Quote:
Originally Posted by josevalenzuela752@gm
There hasn't been a posting on this thread in a while. Are there any updates on other computer designs?
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Well, I can say this: Trimble released a note about the newest release of Sketchup and the early reviews are ... not good. The email I received was primarily to explain the new pricing plan for the Pro version. They have switched to a subscription model so you can no longer buy the software and use it indefinitely. Now you pay an annual fee and if you stop paying the fee, the software stops working. I could find no information on whether the previously free version of Sketchup Make will still be available.
Other than the new pricing, there seems to be very few new features. There were so many upset users complaining about this that I just stopped reading the reviews online. The biggest complaint is that Sketchup has fallen behind other apps that are far better at handling very large files without slowing down.
One of these other apps is Blender, which is free and
immensely powerful. It's an open source app that has a lot of industry support, so it keeps getting new features and those features are really useful.
I've tried Blender a bit and it's very good, but it has a
steep learning curve and the controls are mostly unintuitive. It looks like a Linux app, so Mac users will struggle to understand why the menus are scattered all over the place instead of at the top of the screen. But the advantage here is that no matter what platform you use it on (Mac, Windows, Linux), you will get the same interface.