AutoCAD Archives - Page 11 of 19

AutoCAD, Autodesk, Customisation, Development, LISP, Other Blogs

Programmers, have your say

By Steve Johnson 11 May 2010, 4:57 pm 11 May 2010 itemprop="discussionURL"2

Autodesk wants your input in its annual API survey. What used to be a closed survey for Autodesk Developer Network (ADN) members has been open to all for the last couple of years, and if you do any Autodesk-based development at all I encourage you to take part. Yes, that includes those of us who do most of our development in LISP. In fact, I am especially keen to see LISP developers adequately represented in this survey. This is a one-page survey and it doesn’t take long. The full list of API surveys is on Kean Walmsley’s Through the Interface …

AutoCAD, AutoCAD 2011, AutoCAD 2012, AutoCAD 2013, Customisation, Tip

Restoring Hatch double-click in AutoCAD 2011

By Steve Johnson 10 May 2010, 12:39 pm 10 May 2010 itemprop="discussionURL"41

In AutoCAD 2011, the default action when double-clicking on a hatch object is to invoke the Properties palette for that object. In previous releases, it would invoke the Hatch Edit dialog box. In my AutoCAD 2011 – Putting things back to “normal” post, I briefly described how to restore the old double-click action. I have since seen some incorrect advice being given out about how to do this, so this post describes the correct process in full detail. What to do Invoke the CUI command. In the top left pane, find the [+] next to Double Click Actions and left-click …

AutoCAD, AutoCAD 2011, Bug, Cloud, Customer Service, Customisation, Development, Other Autodesk Products, Subscription, Tip, Web Stuff

Filling the holes in Autodesk’s CHM Help stopgap

By Steve Johnson 7 May 2010, 1:18 pm 7 May 2010 itemprop="discussionURL"6

It was good to see Autodesk react to criticism of AutoCAD 2011’s browser-based Help with an acknowledgement of the problems and an attempt to provide a workaround by making a zip file of CHM files available for download. That’s much better than ignoring people’s concerns, denying the validity of those concerns or shooting the messenger, which has been known to happen in the past. However, there are some holes in the workaround, only some of which can be filled. Under 64-bit Windows 7, the Search pane is blank, as it is in the CHM Help for earlier releases on that platform. This …

AutoCAD, AutoCAD 2011, Performance

How is your AutoCAD 2011 hatching?

By Steve Johnson 5 May 2010, 1:11 pm 5 May 2010 itemprop="discussionURL"16

Hatching is the poster child for AutoCAD 2011’s 2D drafting feature changes (although there are several other significant ones), and also for demonstrating the advantages of providing a contextual interface via the Ribbon. It looks great at first glance when working with simple demo drawings, but how are things going in the real world? I’d be interested in hearing about your experiences. Is the hatch Ribbon tab snapping into place and going away quickly enough, both the first time it is used in a session and subsequently? Is the Ribbon interface easy to use, efficient and complete? Does the hatch preview always …

AutoCAD, AutoCAD 2010, Autodesk, Bug, Customer Service, Win

Autodesk shows Dassault how to treat customers

By Steve Johnson 30 April 2010, 2:03 pm 30 April 2010 itemprop="discussionURL"6

There are areas of Autodesk’s treatment of customers that leaves much to be desired, and I will most likely continue to be critical of that until a) I die; b) Autodesk dies; or c) the bad stuff stops happening. One thing for which Autodesk deserves praise is the distribution of bug fixes to its customers, without imposing the sort of conditions that SolidWorks customers have to put up with. Do Autodesk customers need to be on Subscription to receive bug fixes? No, they do not. Do Autodesk customers need to have purchased the software within the last 90 days to …

AutoCAD, AutoCAD 2011, Autodesk, Comments, Customer Service, Web Stuff

Autodesk provides CHM-based Help for AutoCAD 2011

By Steve Johnson 28 April 2010, 2:27 pm 28 April 2010 itemprop="discussionURL"7

In a comment in response to my AutoCAD 2011 Help system is not popular post, Autodesk’s Diane Serda acknowledged the problems, offered apologies and posted a link to a CHM version of the Help. From Diane’s comment: We have posted the zip file for download here: http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/ps/dl/item?id=15068206&siteID=123112&linkID=9240618 Instructions: 1. Download the AutoCAD2011CHMHelp.zip to your local drive (such as My Documents\AutoCAD2011Help). 2. Extract the zip file to this same folder. 3. To access the CHM Help, you’ll need to click on acad181.chm or create a desktop shortcut. You can also point to the locally installed HTML help by turning on the …

AutoCAD, Autodesk, Web Stuff

AutoCAD Internet Survey

By Steve Johnson 27 April 2010, 9:47 am 27 April 2010 itemprop="discussionURL"0

I spotted this on the AutoCAD Research Twitter feed: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/AutoCAD_Internet Autodesk wants to know your views on web content and how it relates to AutoCAD and your work. It’s a fairly big survey, but I encourage you to take part. You can also sign up to participate in user research sessions here. This is a pretty direct way of letting Autodesk know what you think.

AutoCAD, AutoCAD 2011, Cloud, Comments, Fail, Rant, Web Stuff

AutoCAD 2011 Help system is not popular

By Steve Johnson 23 April 2010, 3:48 pm 23 April 2010 itemprop="discussionURL"9

My poll on this subject is still running (see right), but so far about 2/3 of respondents rate AutoCAD 2011’s new browser-based Help system as 0, 1 or 2 stars out of 5 (total fail, very poor or poor). Frankly, I’m surprised it’s doing as well as that. Have a look at this discussion group thread to get an idea of the sort of reaction I was expecting it to receive. (Kudos to Autodesk’s moderators for allowing the discussion to continue with relatively little obvious censorship, at least so far). There are many good new things in AutoCAD 2011, but …

AutoCAD, Navel Gazing

What do I think of the Ribbon?

By Steve Johnson 19 April 2010, 1:26 pm 19 April 2010 itemprop="discussionURL"9

I’m curious. What do you think I think about the Ribbon, particularly in AutoCAD? Do you think I’m a hater, a lover, indifferent, or what? Now, on what evidence do you base that view? Feel free to quote back to me anything I’ve written on this blog or any other public place to support your opinion. If you can’t find anything that gives you any clues one way or the other, feel free to mention that, too.

AutoCAD 2011, Autodesk, Customer Service, Web Stuff, Win

Autodesk Knowledge Base – rapid response converts fail to win

By Steve Johnson 16 April 2010, 1:46 pm 16 April 2010 itemprop="discussionURL"1

Credit where credit is due. Following my rant about the uselessness of using a 16-minute YouTube video as the AutoCAD 2011 system requirements resource, the relevant people at Autodesk quickly fixed it and let me know. Now we just need the other releases covered and we’ll be all set. Autodesk is still officially supporting AutoCAD releases back to 2008, and those people who parted with a big slab of cash a decade ago are Autodesk customers, too. I’m sure Autodesk would like potential new buyers of its current products to know that they will be at least minimally looked after …

AutoCAD, AutoCAD 2011, Autodesk, Customer Service, Fail, Other Sites, Rant, Video, Web Stuff

Autodesk Knowledge Base – who thought this was a good idea?

By Steve Johnson 14 April 2010, 10:35 pm 14 April 2010 itemprop="discussionURL"7

This evening, I needed to know exactly which operating systems were supported by all AutoCAD releases from 2004 to 2011 inclusive. I have a pretty good idea, but I needed to confirm that my mental picture is completely correct. So I hopped over to the Autodesk Knowledge Base and entered “system requirements” in the search engine. Only one of the first 50 results was relevant, and that was for AutoCAD 2011. So I clicked on that. Did I get an easily digestible list of system requirements, including a list of exactly which operating systems were supported by AutoCAD 2011? No, …

Apple, AutoCAD, AutoCAD 2011, Other Blogs

AutoCAD for Mac under construction

By Steve Johnson 13 April 2010, 2:55 pm 13 April 2010 itemprop="discussionURL"5

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 …

Announcement, AutoCAD, Autodesk

AutoCAD Classic Interface Survey

By Steve Johnson 6 April 2010, 9:41 am 6 April 2010 itemprop="discussionURL"1

Twitter throws up a gem every now and then. I just saw this in a retweet by Melanie Perry of a tweet from Autodesk’s Elena Fadeeva: AutoCAD Toolbars and Menus Survey I strongly encourage you to participate in this survey.

Announcement, AutoCAD 2011, Polls

Competition poll now open

By Steve Johnson 29 March 2010, 9:07 pm 29 March 2010 itemprop="discussionURL"0

In a shock move, Autodesk’s general design product for this year was named AutoCAD 2011. I thought AutoCAD Banana or Generic CADD 7 stood a chance, but it was not to be. Maybe next year? Over on the right is a poll to allow you to choose who of the 14 entrants wins the prize in the pin the name on the product competition to come up with an alternative name. I’ll leave the poll open for about a week. Entrants can vote for themselves, but only once. Please vote for the entry you like the best!

AutoCAD, AutoCAD 2011, Cloud, Comments, Performance, Polls

AutoCAD 2011’s new Help system – what do you think?

By Steve Johnson 28 March 2010, 9:20 am 28 March 2010 itemprop="discussionURL"15

With all this talk of clouds in the air, it is interesting to note that Autodesk has moved AutoCAD’s Help system to a browser-based format, with online access as the default. So, how has Autodesk done with this first dipping of its toes into the cloudy waters with its primary mainstream product? I’ve already had a couple of unsolicited comments on the subject, and I’d like to hear from you. How do you rate the following, compared with previous releases? Performance (online) Performance (offline) Search results Content completeness and accuracy Ease of manual browsing Efficiency of user interface Concept of …

AutoCAD 2011, Autodesk, Fail, Navel Gazing, Other Blogs, Spin, Thoughts

Some meaningless AutoCAD 2011 numbers

By Steve Johnson 26 March 2010, 5:41 pm 26 March 2010 itemprop="discussionURL"2

According to David Cohn, at yesterday’s blogger event in San Fransisco prior to the 2011 launch, Autodesk provided the following figures: 76,000 man hours spent on Q/A of the new release 6,000 total code reviews of new release 2,000 commands tested 4,600 Beta customers involved in AutoCAD 2011 1.4M lines of old code were removed Well, that’s all very nice, but those numbers are completely meaningless without context. Autodesk may as well have just published the equivalent numbers for Release 13; I’m sure they would have looked impressive in isolation. Did anybody in the blogger audience ask the obvious question? …

AutoCAD 2011, Other Blogs

Summary of AutoCAD 2011 features

By Steve Johnson 26 March 2010, 1:07 pm 26 March 2010 itemprop="discussionURL"3

No, I haven’t written a post containing a summary of AutoCAD 2011 features. I won’t be doing so, either. Instead, I’ll just point you at R.K. McSwain’s excellent AutoCAD 2011 in 3 minutes post on his CAD Panacea blog. I won’t be ignoring the new release; I will be covering selected AutoCAD 2011 features in more detail in future posts. I just don’t see much point in doing a “me too” post when somebody else has already done such a fine job of it.

AutoCAD 2011, Subscription

Downloading AutoCAD 2011

By Steve Johnson 26 March 2010, 11:04 am 26 March 2010 itemprop="discussionURL"19

Apparently, AutoCAD 2011 has been available for download for the best part of a day. Here’s my experience so far. As a Subscription customer, I can see a bright new Get Your Upgrade button, and if I click on that I get an AutoCAD 2011 English link to click on. So far so good. If I click on that link, I get only this: Error Message You are currently not authorized to download from this Account. I have contacted my reseller to try to work out what is going on. In the meantime, I’d be interested to know if any …

AutoCAD, AutoCAD 2011, Customisation, Nostalgia, Tip

AutoCAD 2011 – Putting things back to “normal”

By Steve Johnson 25 March 2010, 9:17 pm 25 March 2010 itemprop="discussionURL"137

Edit: If you’re running a more recent release of AutoCAD, have a look at the post AutoCAD 2017 – Putting things back to “normal” instead. Easily the most popular post on this blog, in terms of both hits and comments, is AutoCAD 2009 – Putting things back to “normal”. Not too far behind it is AutoCAD 2010 – Putting things back to “normal”. Apparently, lots of people find these posts useful, so here’s an updated version for the latest release. Some of this post is based on the originals, but there are significant additions and differences in this year’s Luddite …

Announcement, AutoCAD 2011, Fun

Last chance to enter

By Steve Johnson 24 March 2010, 2:06 pm 24 March 2010 itemprop="discussionURL"0

My name the product competition has only a short time left to run, so please enter soon if you want to be in the running. With only 12 entries so far, new entrants still have a pretty decent chance of winning.