Steve: Another issue I have with Cloud-based environments is the lack of customisation. One of the things that makes AutoCAD so efficient for people is that they can get it exactly the way they want it. With a browser-based environment, we’re pretty much stuck with what you guys decide to give us. Can you [...]
 11 November 2011, 10:08 am |  Leave a comment | Tags: Autodesk, Cloud, Interview, Labs | Category: AutoCAD, AutoCAD WS, Autodesk, Cloud, Interview, Other Autodesk Products, Web Stuff …the Ribbon, according to your selections in the What are the worst features ever added to AutoCAD? poll. As in the best ever poll, the winner (loser?) in this race had no serious competition. I’ve listed eleven top (bottom?) features here rather than ten, partly because the popular (unpopular?) choice Memory Overuse isn’t exactly a [...] 9 November 2011, 12:45 pm |  13 comments | Tags: Action Recorder, Help, Ribbon, User Interface | Category: AutoCAD, AutoCAD 2009, Cloud, Development, Fail, Nostalgia, Polls, Rant Steve: Autodesk is currently giving away these Cloud-based services, Butterfly for example. Presumably you’re not going to keep doing that for ever. Are you going to start charging for these services eventually? Guri: Again, you’re pushing us to talk about future. Currently, for as long as this is in a Labs environment, we’re encouraging [...] 8 November 2011, 1:05 pm | 2 comments | Tags: Autodesk, Cloud, Interview, Labs | Category: AutoCAD, AutoCAD WS, Autodesk, Cloud, Interview, Other Autodesk Products, Web Stuff …LISP. I have now closed the What are the best features ever added to AutoCAD? poll, and the winner is AutoLISP/Visual LISP, by a long, long way. I don’t always agree with the majority view expressed in the polls here, but in this case I wholeheartedly agree. Adding LISP was the biggest and best [...] On 26 May 2010, I had the opportunity to ask Autodesk some questions about the Cloud in general and what was then Project Butterfly (now AutoCAD WS) in particular. The Autodesk people were: Guri Stark,Vice President, AutoCAD & Platform Products Tal Weiss, R&D Center Manager (Israel) Noah Cole, Corporate Media Relations The interview was [...] 4 November 2011, 10:12 am | Leave a comment | Tags: Autodesk, Cloud, Interview, Labs | Category: AutoCAD, AutoCAD WS, Autodesk, Cloud, Interview, Other Autodesk Products, Web Stuff As reported by multiple on-line news outlets, Autodesk just announced that it is increasing its research and development budget (having slashed it last year), and increasing the percentage of that budget on the Cloud. Carl Bass: When there are technology transitions in place, you better be more mindful of that, or you become roadkill. [...] 2 November 2011, 10:17 am | 7 comments | Tags: Budget, Cloud, Development, Financial, Research | Category: AutoCAD, Autodesk, Cloud, Other Autodesk Products, Other Sites, Web Stuff A few days ago, John McCarthy died at the age of 84. He didn’t make a fortune selling gadgets, he just profoundly affected the world of computing. He will be remembered mainly as the father of LISP, without which it is quite possible that AutoCAD and Autodesk would not have survived beyond the 80s. [...] 27 October 2011, 9:37 am | One comment | Tags: John McCarthy, Vale | Category: Announcement, AutoCAD, Autodesk, Cloud, Development, LISP, Nostalgia, Thoughts, Web Stuff, Win Using AutoCAD 2012 for Mac? Don’t use special characters such as # in your folder names, because AutoCAD will, under certain circumstances, delete whole folders worth of files when you open a drawing. See here and here for more detailed information. 13 October 2011, 3:05 pm | Leave a comment | Tags: AutoCAD for Mac | Category: Apple, AutoCAD, AutoCAD 2012, Bug, Tip Autodesk recently made a big announcement about its Cloud initiatives, and reactions have been all over the place. Some people can barely contain their breathless excitement while others are outraged to the point of passing out the pitchforks. Why? It’s pretty much business as usual. It’s nothing like Dassault’s disastrous we’re-moving-you-to-the-Cloud FUD campaign against [...] 30 September 2011, 1:00 pm | 3 comments | Tags: AutoCAD for Mac, AutoCAD WS, Autodesk, Cloud, Hype, Labs | Category: AutoCAD, Autodesk, Cloud, Other Autodesk Products, Spin, Subscription, Thoughts, Web Stuff Audience participation time, I think. A comment on one of AutoCAD 2012′s new features recently set me thinking about what were the worst features ever introduced to AutoCAD. That in turn got me thinking about what were the best. I’ll keep my opinions to myself for a while, as I’d like your input and [...] Thanks to Kean Walmsley’s post on his Through the Interface blog, I have learned something that would have been handy to know for the last decade or so, but which somehow escaped my knowledge. I learned how to increase the size of AutoCAD’s command line history cache. It defaults to 400 lines, which isn’t [...] 13 September 2011, 11:16 am | 5 comments | Tags: Command line, Kean Walmsley, QAFLAGS, Scrolling, Text window | Category: AutoCAD, Customisation, Development, Other Blogs, Tip The observant among you may have noticed that for many years, Autodesk’s free patches, service packs and updates haven’t added any new functionality. Bugs may get fixed, severe performance issues may be addressed, but design errors generally have to wait for the next release (at the earliest), and new features definitely don’t get added. The [...] 12 September 2011, 1:06 pm | 5 comments | Tags: Accounting, Autodesk, FASB, SEC, Service Pack, SOP 97-2, Update, VSOE | Category: AutoCAD, AutoCAD 2012, Autodesk, Autodesk University, ClassicArray, Customer Service, Navel Gazing, Nostalgia, Other Products, Thoughts The first update for AutoCAD 2012 is now available on the Autodesk site. As usual, read the readme first and exercise the usual paranoia. Make sure you install the right version (32 or 64 bit). The update is also available for AutoCAD LT 2012. There is no news yet on equivalent updates for vertical [...] 9 September 2011, 3:17 pm | 9 comments | Tags: AutoCAD, AutoCAD 2012, Service Pack, Update | Category: Announcement, AutoCAD, AutoCAD 2012, ClassicArray In AutoCAD 2012 and products based on it, saving the drawing while in the block editor can result in your whole drawing being replaced by the block you’re editing. As this can be somewhat inconvenient, it’s probably a good idea to download and install Autodesk’s hotfix for this problem. As always, read the readme [...] 27 June 2011, 11:28 am | One comment | Tags: Block Editor, Bug, Drawing corruption, Hotfix, Save | Category: AutoCAD, AutoCAD 2012, Bug One of the more painful aspects of dealing with installations of recent releases of AutoCAD and related products is that although you might run a single setup routine to install what you think is a single application, the end result is a mass of different components being installed. Each of these components is considered a [...] 1 June 2011, 12:27 pm | One comment | Tags: Installation | Category: AutoCAD, AutoCAD 2010, AutoCAD 2011, AutoCAD 2012, Autodesk, Customer Service, Interoperability, Other Autodesk Products, Rant Here’s a trick you can use in AutoCAD 2012 to fill an area with any objects you like. It’s not actually hatching, but it has several advantages over the real thing: You aren’t restricted to straight line segments as you are with real hatching. Circles, splines, even solid objects, you name it, you can [...] 30 May 2011, 4:32 pm | 6 comments | Tags: Array, Block, ClassicArray, Express Tools, Hatch, Minsert, Tip, Xclip | Category: AutoCAD, AutoCAD 2012, ClassicArray, Tip In a recent comment, I was asked how to make Ctrl+C perform a Cancel. Before I get onto that, here’s a bit of history. Back in the Dark Ages of DOS, the way to cancel a command was by holding down Ctrl and pressing C. The last release to work like this by default [...] 27 May 2011, 11:33 am | Leave a comment | Tags: Control C, Crtl+C, CUI, DOS, Keyboard Input, Release 13, Windows | Category: AutoCAD, AutoCAD 2012, Customisation, Nostalgia, Tip Lynn Allen produces a handy tips booklet for each new release of AutoCAD, giving an easy-to-read summary of the main new features. She has made the AutoCAD 2012 online version available on her blog here. 13 May 2011, 4:04 pm | 3 comments | Tags: Lynn Allen | Category: AutoCAD, AutoCAD 2012, Autodesk, Other Blogs, Tip If you download AutoCAD or other Autodesk products from either the trial or Subscription sites, the executable you get (e.g. AutoCAD_2012_English_Win_32bit.exe) is actually a self-extracting archive rather than a real installer. When you run it, you are prompted for a destination folder, with a default location such as this: C:\Autodesk\AutoCAD_2012_English_Win_32bit The actual installer (setup.exe) and [...] 13 May 2011, 12:01 pm | 5 comments | Tags: Bloat, Installation, Tip | Category: AutoCAD, Other Autodesk Products, Performance, Tip |
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Best and worst AutoCAD features ever – polls
Using your suggestions and a few of my own, I have added two polls for you to select what are, in your opinion, the best and worst features ever added to AutoCAD. To help us find The Answer, there are 42 items in each poll, from which you can choose up to three.
A few [...]