those walls. Then came the line I keep thinking about:

The moment you start categorizing, that's the moment you start loosing a bit of 'freedom' …

Profile Builder looks impressive, and what impresses me is how generic it is: one idea, the profile, pushed to so many use cases. That's what fascinates me about SketchUp in general. I want BIM, but I also want the freedom of generic modelling, and when I design a tool I'm pulled between the two.

It's also a pattern. Every few days I discover another extension, some of them extensive, long-established and well maintained, and each time I stop and look for the gaps to work out where Aplo is going. Am I solving problems that are already solved? What I keep coming back to is the user experience. Many extensions are powerful but complex, hard to learn, and each one does its own thing.

Revit is no model here. Its parametric families are difficult to use and slow: you get a list of parameters and that's it. Most of what I find in SketchUp works the same way, but SketchUp lets me build a properly custom experience. So in the modelling tools there's one tool for a corner join, Trim/Extend to Corner, and it should just work, do the right thing and follow SketchUp's conventions.

I really like the forum, by the way. No algorithm, a dedicated professional community, and simple. It's so much better than social media.

Right now I'm adding radius support to corner joins, still in that one tool.