*Updated 5/6/10

The Model Location plugin created by Jim on the Sketchup [Plugins] Blog is a simple plugin to specify the location of your model. It seems to work well, though we do not have the tools to test it’s accuracy. The plugin does not really come with any explanation and can be a little frustrating to figure out.

The menu comes with 8 fields/options. The first two are for your informational purposes, they don’t really affect anything much. Then you need to input your latitude and longitude which can be found fairly easily online (we used itouchmap.com to find the values). Then you need to input the time zone, this was a little tricky as the plugin does not really explain this. But basically you count using a general timezone map from the “international date line”, to the right you go in the negative direction and left positive. We could be wrong on this but this is how we think it works. The daylight savings option specifies if your region abides by daylight savings standards (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time)*. And then you can specify the North location with an angle and choose to display it or not. It displays as an orange line on your SketchUp window. We are not sure if these directions are 100% correct but we believe it is, please comment if you observe that this plugin works otherwise.

It is suggested to set this up once and then create it as a template so these options are saved on all future drawings. And note that two plugins are needed for it to work, the model_location.rb and inputbox.rb.

Overall, The Model Location plugin created by Jim is a useful plugin, granted if it works correctly. At the time of this review this plugin is free and is available at the Sketchup [Plugins] Blog. I give this plugin 3.5 out 5 stars.