Starting with the tools I use myself

I should have started writing earlier, but anyway, here we are ...

I started building Aplo in mid-September where you'd expect someone with seventeen years of Revit behind them to start: with a wall. A proper Revit-style wall with real layers, materials, and all the rest of it.

At the same time I'm modelling our own house in SketchUp, and that model was already well under way. Working on both, I noticed I actually prefer modelling the walls directly. I enjoy the freedom of it, and there are things about BIM walls in SketchUp I simply don't miss — a joined corner showing a mitre line, for one.

What I did miss, very quickly, were the tools. While drawing the house I kept reaching for the same three things: joining two lines, trimming one back to another, and extending a line or face until it meets something.

There are extensions for some of this, and I haven't tried them all yet. But I want the same operation to work on a loose line, a grouped wall and, eventually, an Aplo wall. I don't want to stop and think about which kind of geometry I'm touching.

I have been working on some of those operations already in the context of the wall work. To join two walls I need to trim and extend them anyway. If I'm building that machinery, I'd rather make it useful on the rest of the model too than hide it inside one kind of wall.

I expect to shift focus a few times as I work through what feels right in the moment. At this point all the features and tools that I work on are based on my own usage as well as all the feedback that I received from my Revit customer base over the years. That's obviously not all relevant to Sketchup, so I'm looking forward to get my work as soon as possible in the hands of other Sketchup users to see what they are missing to make their work more effective and enjoyable.