I’ve been using Google SketchUp today. I’ve been sketching a design for a garden! It’s got some amazingly useful tools, and some fantastic features… and a couple of very strange and annoying bugs. See those vertical posts? They represent pergola-style gates that already exist in the garden — and they’re slightly different heights in the sketch (but not in real life). This is because:

1. The extrude feature wouldn’t let me extrude past the limit of the adjacent low wall in a single step. I would have to extrude to that height, then extrude again to the height I want, which I have to do by eye because...
2. The extrude numbers said, ‘-2.05m’ but when I told it to be ‘-2.0m’ the pole disappeared. Setting it to positive didn’t make any difference. In fact, typing in any value made the extrude go away.

OK, so it’s beta software, so you expect a few bugs, but these ones really detract from the experience.

And… just how crap is ADSL? Especially from Pipex! It drops every 30 minutes or so, and takes about a minute to come back up again… partly the fault of the modem, I’m sure. Bad netgear. Bad pipex. Evil bad PCWorld for selling my parents an adsl router modem thing that does so much stuff, and doesn’t do the main thing it’s supposed to do properly.