What?s New in Extension Warehouse 2.0

One of the most beloved and favored 3D modeling and designing software is Trimble SketchUp. It is immensely popular not only among professionals but also with amateurs as well, thanks to its simple interface, easy-to-learn tools, comparatively cheap pricing, and great performance. However, arguably the most effective reason for SketchUp?s popularity would be its awesome flexibility and adaptiveness.

Trimble SketchUp achieves this by enabling users to attach ?extensions? or ?plug-ins? with the mother software, which augment its functionality to no end. These extensions can be developed by professionals as well as amateurs and change or upgrade the way you can draw in SketchUp, or improve its performance, or provide new resources to play with, or even connect to external software for additional support.

Many developers choose to host these extensions on their own site. However, the most common location to find the best SketchUp extensions is at the Extension Warehouse. The Extension Warehouse is an online resource full of plug-ins developed especially for SketchUp. The extensions are neatly categorized and presented here. When you wish to install a given plugin, just download the corresponding RBZ file and use your SketchUp?s Extension Manager tool to assimilate it.

One word of note here that support for plugins is not enabled in the Free or Shop versions of SketchUp. Only SketchUp Pro and above supports plugins, opening up a whole new world of customization for you. Whether you are an artist or an architect, the Extension Warehouse will have the right plugins, often a whole bunch of them, to set up your SketchUp in the way that best fits you, offering you the tools that you really need above and beyond SketchUp?s default toolset.

In their neverending quest to bring you the features that you need most and tools that make your designing and rendering efforts much easier, the Trimble team has just launched a few awesome improvements and enhancements that are sure to bring you a bundle of joy into your workflow. Let us see what are the new stuff in the Extension Warehouse 2.0.

Easier Search Functions

The whole site has got a facelift from the home page to plugin lists. The search function is much more obvious and usable now. Two new sections have been added, the first one featuring the most popular extensions till then, and the other one displaying handpicked featured extensions the team thinks users should be most benefited by. These convenient features will certainly help most users, especially first-timers.

Performance Tweaks

The Trimble team has built up the Extension Warehouse from the ground up, using a better-modulated engine. Also, the server capabilities have been tinkered with for faster result delivery. As a result, you will have the maximum performance experience while in the SketchUp Extension Warehouse.

Better Filtering

A plethora of new search filters have been set up for your convenience. Now you can search extensions by various criteria, for example, operating system compatibility, SketchUp compatibility, cost, category, most recently updated version and many more. Not only that, now you can use the same parameters to sort your results by as well. How?s that for freedom of search! You will be able to search faster and more accurately while comparing your preference to other similar results.

Merged ?Industries? and ?Categories?

Previously, there were two distinct parameters for categorizing the extensions by, namely ?industries? and ?categories?. Now, the developers wised up to change it into just one parameter: ?Category?. This would help a lot in filtering what you need exactly and ignore the unneeded extensions. The new merged categories will also help the developers to categorize new plugins more accurately.

Extra Support for Developers

The Trimble team did not forget about extension developers. With a total overhaul of the extension submission process, publishing new content should get much easier now. They are welcoming feedback in order to make the Extension Warehouse even better.

Personal Model Organization at a New Level

The team is vastly remodeling the content organization process. First of all, the multi-selection of components is now possible. The concept of Folders and Collections are also introduced here. Private collections are re-introduced as Folders. And Collections, from now on, will not display models from commercial sourcing, only personal models. This will help you remove duplicate and junk, and use original content. You can still add commercial models to a Collection or Folder by force. The Like button has been renamed to ?Favourite? and clicking it also adds that model into a private Folder.

Improved Profile

There will be some simplifications on the personal profile page. It will now be able to record your interests and demography so that the warehouse can provide you with more relevant and personalized content. Sure, it will take a little bit more time to finish setting up your profile but we are guessing that you will be glad to have done so. Also, you cannot download models from the Warehouse without signing in first.

What?s New in Extension Warehouse 2.0