SketchUcation News Update March 1 2009

SketchUcation is happy to (softly) announce its new website, which has been in development for some time.

A lot of time has been spent on what made SketchUcation popular in the first place – tutorials. And we’ve got a bunch of them ready for you to view (25 in total, with more on the way).

So let’s go over some of the new stuff.

First of all we have 3 levels of tutorials: Beginner, Intermediate and Advanced. Each level has a different color. Beginner is Grey, Intermediate is Blue and Advanced is Red.

Whenever you are viewing a tutorial, or a tutorial section, the color immediately reveals its level of required experience.

We also wanted to have some cool features in our tutorials. Things that help beginning users learn Google SketchUp even faster. And other things that are specifically useful for more experienced users.

For Beginner level tutorials we have something we call ToolClips. You may have seen these already on the previous Home page, in our tutorial examples. How they work is much like the Instructor panel in Google SketchUp. However, they only pop over when you hover your mouse over a tool icon, such as the Push/Pull tool icon.

What else is new?

The SketchUcation Community Forums are full of talented people. Author of the SketchUp Plugins blog and Ruby Discussions Moderator of the SCF Jim Foltz, has worked for some time on the ‘Extensions Index‘. In short, this is our attempt at indexing every script, plug-in, add-on and external application for Google SketchUp.

There are AJAX powered search features, narrowing down the results as you type. And you can search for different things as well, for example a script author or by tags.
In its current (Beta) state, it’s fairly straightforward. In the future we want to add the ability for developers to log in with their own profile and adding the ability to rate scripts. In a nutshell, all the features of Web 2.0.

Speaking of which, Web 2.0 has been the driving force behind the development of this new website. You can comment on our tutorials (registration required) and soon we’re also adding the ability to discuss tutorials in our forums. Seamlessly integrated.

Our Home page (which you’re currently reading) has also been revamped as you can see. It’s still in development as well and we may move some things up, down, left and/or right.

We wanted to have the most common and sought after features in one place, right where most folks enter SketchUcation, the Home page.

We hope you enjoy the new site and its content. If you have ideas or requests you can leave comments everywhere, or simply contact us directly.

More coming soon!

Short URL: http://news.sketchucation.com/?p=110