If you don’t want to spend anything on software and are willing to adapt to “cloud” software you will be able to design, engineer and plan just about anything without spending a penny.įive years is a long, long time in the software business and earlier this year SketchUp stopped offering downloads of SketchUp Make 2017. The interface looks different, and there aren’t as many options as the desktop version but it is fully functional and performs well. The image at right is one of my models in the current online version of SketchUp. Because the computer that actually runs the model is somewhere else, SketchUp Free can run on a bare bones Chromebook or laptop. The first (and best) example that comes to mind is in public schools.
I’m not keen on software that doesn’t live on my machine, but there are situations where software that lives in the cloud makes sense. In 2017 the company announced that SketchUp Make 2017 would be the last iteration of a free version that users could download and install on their own computers, but a free version would be available online. The “free” desktop version of SketchUp was still available but as the years passed the emphasis shifted to more “encouragement” to use the paid “SketchUp Pro”. A few years later, in 2012 Google sold the company to Trimble Navigation and the business model changed.
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People could learn how to use the software without any expense, people who needed the features of the paid version could upgrade when they were ready, and enough “pro” licenses were sold to keep the wheels turning.
The biggest difference between the two versions was the types of files that could be imported and exported. I liked the business model there was a very functional free version and a “pro” version. When my book “Woodworker’s Guide to SketchUp” was first published in 2010, Google was included in the name. When I first started 3D modeling with SketchUp, the software company that developed it, had been recently acquired by Google.
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