SketchUp

A few words about SketchUp would be appropriate now (I use Sketchup in my Genetic-house project for final processing and visualisation).

I consider SketchUp the best drawing software I've ever seen, period.

I have some 25 years of experience with computers and software. It started with the 8-bit Sinclair ZX-81, then came it's more powerful brother ZX-Spectrum, then Commodore 64, and then a countless armada of PCs... you can imagine I've tried and used lots of software of every kind.

From my personal experience I know that by far the most difficult thing in software is to make things simple but still powerful (that I call good abstraction). It's very easy to make complex things. To add features, to expand functionality. Anyone knows how to do that. But complex software can be either painful to use or even completely useless.

The other danger is to make things too simple. One of the Murphy's Laws, called Shaw's Principle, says: Build a system that even a fool can use, and only a fool will want to use it. That I call bad abstraction.


To keep powerful things simple to use, that's far from trivial. And SketchUp is both quite powerful as well as incredibly simple to use.

When discussing SketchUp with my colleagues, most of them point out, that SketchUp in not as powerful as the classic CAD software (e.g. AutoCAD). That's not a very good comparison; AutoCAD (a great software too, no doubt) is primarily a drafting tool, while SketchUp is used for - 3d sketching and modeling in the design conception phase.

But consider this: SketchUp can build up functionality and new features while it can remain simple to use; it's authors have demonstrated they master the good abstraction lore. On the other hand, it's virtually impossible for AutoCAD (or any other) to become much simpler - unless they start all over again, but then it wouldn't be the same software anymore.