All that complaining I was making about the parlous state of 3d rendering packages is still true; however, I have discovered that there is at least one exception to the rule.
Google Sketchup is actually surprisingly userfriendly, makes generally good guesses as to what direction you're trying to move in (as 2d projections are always ambiguous), and has a whole set of almost-intuitive behaviours regarding tools (there's a simple extrude tool as a basic option, the tape measure doubles as a guide-line maker and a scaling tool, and all tools colour-code themselves as a cue to the location they think you're in - a corner, edge, midpoint or face).
It is a beautiful beautiful thing. A pity it appears to be Windows only (I wonder how well it works in Wine...).
3 comments:
As far as I am aware, all Google's supposed Linux applications just use Wine. They don't appear to bother properly porting them and the end result is usually a little poor.
In fact, it's not even that good, Andy.
Google Sketchup apparently doesn't work in Wine without some tweaking and modification. And, even then, you seem to be missing some of the functionality.
So much for Google's "Do no evil", eh?
Google Desktop and Earth for Linux are both fully native, no Wine anywhere near them.
Sketchup seems to be working reasonably well on Wine these days, see
wiki.winehq.org/GoogleSketchup
for tips on how to get past known
issues.
If you run into new problems, please leave a bug report there so the Wine project can try to fix them.
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