About
About SketchUp Power Tools
SketchUp Power Tools is a monthly/bimonthly journal to help you use SketchUp more powerfully. This is a website about SketchUp Power Tools.
A “periodical”
SketchUp Power Tools is an experiment in publishing. It’s a “periodical” because it will be published periodically. Plans call for a new major article every week or 10 days. It’s experimental because it is designed for the Internet, not for paper. Articles won’t be all jigsawed together and trimmed to fit like they have to be with paper publishing. That affects a lot of things.
One of the great benefits of periodicals like newsletters, magazines, and journals is that in each package you get articles on a wide variety of topics. You get information that is of interest and value that you didn’t specifically look for. You get that in SketchUp Power Tools volumes.
By subscription
When you subscribe to SketchUp Power Tools, you will regularly receive articles on a wide variety of different subjects, all of interest to SketchUp users. Your subscription is not based on the calendar, it is based on “volumes” of articles, typically four or five major articles plus some smaller ones.
Traditional periodicals are distributed using paper, print, postage, and petrol. That dictates their design and controls their content, defining what they are and what you get. Articles must be trimmed to fit the space available, always a multiple of two pages, or four, eight, or 16 pages. And it won’t be sent to you until the package is filled and printed.
In paper magazines, the current issue or volume is the most recently completed one, the one currently on the newsstands, or wherever. For SketchUp Power Tools, the current volume is the one currently being assembled.
When you subscribe to SketchUp Power Tools, you pre-pay for the current volume, or the next five volumes. Articles in a volume may be sent to you separately or together, or some of each. At the time you subscribe, the current volume may already have some finished articles. You get those right away. And because you’re subscribing, you get them at the pre-publication, whole volume, subscription discount, even though they are already finished. As the rest of the articles in the volume are completed, you get those too, as soon as they are done.
A volume is “complete” when it has “enough” material in it. That decision is up to the Editor. When a volume is declared to be complete, it’s pricing changes. You can buy the individual articles from completed volumes, or you can buy the whole volume with a whole volume discount (but no longer the pre-publication discount).
Filling a gap
SketchUp Power Tools fills in the gap between the huge number of volunteer-written, SketchUp tutorials and the growing number of SketchUp books that attempt to cover everything in a single volume.
Why books don’t work
To sell enough copies to justify paper and print production, books have to try to be all-encompasing and cannot do anything really deeply — “deeply” has a limited audience. A book has to sell about 10,000 copies before the author sees a penny more than the publisher’s relatively small advance payment — which often means that an author works for less than minimum wage.
The economics, the financial and schedule pressure, push book authors to skim over the top, to touch as many topics as possible, but there is little incentive to dig deep. A book that covers everything cannot provide detailed explanations, demonstrations, and step-by-step instructions.
Not only are the financial incentives against that kind of detail, books are limited by page count just like traditional periodicals. For a prime example, Aidan Chopra’s Google SketchUp For Dummies had a Chapter 13 in the the 2007 edition. In 2009, when updating the book for SketchUp 7, Aiden had to leave that chapter out, “for space reasons.”
Volunteer authors are just that
There are a wide variety of volunteer-written tutorials, text and illustrations on blogs and forums, demonstration files to download, and videos on YouTube. Occaisionally an author is inspired, or has another incentive for covering a topic deeply, but most volunteer tutorials are short demonstrations that only go as deep as a volunteer has time and energy for.
Most volunteer tutorial authors don’t have the time or the inclination to cover narrow topics in real depth. Their typical goal is to demonstrate a technique as simply and as quickly as possible. Many are very good and very useful. Many leave readers and video viewers frustrated at their incompleteness.
The perfect middle ground
What’s needed, to cover focussed topics in depth, is comprehensive articles by a paid author (or authors) — paid to provide motivation to make each article as comprehensive as possible to give readers real value.
Because this is the internet and because this is a global economic crisis, the cost of each must be kept small, while the depth of the articles should make the price well worth it if the narrow topic is of interest to you. By bundling a range of articles on different topics into a volume or issue, the price for each article can be kept even lower while also offering readers material on topics they might not have picked out individually. By discounting for pre-paid subscriptions, the price can go even lower.
By not being distributed on paper with a pre-planned press run, a journal no longer has to massage its material to fit into 16 or 40 pages, articles can be just as long as they need to be, illustrations don’t come at the expense of explanitory text, research does not have to be trimmed to get enough titles into the volume’s table of contents.
What’s in this?
SketchUp Power Tools articles will be about using SketchUp in high-powered, effective, efficient ways. Topics will come from the real-world frequent questions on the Google SketchUp Group and the SketchUcation Community Forum, and they will come from readers of SketchUp Power Tools.
Regular features
SketchUp Power Tools will include regular features on:
- “Pro-for-Free” — showing you how to get the results of SketchUp Pro using SketchUp Free together with other programs.
- “Starting Ruby” — simple ways of breaking the ice and using the powerful features of the Ruby language to customize your SketchUp experience.
- “Inside PhotoMatch” — exploring how to get the most of this powerful feature, especially when your project doesn’t match the tidy examples in the tutorials.
How do I get this?
Periodic volumes will be available at a pre-publication discount by subscription. After publication, volumes and many individual articles will be available for purchase. Volumes will be cheaper than the individual articles, one at a time. Pre-publication subscriptions will always be the best value.
Published individual articles will be in the $5, $7, $8, or $10, depending on length and complexity. Monthly volumes of four or five major articles will be $19 pre-publication, $25 after.
Subscription discounts
Subscriptions to the next five volumes will be $65, the next 10 volumes, $110. For a very limited time, charter subscriber can get five volumes for $50 or 10 volumes for $80. If you’ll take a risk on me, before this is really off the ground, you should see something extra.
Prices are still subject to change because the purchase and delivery mechanisms are not set up yet.
When there are enough published articles to warrant it, collections of related articles will also be available as Topic Volumes.
Free to take it and run
All articles will have approximately 1/4 of the article available for free, with enough information contained in the introduction that if you are of an experimental mind and enjoy that kind of thing, you can probably figure the rest out for yourself.
For those who don’t enjoy experimenting or are simply in a hurry, the full articles will have lots and lots of explanations and step-by-step instructions to ensure that you can make the concepts work for you, quickly and easily. Each article will also have its own discussion thread for questions and updates.
Is this real?
The July 2009 volume currently has these articles in the works:
- “Too Many Rubies” — An overview of existing plugin-management plugins plus detailed usage guides.
- “Plugins by the Checkbox” — The SketchUp Registered Extensions mechanism and how you can use it with any plugin. A useful beginner project in Ruby.
- “Weights and Dashes” — Generating various line widths and dash styles for mechanical drawings in SketchUp Free. The article includes both a Styles file and a drawing Template.
- “Pulling Panels” — Creating a hotkey that automatically pulls shapes to a standard plywood thickness. A useful beginner project in Ruby.
- “Google SketchUp Cookbook” — A free review of Bonnie Roskes’ new book from O’Reilly. Amazon and the publisher can tell you about the book, but neither one will give you the information you need that lets you know if this is the right book for you and to save your money if it’s not (now more important than ever).
Suggestions for additional topics are welcome.
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