Sketchup Blog - News and Notes from the Sketchup folks
Showing posts with label Developers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Developers. Show all posts

Introducing Paid Extensions in Extension Warehouse

Today, we're pleased to announce that Extension Warehouse has just crossed into the realm of fully functional app store. This means that in addition to the hundreds of fantastic SketchUp extensions that are freely available, you can now purchase and install paid extensions directly through Extension Warehouse, in just a few clicks.

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Now, Extension Warehouse lets you purchase and install paid extensions from SketchUp developers.

We hope that enabling the sale of paid extensions will be a game changer for SketchUp users and developers alike. Users get direct access to awesome paid extensions that streamline modeling workflows. Developers get an awesome E-commerce platform with access to millions of customers who are looking for great modeling utilities and add-on tools. Win-win? We think so.

It’s worth noting that credit card transactions are processed securely by the same store platform we use to sell SketchUp licenses. And we’re using the same licensing platform that SketchUp uses. Each extension is still carefully moderated by the SketchUp Extensibility team to ensure quality and security. So, the purchase process for extensions is as smooth and safe as buying SketchUp Pro.

Initially, you’ll find the following paid extensions now available through Extension Warehouse:

We're adding new free and paid extensions every week; keep tabs on the newest extensions by following SketchUp on Twitter, Facebook, or Google+, or by browsing Extension Warehouse for new products from your favorite developers.

If you are a developer, our new E-commerce platform means that instead of spending a major portion of your time implementing your own licensing system, maintaining your own store front or worrying about how you’ll process your transactions, you can focus on developing great tools for SketchUp. For more information on distributing extensions check out our developer center.


Posted by Bryce Stout, Product Manager

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A Ruby Debugger for SketchUp 2014

As most SketchUp Ruby extension developers would agree, debugging has always been a bit of a pain. In the past, there have been a few community projects that added debuggers to SketchUp, but these were often difficult to set up and some were abandoned over time. The rest of the Ruby community enjoys debugging with Integrated Development Environments (IDE) such as RubyMine, NetBeans and Aptana RadRails. All of these generally rely on various gems to be installed for remote debugging. Getting these gems to work within SketchUp’s embedded Ruby is usually non-trivial.

This week, we’re taking a small step towards making debugging for SketchUp extensions a bit easier. At 3D Basecamp 2014, we’ve announced an open source Ruby debugger framework. You’ll find the source code for this project hosted under our GitHub account:

https://github.com/SketchUp/sketchup-ruby-debugger

We currently support Windows only but you can expect Mac support soon. Setting it up is easy:
Simply grab SURubyDebugger.dll from GitHub and copy it into your SketchUp installation directory: C:\Program Files (x86)\SketchUp\SketchUp 2014
Launch SketchUp with the following command line arguments:
SketchUp.exe -rdebug "ide port=1234"
The port should match the remote debugger port setting configured in the IDE.
SketchUp will start up and appear to be frozen. It is waiting for the debugger to show up.
Launch remote debugging in the IDE, SketchUp should continue running. You should see breakpoints hit when Ruby code execution reaches the specified lines.

If you are unfamiliar with installing and configuring the IDEs, we’ve posted some step-by-step instructions in the GitHub repository wiki.

We still have a few TODOs (such as multi-thread debugging, breakpoint conditions and exception breakpoints), so if you are versed in Ruby’s C API, please contribute to the project.

Happy debugging!


Posted by Bugra Barin, Software Engineer

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