Despite it being A Bad Idea, it look like Autodesk is going ahead with making some kind of OS X variant of AutoCAD, as has been hinted at for a while now. Owen Wengerd has pointed out a few dead giveaways in the AutoCAD API.
Another giveaway is the move to the browser-based Help system. OK, it may perform hopelessly and have terrible functionality, but hey, it’s platform-independent! If you still doubt my assertion that the development of AutoCAD for Mac would be a bad thing for AutoCAD, just go and search for a few things in the new AutoCAD 2011 Help system. Then go back to an earlier release (one that uses Windows-specific Help) for a comparison. Once you’ve seen how platform-independence has “improved” Help, just imagine that level of “improvement” applied to the rest of AutoCAD.
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The move to a web based help is a bad move. We loose Windows help functionnality.
i wonder if real reason for HTML help is;
- Easier to maintain. More flexible, can ref URL’s etc, esp for more modular application structures (core, discipline specific)
http://wikihelp.autodesk.com/
- Eventually can outsource some of it to users
The bad thing about using web based help is IE. But seeing how everything is on the web now, why not?
Autocad for the Mac is something I’ve waited a long time for.
No, the bad thing about the Help is not IE. It can be configured to use another browser (which is good), but it’s still awful (which is not). As for why not, how about “because it doesn’t work very well”?
oh, who needs help? You should be paying for tech support anyway