11 July 2008 - cad nauseam

Autodesk and Bentley – kiss, kiss!

By Steve Johnson 11 July 2008, 9:29 pm 11 July 2008 itemprop="discussionURL"1

OK, so I’m a long way from being the first to comment on this, but maybe I’ll be the last? Don’t count on it. In the unlikely event that this is the only CAD blog you ever read, you may be unaware that Autodesk and Bentley have decided to swap code so their respective products can make a better job of writing each other’s drawing formats. The MicroStation DWG interface has traditionally been imperfect. (I remember raising the ire of one of the Bentley brothers in person many years ago on the CompuServe ACAD forum when I described Bentley’s DWG/DXF …

Fun, Image manipulation, Music, Video

Video – Deciphered lyrics

By Steve Johnson 11 July 2008, 8:44 pm 11 July 2008 itemprop="discussionURL"0

Here’s another video I have done to the music of Swedish metal band Opeth (the first one is here). This band’s latest album, Watershed, does not come with conventional lyrics in the booklet, but rather a page full of rune-type characters. There are actually two different pages in different editions of the album, and in order to work out the lyrics you need to rotate the pages, work out a substitution cipher and combine the two sources. To save you the trouble of doing all that, here are the lyrics of Heir Apparent. This is the only song on the …

AutoCAD, AutoCAD 2009, Polls

You don’t think much of AutoCAD 2009’s buttons

By Steve Johnson 11 July 2008, 3:10 pm 11 July 2008 itemprop="discussionURL"0

I’ve closed the poll about the button images. It’s a general thumbs-down from you on that particular change, albeit not a spectacularly vehement one. I agree with most of you. The images themselves don’t offend me greatly, but their role in making things harder to find means that Autodesk erected another unnecessary barrier to Ribbon acceptance. The images themselves have crisper edges, but are sadly devoid of colour, making them harder to tell apart. One exception is with the object snap buttons, which I consider an improvement over their predecessors. More important than that is the fact that there were …

AutoCAD, AutoCAD 2009, Polls

AutoCAD 2009 – What’s good about it?

By Steve Johnson 11 July 2008, 2:53 pm 11 July 2008 itemprop="discussionURL"0

I’ve added a poll that asks you to choose the best things about AutoCAD 2009. I’ve come up with a list of 25 features that are new, improved or otherwise changed in AutoCAD 2009. You can choose up to 3 items from the list.