There are many areas of AutoCAD 2009’s new user interface that pointlessly waste your screen space. Floating toolbars do not. You have probably already noticed that AutoCAD 2009 concentrates on the Ribbon as its primary screen-based user interface, with the default state lacking any toolbars at all. So it’s somewhat ironic that AutoCAD 2009 sports what are easily the best floating toolbars in the history of the product. Ironic but very welcome.

Why are they better? Because they’re smaller. Let’s compare the number of pixels taken up by a typical small group of floating toolbars in different AutoCAD releases. These are the Express toolbars, which I mocked up in Releases 13 and 14 to show the same number of buttons and dividers (the Release 14 Bonus toolbars had more buttons than shown here). This provides for a totally fair comparison of the interface itself.

Using Release 13 as the base for comparison, Release 14 uses 103% of the number of pixels, AutoCAD 2000 to 2008 use 93%, and AutoCAD 2009 uses only 43%. That is, it’s 2.3 times more space-efficient than Release 13 and 2.15 times more efficient than any recent release. Good stuff!

This space efficiency is gained at the expense of having a visible toolbar label. So how can you find your way around a bunch of floating toolbars as you get used to things? Hover over the dark grey area to the right of the toolbar and a tooltip will show you what’s what.

Here are a couple more tricks AutoCAD 2009 has up its Status Bar sleeve, this time to do with layouts.

You may love the new Quick View Layouts feature or you may find it too slow. You may wish to use it sometimes and at other times use the traditional layout tabs. How do you quickly switch from one to the other? Right click, as shown in this animation. The left clicks are red, the right clicks are blue.

As you can see, when the layout tabs are visible, the model space button and most recent layout button are replaced by a traditional PAPER or MODEL label. Something you can’t see in the animation is that when you hover over a layout tab, a preview of that layout is displayed at the cursor, thus:

Having covered the left side of the status bar, let’s move onto the other side. Some of it is familiar, but much of it is new or modified. Let’s have a look:

This animation shows the following:

1. The first icon switches to the model space layout.
2. The next icon switches to a paper space layout, but which one? The one you were in most recently.
3. The third icon gives access to the new Quick View Layout feature. Shaan Hurley has covered this quite extensively, so there is not much point in me going over the same ground. However, I will add that in AutoCAD 2009 Release Candidate at least, it’s not particularly accurately named. Yes, you can View Layouts. No, it’s not Quick. If you’re happy using these first three buttons, you can turn off the layout tabs and save some screen space.
4. The Quick View Drawings feature is similar to the Quick View Layout feature, except it applies to currently open drawings rather than layouts. No, this one isn’t Quick either.
5. Pan. I’m not sure why this is here, as I can pan perfectly adequately with my middle mouse button. Maybe having it down here means it doesn’t always have to be available in the Ribbon?
6. Zoom. See Pan.
7. The Steering Wheel is a new view controlling mechanism that Lynn Allen has covered nicely here. According to Lynn, Autodesk is going to be using this interface in its other products soon. Hopefully, it will actually have some useful purpose in those other products, because I don’t see much point to it in AutoCAD. File under, “We did this because we can”.
8. ShowMotion is a new feature that allows you to use AutoCAD to create animations. This feature is potentially useful to users who need to visually impress clients, and deserves a much more detailed overview than I can give it here.
9. The Annotation Scale control isn’t new, but the menu that lives underneath it shows two welcome changes. First, there is a toggle (on by default) that hides all those silly _XREF scales that have been driving AutoCAD 2008 users crazy. Note that it doesn’t kill the scales, it just suppreses the display of them. That is, it’s hiding the problem rather than solving it, but this is much better than nothing. Second, in a new metric drawing (that is, one in which the system variable MEASUREMENT is set to 1), there are no imperial scales. However, this doesn’t do anything for your AutoCAD 2008 drawings, which will remain infected by imperial scales until you explicitly remove them.
10. The Annotation Visibility button isn’t new.
11. Neither is the Annotation AutoScale button.
12. The Workspace Switching button is, though. This is a very welcome change. Previously, workspaces were controlled using a toolbar. If you switched to a workspace that had this toolbar turned off, this made things rather difficult. Also, different workspaces (including those created by Autodesk) tended to have the workspace controls in different places, leading to general confusion. This little button does away with all those problems. Nice one.
13. The Interface Lock button does what it has done for the past few releases.
14. The penultimate button, the little down arrow thing, provides access to turn all the status bar buttons on and off as required. As before, it controls the left and right sides of the status bar, but the left side is now down one menu level. I would prefer it if it wasn’t. There’s a Drawing Status Bar available, as before. I can’t see many people opting to use it.
15. Finally, the Clean Screen button works as before, removing user interface elements to enlarge your drawing area. You will be pleased to know that it turns off the Ribbon, in addition to what it turned off in earlier releases.

Overall, there are some real positives on the right side of the status bar. There are some features that don’t do much for me, such as the Steering Wheel, but in most cases I can just ignore or even turn off those things. That leaves me to enjoy the ones I do like, such as the Workspace Switching button.

Enough of linking to other peoples’ observations about AutoCAD 2009, here are some of mine. There is a lot I don’t like about AutoCAD 2009, and I will be covering that side of things in more detail once I have the shipping product to play with and I’m certain that the bad stuff is still there. This post is about the mostly good stuff that will definitely appear in the finished product.

AutoCAD 2009 is all about the user interface, but it’s not all about the Ribbon. There are other interface changes too, and some of them are quite welcome.

Let’s have a look at the left side of the Status Bar at the bottom of the screen. The buttons have changed from the traditional text labels to incomprehensible icons, at least until you get the hang of what they all mean. Don’t get too outraged about that, because thankfully Autodesk has allowed you to easily switch back to text labels with a couple of clicks. If you prefer to put the effort into getting used to what is the standard interface, hovering over each icon in turn will reveal a tooltip that deciphers the hieroglyphic for you.

What else is new down there? A handy way of controlling running object snaps, for one thing. Right-click on the osnap icon and you are presented with a menu that shows you what running osnaps are on and allows you to turn one of them on or off. It’s unfortunate that the menu then vanishes before giving you the chance to make more changes. It would have been nice to allow multiple changes, perhaps by holding down the Shift key or similar. It would also have been nice to have Clear All and Set All options on that menu.

This animation shows the following:

1. The new-look status bar icons.
2. Right-clicking on the object snap icon reveals the handy osnap menu.
3. The boxes show which running osnaps are currently turned on.
4. As in earlier releases, on any status bar right-click menu there is a Display item, allowing you to control the visibility of the status bar items. Note that Quick Properties is now on the list.
5. By turning off the Use Icons item, the icons transform to text.

My next post on AutoCAD 2009 will cover what’s new on the other side of the status bar.