AutoCAD « blog nauseam

The Ribbon Man interview – part 2

The second and final part of my interview of Matt Stein has now been published on the Cadalyst site. There were some other questions I would have liked Matt to answer, but some unfortunate logistical problems prevented that from happening. Never mind, I guess it ended up plenty long enough anyway!

The Ribbon Man interview – part 1

Over on the Cadalyst site you will find the first part of a two-part interview I did with Autodesk’s Matt Stein, the man responsible for making the Ribbon interface work in AutoCAD 2009. I hope you find it interesting.

AutoCAD 2009 – Do your old drawings need recovery?

I’ve seen quite a few complaints that AutoCAD 2009 refuses to open some drawings saved in 2000 or 2004 format unless the Recover command has been used on them. Autodesk has now issued a Knowledge Base item about this issue.

There’s no real fix in AutoCAD 2009 yet, just an external workaround. You will [...]

AutoCAD 2009 – How do you use the Ribbon?

It would appear from comments made on the Autodesk newsgroups that a lot of AutoCAD 2009 users have their Ribbons turned off. That’s actually one of eight possible states for the Ribbon to be in. Is it really the most popular configuration? Does it apply to 12.5% of you or is it more than [...]

AutoCAD 2009 – The Reaction Part 3

I’ve closed the poll asking for your initial reactions to the shipping release of AutoCAD 2009. It’s interesting to compare it with your reactions when asked to speculate prior to the release date. It seems your collective opinion of AutoCAD 2009 has taken a sharp drop now you’ve actually had a chance to use [...]

AutoCAD 2009 – Drawing integrity tip – urgent!

AutoCAD 2009 users, I strongly suggest you go and set the new system variable OPENPARTIAL to 0. Now.

Why? Because if it’s set to the default value of 1, purging can be harmful to your drawings. I’ll fill in the details in a future Bug Watch column, but for now I suggest you just [...]

AutoCAD 2009 – Putting things back to normal revisited

I see Lynn Allen has written a post explaining how to restore the “classic” interface. I commend Lynn for doing this in response to the requests she’s been receiving. It must be pretty painful for some people at Autodesk to see their Technical Evangelist showing people how to turn off AutoCAD 2009′s Big New [...]

AutoCAD 2009 – The Reaction Part 2

I won’t beat about the bush, AutoCAD 2009 is getting a pretty hostile reaction out there. Have a look at Autodesk’s AutoCAD 2009 newsgroup, for example. It’s true that many releases receive a hostile welcome, but this year it looks particularly bleak. Frankly, AutoCAD 2009 is taking a hammering.

I think it’s possible to [...]

Autodesk University Session Voting

This year, the Autodesk University people are allowing you to vote on the various sessions (classes). Here’s the link:

AU 2008: Help Us Select the Sessions

If I can sort out a few practical details, I am hoping to attend this year as a speaker. I have submitted four session proposals. These are:

Customization [...]

The _XREF_XREF killer – update

If you saw my post or Shaan Hurley’s post about this utility and grabbed it on or before 27 April, please go and grab it again. It’s been updated to fix a couple of bugs.

The _XREF_XREF killer

If you’re an AutoCAD 2008 user you probably already know what the title refers to. If not, you probably don’t need to know. If your drawings are afflicted, I suggest you hop over to Between the Lines, grab the scale list cleanup utility and start cleaning up. Although I’ve found that this utility works [...]

Do you do any AutoCAD development?

Yes, that includes hacking about (or producing beautifully elegant code) in LISP. If so, you may wish to go here and fill in the appropriate API survey, which is probably the AutoCAD one.

This year, Autodesk is opening up this survey, which used to be confined to Autodesk Developer Network members. I approve. ADN represents a tiny [...]

Wiki for AutoLISP

Greg Robinson, who I had the pleasure of meeting at Autodesk some 11 years ago in the run-up to Release 14, has started a Wiki for AutoLISP and other AutoCAD-based source code. I’m a big fan of LISP in AutoCAD, so I’m happy to see this resource available for users.

It’s in its infancy [...]

AutoCAD Migration – continued

I have added two more polls (see right) about this subject making a total of four. I have an inkling that the people most dissatisfied with Migration are those with many users to support, and I’m interested to know how accurate that impression is.

If you voted that you were totally or generally dissatisfied [...]

Which AutoCAD release is the best when compared with its predecessor?

After a month and 204 votes, I have now closed the poll that asks the above question, but it can still be found in the polls archive.

There were 20 choices, so you might expect an “average” release to attract 5% of the votes. You might also expect there to be relatively few votes [...]

AutoCAD Migration – what do you think?

For a few years now, AutoCAD has allowed you to migrate your settings forward from an old release to a new one. Since AutoCAD 2006, this has included your custom CUI stuff.

How well is this mechanism working for you? I will keep my opinions to myself for now, but I’m interested in yours. [...]

AutoCAD 2009 – Video from product managers

I generally dislike blogs that just regurgitate contents from elsewhere, so I’m going against the grain here to repost something from Shaan Hurley’s Between the Lines blog.

Shaan has been a bit quiet over the past few weeks, but has recently made up for this with a vengeance. A flurry of new posts has [...]

AutoCAD 2009 – Tooltips are bad for my sanity

In the general scheme of things, this is a relatively trivial issue, but it’s sometimes the little things that get under my skin. Winner of this year’s prize for most annoying new feature just has to be the new tooltips. They are really not good for my mental health. If I have tooltips turned [...]

AutoCAD 2009 – ViewCube problems?

Having been very effusive in my praise of AutoCAD 2009′s ViewCube feature, stating among other things that “the ViewCube looks like a finished, polished tool”, I may need to backpedal. Those views, along with all of my 2009 Prequel posts, were based on my experience with the Release Candidate. Although ViewCube was very stable [...]

AutoCAD 2009 – Automatic spell checker

I’ve seen quite a few positive comments about the new automated spell checking feature, with some people saying that it alone is enough to make AutoCAD 2009 worth the price of admission. I wouldn’t go quite that far, but it is a nice feature. If you enter or edit text or mtext, a little [...]

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Polls Archive

blog nauseam

The Ribbon Man interview – part 2

The Ribbon Man interview – part 1

AutoCAD 2009 – Do your old drawings need recovery?

AutoCAD 2009 – How do you use the Ribbon?

AutoCAD 2009 – The Reaction Part 3

AutoCAD 2009 – Drawing integrity tip – urgent!

AutoCAD 2009 – Putting things back to normal revisited

AutoCAD 2009 – The Reaction Part 2

Autodesk University Session Voting

The _XREF_XREF killer – update

The _XREF_XREF killer

Do you do any AutoCAD development?

Wiki for AutoLISP

AutoCAD Migration – continued

Which AutoCAD release is the best when compared with its predecessor?

AutoCAD Migration – what do you think?

AutoCAD 2009 – Video from product managers

AutoCAD 2009 – Tooltips are bad for my sanity

AutoCAD 2009 – ViewCube problems?

AutoCAD 2009 – Automatic spell checker

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