As you may have seen on social media or the SketchUp Blog, this year’s version of the desktop (Pro) version just got an update (2023.1). Here’s what’s new and noteworthy from my perspective:
- New icons. Given the use of new icons in the web and the iPad apps, this was definitely coming, so it should not be a surprise for anyone. While the old icons had a great run, this visual refresh was overdue.
TIP:
If you feel nostalgic for the old icons and want to keep them around (e.g. for a future craft project), go to the C:\Program Files\SketchUp\SketchUp 2023\Images folder and save all of the svg files somewhere before upgrading SketchUp to the latest version.
- Snaps. This is a very interesting feature because it allows you to set up snaps on objects (groups or components). Those then allow you to join those groups in an aligned fashion in one operation instead of copy-move-rotate placements. One example for where this is helpful is aligning piping parts.
- Auto-associated auto-text labels in LayOut. This is a great improvement. While you needed to manually associate those up until now, you can from this version onward just drop, place, and forget those.
There are also some smaller but equally useful additions:
- Horizon color. A duo-tone sky in your modeling environment… nice!
- Custom flip planes in the recently introduced flip tool.
- Better rendering control in LayOut
- Improved scrapbooks in LayOut
- Polygonal lasso selection
There has been one reduction in functionality too (or rather a realignment): Scaled and tiled printing options were removed from the desktop version of SketchUp. That was never overly well implemented and with those tasks being much more controllable in LayOut, this move makes sense. You can still print the current (unscaled) view in the desktop version, though. And you have the option to print to scale in the web version.
You can find the complete list of feature changes and fixes here. Upgrade to the latest version with the Help > Check for Update menu item and try all of these out for yourself.
Below are also some videos that give you a good introduction into what is new…