Tag Archives: AutoCAD

The Ribbon Man interview – fluff?

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Looking at the comments, it seems not everyone is happy with the Matt Stein interview. If so, I’m sorry you feel that way about the piece. In my own defence, I would point out the following:

  1. I like to think my work at Cadalyst represents a balanced viewpoint. I pride myself on being fair. Whether Autodesk deserves praise or criticism for something, I provide it. But an interview isn’t really the place to do that. An interview is supposed to be an opportunity for the interviewee to say things, not a platform for the interviewer’s opinions. My job as an interviewer is to extract information, not provide it. In my opinion, the best TV interviewers listen a lot and say very little. Confrontational interviewers can be fun to watch, though.
  2. I have many other opportunities, both here and in Bug Watch, to express viewpoints that may conflict with what Matt had to say. Matt doesn’t have a blog or a regular Cadalyst column, he has this one chance to put his point across to Cadalyst readers. I think it’s fair to let Matt make best use of that opportunity and not beat him down with a confrontational style.
  3. I think it’s important for readers to understand the thinking behind the user interface changes. You may not agree with Autodesk’s thinking (in fact, I often don’t), but if you know what the thinking is, you can argue against it more convincingly.
  4. I don’t want to go into too much detail about this because it involves private correspondence, but getting this interview published at all was an effort and a half. Anyone who wants to get access to an Autodesk employee’s comments for publication has to go through Autodesk’s PR people. While the people I dealt with were pleasant and cooperative, the pace at which things happened is best described as glacial.
  5. As a result, one of the first set of questions I asked and a whole set of follow-up questions didn’t get answered in time for publication. Cadalyst could have waited for that to happen before publishing, but AutoCAD 2010 would probably have come out first, rendering the answers somewhat irrelevant…
  6. With all that said, I actually agree that part 1 of the interview comes across as a bit soft on Autodesk. The very fact that Shaan Hurley thinks it’s unbiased is a bit of a worry. 😉 However, I think some of the questions in part 2 are fairly probing. Have a look around and see how many comments you can find by Autodesk employees that are critical in any way of the current product line-up. Getting a public admission that “Ribbon customisation should be easier” out of the AutoCAD Ribbon’s number one fanboy and past Autodesk’s PR people is, in relative terms, something of a triumph.

Enough from me, what would you have asked? Let’s hear what questions you think the interview is missing. Maybe there will be a chance to ask them one day.

AutoCAD 2009 – Ribbon content for Express Tools

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One of the many unfinished aspects of the AutoCAD 2009 Ribbon is the lack of Express Tools content. One enterprising user has put the effort into correcting this, and has posted an Express Tools CUI replacement in this Autodesk newsgroup thread. I have not tested this myself. As usual with CUI, be paranoid. Back up everything before you touch anything.

While I wouldn’t normally suggest you do any Ribbon custom work in 2009 in its current state, it shouldn’t hurt in this case as it should be easily redoable once Autodesk has fixed up the worst of the 2009 CUI problems. Anything else you do should be considered as disposable. The problems with 2009’s CUI are so fundamental that it is quite likely a restructure will be required to fix them, either in a service pack or in 2010. That means your 2009 CUI efforts may need to be redone, just like your AutoCAD 2008 Dashboard modifications.

The Ribbon Man interview – part 2

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The second and final part of my interview of Matt Stein has now been published on the Cadalyst site. There were some other questions I would have liked Matt to answer, but some unfortunate logistical problems prevented that from happening. Never mind, I guess it ended up plenty long enough anyway!

AutoCAD 2009 – Do your old drawings need recovery?

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I’ve seen quite a few complaints that AutoCAD 2009 refuses to open some drawings saved in 2000 or 2004 format unless the Recover command has been used on them. Autodesk has now issued a Knowledge Base item about this issue.

There’s no real fix in AutoCAD 2009 yet, just an external workaround. You will have to fix up the drawings in AutoCAD 2008 or TrueView. Either save the drawings in 2007 format or set the system variable 3DCONVERSIONMODE to 0 and then save them in the old format.

AutoCAD 2009 – How do you use the Ribbon?

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It would appear from comments made on the Autodesk newsgroups that a lot of AutoCAD 2009 users have their Ribbons turned off. That’s actually one of eight possible states for the Ribbon to be in. Is it really the most popular configuration? Does it apply to 12.5% of you or is it more than that? I’ve added a poll to find out. Please vote only if you’re an active AutoCAD 2009 user, as I want to see what people use in production.

AutoCAD 2009 – The Reaction Part 3

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I’ve closed the poll asking for your initial reactions to the shipping release of AutoCAD 2009. It’s interesting to compare it with your reactions when asked to speculate prior to the release date. It seems your collective opinion of AutoCAD 2009 has taken a sharp drop now you’ve actually had a chance to use it.

In the speculative poll, the average opinion was “OK”; in the first reactions poll, the average opinion has slipped two levels to “Bad”. In the speculative poll, 39% of voters used the “bad” half of the poll; in the first reactions poll, that number has increased to 61%.

Bear in mind that the numbers in this poll are relatively small and I am not claiming that this is a scientific study. However, it is completely neutral, open and transparent, which is one thing I demand whenever anybody tries to use statistics to support a particular viewpoint. See the Polls Archive page for the full details.

AutoCAD 2009 – Drawing integrity tip – urgent!

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AutoCAD 2009 users, I strongly suggest you go and set the new system variable OPENPARTIAL to 0. Now.

Why? Because if it’s set to the default value of 1, purging can be harmful to your drawings. I’ll fill in the details in a future Bug Watch column, but for now I suggest you just go and fix up that variable. It’s stored in the Registry, so you should only need to do it once unless you use multiple profiles, in which case you should do it once per profile.

AutoCAD 2009 – Putting things back to normal revisited

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I see Lynn Allen has written a post explaining how to restore the “classic” interface. I commend Lynn for doing this in response to the requests she’s been receiving. It must be pretty painful for some people at Autodesk to see their Technical Evangelist showing people how to turn off AutoCAD 2009’s Big New Feature, but it’s absolutely the right thing for her to do.

The worst thing Autodesk can do right now is go into denial mode, which has happened more than once in the past when users have reacted negatively to various things. This post from Lynn gives me hope that maybe we don’t have to go through that stage this time.

Anyway, if you want more detail about putting things back to normal, have a look at my earlier post on the subject.  I’ll add one more tip here that you might otherwise miss: if you want the old layer interface to be invoked by the Layer command rather than the new pallette, set the undocumented system variable LAYERDLGMODE to 0.

AutoCAD 2009 – The Reaction Part 2

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I won’t beat about the bush, AutoCAD 2009 is getting a pretty hostile reaction out there. Have a look at Autodesk’s AutoCAD 2009 newsgroup, for example. It’s true that many releases receive a hostile welcome, but this year it looks particularly bleak. Frankly, AutoCAD 2009 is taking a hammering.

I think it’s possible to gauge the general AutoCAD user reaction reasonably well by looking at what is said in places like this, but adjustments do need to be made. There are always some people who are resistant to any change, some who are habitually hostile to Autodesk, some who dislike parts of the new release without fully understanding them, and so on. The percentage of the comments you read that can be attributed to that kind of thing is open to debate, and there is always a point to be made that people tend to complain about things they don’t like and keep quiet about the things they do.

To try to take a more objective approach, I’ve added a poll to the right. This has exactly the same options as my earlier poll from before the release date where I asked for your speculation on how good the product was going to be. It will be interesting to see how that compares with your initial reactions to the shipping product. I’ll repeat this poll later in the life of the product to see if there is any change after people have had a chance to use AutoCAD 2009 over an extended period.

Where have all the developers gone?

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I noticed in Ralph Grabowski’s latest upFront.eZine that Autodesk has announced that 100 developers have 200 add-ons working with its 2009 series of software. I hope I’m not supposed to be impressed by those numbers. I remember when Autodesk boasted about having over 3500 third-party developers. What happened to the other 3400-odd? This is a serious question; if anybody knows where they all went, and why, I’d love to know.

Of those two hundred 2009-ready applications, how many of them take advantage of 2009’s Big New Feature, the Ribbon? My guess would be close to zero. Why? Because the AutoCAD 2009 CUI architecture is all wrong. Adding custom stuff to the Ribbon is simply a lot more trouble than it’s worth. Even Autodesk’s own vertical teams have shunned it.

The _XREF_XREF killer

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If you’re an AutoCAD 2008 user you probably already know what the title refers to. If not, you probably don’t need to know. If your drawings are afflicted, I suggest you hop over to Between the Lines, grab the scale list cleanup utility and start cleaning up. Although I’ve found that this utility works very well, paranoia is usually wise in computing so make sure you back up everything before you start! The utility is installed into the AutoCAD 2008 or 2009 main installation folder, and you can make a shortcut to the CleanupScales.exe file on your desktop if you wish to make it easier to fire up.

To the Autodesk people who put the effort into creating this utility, thank you.

Do you do any AutoCAD development?

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Yes, that includes hacking about (or producing beautifully elegant code) in LISP. If so, you may wish to go here and fill in the appropriate API survey, which is probably the AutoCAD one.

This year, Autodesk is opening up this survey, which used to be confined to Autodesk Developer Network members. I approve. ADN represents a tiny (but important) minority of fee-paying developers approved by Autodesk. I expect the results will be rather different if a significant number of “normal” AutoCAD developers notice this survey and fill it in.

If you are, say, a LISP or VBA user and are feeling neglected, please go and have your say while you have the chance. The survey closes on 1 May.

Wiki for AutoLISP

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Greg Robinson, who I had the pleasure of meeting at Autodesk some 11 years ago in the run-up to Release 14, has started a Wiki for AutoLISP and other AutoCAD-based source code. I’m a big fan of LISP in AutoCAD, so I’m happy to see this resource available for users.

It’s in its infancy right now, but if you pick the All Pages link you’ll see that there already dozens of routines available, one of which may help you with something you need to do. Here’s the link to the main page:

http://lispwiki.com/

AutoCAD Migration – continued

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I have added two more polls (see right) about this subject making a total of four. I have an inkling that the people most dissatisfied with Migration are those with many users to support, and I’m interested to know how accurate that impression is.

If you voted that you were totally or generally dissatisfied with Migration, please use the top poll, otherwise use the second poll. If you haven’t voted yet in the satisfied/dissatisfied poll, please do! I’ll keep these polls open for a while.

Feel free to add your comments here to expand on what you have selected in the polls.

Which AutoCAD release is the best when compared with its predecessor?

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After a month and 204 votes, I have now closed the poll that asks the above question, but it can still be found in the polls archive.

There were 20 choices, so you might expect an “average” release to attract 5% of the votes. You might also expect there to be relatively few votes for the older releases, because the newer the release, the more likely it is to be within a voter’s experience. All releases being equal, you might therefore expect the oldest releases to have about 0% and the newest about 10%, with a gradually rising straight line between them.

Of course, not all releases were equal. There has been a huge variation in the quality of releases over the years, so it’s remarkable how closely the poll follows that rising-line description. However, there are a couple of major exceptions that insert a major spike in the graph. Those exceptions are Release 14 with 23% of the vote, and its closest rival AutoCAD 2000. That isn’t very close at all (12%), despite introducing the major and easily remembered benefit of the multiple document interface.

It’s hard to argue with Release 14 being so highly regarded, being such a huge performance and stability improvement over its infamous predecessor. The list of new features in Release 14 was tiny in comparison with that of Release 13, but they generally worked properly. There was also a concerted effort to improve raw performance, and it paid off. Release 14 did wonders for Autodesk’s share price. Is there a lesson to be learned there? I think so.

That said, this is one of the few times I find my own opinion to be significantly different to those of most AutoCAD users. Whose is the sad lonesome vote for Release 2.5? Mine. As I’ve stated elsewhere, AutoCAD Version 2.5 was a really, really good release. If you look at some of the things you couldn’t do with 2.1, the improvement was dramatic.

Try to imagine using Version 2.1 of AutoCAD. As well as every zoom and pan taking an age, it wouldn’t let you plot to a file, mirror at an angle, copy objects more than once, trim objects, stretch objects or explode blocks and plines. No ellipses, even pseudo ones; isometric circles required the creation of a circle block that could be inserted with unequal scale factors. You couldn’t even rotate objects without first making them into a block and inserting it at an angle. Version 2.5 also made some important improvements to AutoLISP.

The reputation of Version 2.5 suffered in North America because of the introduction of the hardware lock, but that was removed within the life of the release and should not overshadow the huge leaps forward that were made in only 13 months. In those simpler days, it was possible to produce a new release of AutoCAD in about a year where the features were actually finished. Finished, working, documented and with API support.

For me, the top AutoCAD releases are:

  1. Version 2.5.
  2. Release 12 – major dialogue box improvements with full LISP support, grips, hatching improvements, the first proper Windows release and much more.
  3. Version 2.1 (2.18 to be exact) – the introduction of AutoLISP. This is what moved AutoCAD permanently ahead of its competitors (yes, AutoCAD had serious competition once).
  4. Release 14.
  5. AutoCAD 2000 – the multiple document interface is the obvious change here, but more significant to me was the incorporation of Visual LISP into the core product.

Other notable but underrated releases include Release 11 (paper space and xrefs) and the notorious Release 13. Despite being released in a very unfinished state and with significant performance issues, the number of advances in Release 13 were enormous. That was part of the problem; Autodesk was too ambitious about what features could be completed within the available timeframe.

AutoCAD Migration – what do you think?

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For a few years now, AutoCAD has allowed you to migrate your settings forward from an old release to a new one. Since AutoCAD 2006, this has included your custom CUI stuff.

How well is this mechanism working for you? I will keep my opinions to myself for now, but I’m interested in yours. I have added two polls about this (see right) and have more polls on this subject waiting in the wings. Feel free to add your comments here to expand on what you have selected in the polls.

AutoCAD 2009 – Video from product managers

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I generally dislike blogs that just regurgitate contents from elsewhere, so I’m going against the grain here to repost something from Shaan Hurley’s Between the Lines blog.

Shaan has been a bit quiet over the past few weeks, but has recently made up for this with a vengeance. A flurry of new posts has pushed this video way down the page, so you may well have missed it. I’m always happy to see Autodesk communicating with its customers (even if I don’t agree with what’s being said), so I decided to bring it to your attention.

Here, Autodesk product managers Eric Stover and Doug Cochran show off some of the new features of AutoCAD 2009.

It seems Doug is very keen on the use of the words “quick” and “quickly”. Hopefully, that means we will see some serious attention paid to AutoCAD’s performance soon, because it could certainly do with it.

This video may lack professional gloss, but I don’t care. In fact, I much prefer something that looks like it hasn’t been processed through a PR committee before we’re allowed to see it. I hope we see more communication like this soon from the real people behind the Autodesk corporate facade.

AutoCAD 2009 – Tooltips are bad for my sanity

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In the general scheme of things, this is a relatively trivial issue, but it’s sometimes the little things that get under my skin. Winner of this year’s prize for most annoying new feature just has to be the new tooltips. They are really not good for my mental health. If I have tooltips turned on, I find it hard to use AutoCAD 2009 for more than a few minutes without wanting to smash my fist through the screen.

I would like to leave tooltips on just a little bit so they will let me get used to AutoCAD’s modified button appearance and location. All I want is a little one-word tooltip if I hover over a button, but I can’t have that. There is some control over tooltips to be had in the Options dialogue box:

Controlling tooltips in Options

Oh, sorry, you can’t see the options I’m trying to describe because there is a stupid great big tooltip in the way. What I’m trying to show is that if you turn off all but one of the toggles, you can at least avoid the embarrassing spectacle of AutoCAD covering up most of the screen with information about how to draw a line when you hover over the Line button. But you can’t persuade AutoCAD to just show you what the commands are, you have to have several lines of information, one of which is exactly the same for every single tooltip.

The least intrusive tooltip available

That’s not too bad I suppose, but try using a dialogue box. Nasty huge tooltips keep throwing themselves at you in a mad rush to obscure what you’re trying to see. You can move your cursor right out of the way to stop the tooltips from appearing, and then move it back again when you want to actually pick something, but what a waste of time, mental energy and wrist effort.

You didn't want to see what's under here

OK, so you’ve had enough of them? Want them all banished? Fine, back into Options, turn that last toggle off, pick OK (assuming it’s not obscured by a tooltip so you can see it) and you’re done. Or are you? Back into Options, pick the Files tab and do a bit of hovering.

Even when they are off they are on

Aaaagh! The stupid tooltip isn’t even accurate. It doesn’t describe what you’re hovering over, it describes the files category that’s selected, which could be off the screen. If nothing is selected, it describes the first category rather than what you’re hovering over. Duh.

OK, Autodesk people, own up. Who thought this was a good idea? Really, what on earth were you thinking?