I just noticed something familiar in the images in Google’s latest blog post on the Turner Construction SketchUp Pro casestudy: That window in the right side of the screen is of course my Ruby Code Editor plugin!

Great to see it put to such good use. Google’s post shows nicely how Turner uses SketchUp Pro for estimating, steel layout planning and other tasks (some related to the WTC Transit Hub project) and even write their own plugins to do so. You can read the original post(s) here:

Official Google SketchUp Blog: Pro Case Study: Turner Construction and the WTC, Part 2

One of these old macs was standing around in our hallway at the office – waiting for its trip to the dump. So I rescued it, gave it a fresh coat of paint and decided it was time to green things up a little. Here’s the process:

No real Ivy was hurt in the making of this! It’s fake Ivy from Michael’s – that way I don’t have to water it…

A standard has finally been approved for CLT (Cross-Laminated Timber), a new structural wood product that can be used either as a wall or as a slab. From the APA press release:

ANSI/APA PRG 320-2011 Standard for Performance-Rated Cross-Laminated Timber, a new standard for cross-laminated timber (CLT), was approved for publication last month by by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI).  is a prefabricated solid engineered wood panel made from at least three layers of solid-sawn lumber or structural composite lumber (SCL) that are stacked cross-wise and bonded together with structural adhesives to form a solid, rectangular-shaped panel that is intended for construction applications, including roofs, floors and walls in residential and non-residential buildings. Orthogonally bonding the layers increases the structural and dimensional stability of the product as a slab or wall.

Find out more about this product and download the standard’s text here:

• New Standard for Cross-Laminated Timber Approved by ANSI | APA – The Engineered Wood Association
• A primer on CLT by NaturallyWood

Current suppliers in North America:

• CST Innovations, New Westminster, BC, Canada
• Nordic EWP, Montreal, QC, Canada
• Structurlam, Penticton, BC, Canada

The following is a cross-post from my other site http://sketchupplugins.com. When you are done creating your new plugin, feel free to add it to the index on http://sketchupplugins.com. It’s free and easy.

Learn Plugin Developement

There are many tutorials, resources and forums available online that will help you get started. Use the following list as a springboard:

• Hello world!
• Distributing your plugin
• SketchUp API documentation
• SketchUp Ruby Cheatsheet
• Official SketchUp API Blog
• SketchUp Ruby Resources
• Ruby Code Snippets
• Ruby Documentation

You can also find great forums for discussion in the official Google Developer Forum or at SketchUcation.

The following concerns plugins written in Ruby (the programming language included with SketchUp’s free and Pro versions). It is a basic template to get you started. Also note that SketchUp has a C++ SDK (in case you intend to work with it from other software).

Although you can use any text editor to create a plugin, it might be a good idea to install my Ruby Code Editor plugin into SketchUp first. This allows you to experiment with Ruby scripting. You can then afterwards package your code in a plugin using the instructions below.

RBZ Plugin File Structure

The RBZ file format was introduced in Maintenance Release 2 of Version 8. Packaging a plugin this way allows a user to easily install it from SketchUp’s Preferences dialog.

To enable use of the RBZ-installer functionality, all files that make up a plugin must be packaged in one single compressed file (note that the RBZ file is simply a re-named ZIP file). The following is a minimal sample file structure. You can add as many other files and folders as necessary for your plugin. The entire contents of the compressed file will get copied into SketchUp’s Plugins folder on installation.

my_plugin.rbz (compressed file)
  |
  |-- my_plugin_loader.rb
  |
  |-- my_plugin (directory)
        |
        |-- my_plugin.rb

As a reference: SketchUp’s default Plugin installation folder can be found here (replace version number with current major version):

Windows: C:\Program Files\Google\Google SketchUp 8\Plugins\
Mac: /Library/Application Support/Google SketchUp 8/SketchUp/Plugins/

Plugin Template

It is a good idea to a) use SketchUp’s extension system and b) wrap your plugin in a Ruby Module. Below is some sample code to get you started. Replace “my” with your initials to keep things clean.

Contents of /my_plugin_loader.rb (in main directory)

require "sketchup.rb"
require "extensions.rb"

# Load plugin as extension (so that user can disable it)

my_plugin_loader = SketchupExtension.new "My_Plugin Loader",
"my_plugin/my_plugin.rb"
my_plugin_loader.copyright= "Copyright 2011 by Me"
my_plugin_loader.creator= "Me, myself and I"
my_plugin_loader.version = "1.0"
my_plugin_loader.description = "Description of plugin."
Sketchup.register_extension my_plugin_loader, true

Contents of /my_plugin/my_plugin.rb (in subfolder)

=begin
Copyright 2010, Author
All Rights Reserved
THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS" AND WITHOUT ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, WITHOUT LIMITATION, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
License: AuthorsLicenseStatement
Author: AuthorName
Organization: AuthorAffiliationOrOrganizationIfAny
Name: ScriptName
Version: ScriptVersion
SU Version: MinimumSketchUpVersion
Date: Date
Description: ScriptDescription
Usage: ScriptUsageInstructions
History:
 1.000 YYYY-MM-DD Description of changes
=end

require "sketchup.rb"
# Main code (start module name with capital letter)
module My_module
 def self.my_method
# do something...
end
 def self.my_second_method
 # do something...
 end
end
# Create menu items
unless file_loaded?(__FILE__)
 mymenu = UI.menu("Plugins").add_submenu("My Plugin Collection")
 mymenu.add_item("My Tool 1") {My_module::my_method}
 mymenu.add_item("My Tool 2") {My_module::my_second_method}
 file_loaded(__FILE__)
end

Tip: If you prefer to not have your plugin’s source code visible, then you can use SketchUp’s Scrambler to encrypt Ruby files.