The straight dope-technically speaking:
the tgz file is just a compressed archive replacing the .sit, .sea .cpt .hqx on the mac osx, and .zip, .rar on the windows. It should decompress into an installer package (.mpkg), which in turn -when doubleclicked-starts the Mac OSX STANDARD Installer, and an interactive installation begins. Unlike the Sketchup installer, the skp2AC8 is NOT a disk image, from where you just drag the application package to your Application folder, but it is indeed a folder containing the installer package. It had to be compressed into a binary .tgz archive, in order to be downloadable from the web.
IF the tgz file is not expanding into the folder containing the package, then (as suggested to Peter in the direct e-mail earlier) he should go ahead and install Stuffit Standard (currently) 8.02 package, which will take care all the expanding and compressing needs.
As far as I can tell Peter' computer didn't pass the decompression step.
I'm surpized what @Last supposedly had to say about the plug-in, which is also localized into German and French lately. It is a bit demoralizing, especially when the problem which prompted the asking for expert opinion is with the decompression.
Once you get it working it works fine, however the installer itself is somewhat choosy, for the best results, the ArchiCAD installation should be conducted with sticking with the default location, and stay with the root volume (first disk, where the system is installed).
If you've kept reading so far down the message, you deserve some more technical details:)
-the installer is not really shining when one has to install 3 components: two into fixed locations (skptoxml tool into the /Library folder, SketchUpReader.Frameworks into the /Library/Frameworks folder), and one into a location where ArchiCAD happened to be installed (Into the Add-Ons folder, by default it goes into the Add-Ons/Import-Export folder whithin the ArchiCAD folder)
The installer is indeed under revision to make it more flexible when something is not at the default place, it has the capacity to execute after install scripts, but it was flaky and unreliable under 10.2
-so why is it 3 parts and not just the add-on? Because the sketchupreader is implemented as a mach-O framework (COM DLL on the windows side), and the ArchiCAD add-on is a CFM linked shared library. CFM and mach-O don't mix very well, so the plug-in has to execute a shell command to create and intermediate (XML) file, which is then read in by the plug-in and the ArchiCAD elements created.
But all these details only have entertainment value until the installer package is successfully uncompressed and the MacOSX Installer does its thing.
Maybe some local mac osX expert can be the cavalry- at least until firing up the installer and verifying that the components are in the right places.
Best Regards,
Ferenc
