Comments on: AutoCAD 2009 - Action Recorder needs action

By: Steve

Steve — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 12:23:18 +0000

I agree with you. Th action recorder could be a much more powerful tool than it is. But I will also play devils advocate. If the recorder is used for simple repetitive tasks, say aligning the wcs to a coordinate map x-ref. Or setting layers to on or frozen so print settings can be kept. And I am considering experimenting with it to do animation (cross my fingers).
Anyway Most of the cad users I have known over my 23 years of Autocad, most DON’T or WON’T use the higher level cad functions. They don’t want to learn programming of any kind. They want to draw the pretty picture and get a paycheck and go home. If you give them a tool that is the finger of god of cad tools, they will be itimidated, and they will not use it.
Now maybe its different where you are and all the cad people are super-users and can do just about anything they want with the system, but I haven’t seen many shops with more than 1 or 2 super-users. So I say, Yes the recorder is simplistic, but it needs to be that way, at least for now.
But I also agree that they need to push back the release schedule soo they can fix a few bugs before they push the product out the door.
-S

By: Jim Longley

Jim Longley — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 15:30:31 +0000

Started with VersaCAD/386 in, oh, 1988 or so. VersaCAD then (and now) has a Macro function which saved in VersaCAD’s CPL programming language. This made an excellent way to get into programming, by having the basci of whant you want - one need only delive into “help” to figure how to modify said recorded code. Great learning experience. May Autodesk could pick up a copy of VersaCAD (either an oooold version or VersaCAD 2006 for Windows) an learn how its done

Oldguy

By: Ragnar Thor Mikkelsen

Ragnar Thor Mikkelsen — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 09:10:37 +0000

Bricscad and probably other Intellicads has had a script recorder for years. Actions are recorded as script files, *.SCR and can be edited in Notepad. Scripts can quite easily be transformed to Lisp with options for user input.

By: R.K. McSwain

R.K. McSwain — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 22:29:16 +0000

Very nice article. Well said and lots of facts. I’m sure I will be linking to this one often.

By: Patrick Hughes

Patrick Hughes — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 15:46:39 +0000

I can only say, if it was on the 2003 AUGI Top Ten AutoCAD Wish List (hmm… 5 years ago) they had more than a one year release cycle to develop it.

By: ralphg

ralphg — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 15:17:45 +0000

The annual release cycle serves but one purpose: Wall Street. It doesn’t serve:

– users, who don’t want to learn a new AutoCAD every year.
– managers, who don’t want to install, upgrade, migrate, train, and pay the hidden costs every year.
– third-party programmers, who have to update their code every year.
– book publishers, who don’t want to have to cost out book production over 12 months (instead of 18, 24, or longer).

Autodesk can solve the problem by changing all their one-year subscriptions to three years (some customers already get that), thus removing the pressure from programmers in getting out ANYTHING every 12 months.

As I noted in my ‘What’s Inside? AutoCAD 2009′ preview ebook, there is nothing in this release for drafters.

By: Chris Cowgill

Chris Cowgill — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 14:08:27 +0000

I agree totally, enough with the half baked features, if anything for 2010, release it as a program that finally fixes all the half baked features and then go to a 24 month cycle. Multileader is another feature that wasnt fully cooked, try aligning your leaders when you have all nice parallel leader lines, when you are done, they wont be nice and parallel any more. (very sloppy)