…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 …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 [...] 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 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 [...] 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 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 The most popular post on this blog, in terms of both hits and comments, is AutoCAD 2009 – Putting things back to “normal”. This is followed by AutoCAD 2010 – Putting things back to “normal”, with AutoCAD 2011 – Putting things back to “normal” not too far behind. As it seems many people find [...] 14 April 2011, 9:28 pm | 94 comments | Tags: AutoCAD 2012, Tip, User Interface | Category: AutoCAD, AutoCAD 2012, ClassicArray, Nostalgia, Other Autodesk Products, Performance, Tip The Array dialog box isn’t the only thing you might notice by its absence in AutoCAD 2012. I’ll do a proper “Putting things back to normal” post later, but here’s a quick one for those of you wondering what happened to a few things that appear to be AWOL in 2012. Are you missing [...] 24 March 2011, 10:31 pm | 35 comments | Tags: AutoCAD 2012, BLIPMODE, DSVIEWER, Screen menu | Category: AutoCAD, AutoCAD 2012, Customisation, Nostalgia In a post on WorldCAD Access, Jay Vleeschhouwer makes some reasonable observations. However, the timing of the 1990s Autodesk / Mac history looks all wrong to me. Jay quotes himself from a 2008 note: …until about the mid-1990s Autodesk did have a reasonable presence on the Mac … commitment waned when Apple’s fortunes faded [...] 6 September 2010, 1:02 pm | 3 comments | Tags: AutoCAD for Mac, Jay Vleeschhouwer, WorldCAD Access | Category: Apple, AutoCAD, Autodesk, Nostalgia, Other Blogs In a comment in response to a Deelip post yesterday, Brad Holtz pointed to an article he wrote in 1999. It’s interesting to note that while much of the computing world today bears little resemblance to the scene at the end of the last century, this article remains almost completely accurate and relevant. Indeed, [...] 27 August 2010, 12:42 pm | One comment | Tags: 12-Month Release Cycle, Autodesk, Brad Holtz | Category: Autodesk, Nostalgia, Other Blogs, Other Sites, Thoughts, Writing 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 [...] 25 March 2010, 9:17 pm | 125 comments | Tags: AutoCAD 2011, Tip, User Interface | Category: AutoCAD, AutoCAD 2011, Customisation, Nostalgia, Tip In Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the Cheshire Cat gradually disappears until nothing is left but its smile. The AutoCAD packaging has done the same thing over the years until now nothing is left but the 0s and 1s. In Release 13, one box was not enough to keep all the materials, but Autodesk gradually [...] 19 February 2010, 3:06 pm | 4 comments | Tags: AutoCAD, Autodesk, Spin, Subscription, Tip | Category: AutoCAD, AutoCAD 2011, Autodesk, Customer Service, Nostalgia, Other Autodesk Products, Spin, Subscription, Tip Last week, in my capacity as a de facto CAD manager for a large public utility company, I was having a chat with an Autodesk Australia person (he’s a nice guy and very honest, by the way). The topic of conversation moved to the new AutoCAD-based vertical, Plant 3D 2010. At that stage, I [...] 30 September 2009, 3:36 pm | 5 comments | Tags: Autodesk, Civil 3D, FMDesktop, Plant 3D, Trust | Category: Autodesk, Customisation, Interoperability, Nostalgia, Other Autodesk Products, Thoughts I often see calls for Autodesk to support AutoCAD on Linux. Just like AutoCAD for the Mac, while I can sympathise with the users of that OS, I think a native port of AutoCAD for Linux would be a bad idea. Again, I think it would be bad for everybody: Autodesk, AutoCAD for Windows [...] 10 June 2009, 2:08 pm | 19 comments | Tags: AutoCAD, AutoCAD for Linux, AutoCAD for Mac, Linu | Category: Apple, AutoCAD, Autodesk, Fail, Linux, Nostalgia, Thoughts A comment from Kal on Between the Lines mentions an AutoCAD Release 10.5 for Mac. My memory of ancient and useless AutoCAD trivia is usually pretty good, but this time things are a bit foggy and I need some help. I definitely remember there being some kind of half-release of AutoCAD for Mac*, but [...] 3 June 2009, 1:00 pm | 3 comments | Tags: AutoCAD, AutoCAD for Mac, CAD History, Cadalyst | Category: Apple, AutoCAD, Cadalyst, Nostalgia There has been a fair bit of open discussion from Autodesk lately on the subject of a possible future OS X AutoCAD version. The more I think about this, the more I am inclined to believe that this would be a bad idea. A very bad idea. It pains me to write this, because [...] 29 May 2009, 6:46 pm | 62 comments | Tags: Apple, AutoCAD, AutoCAD for Mac | Category: Apple, AutoCAD, Autodesk, Fail, LISP, Microsoft, Nostalgia, Performance, Thoughts OK, so the last one was too easy. Is this one any harder? Who is this?
Bonus brownie points are available for identifying the time and place. My first computer was a Dragon 32, which I think I bought in 1982. With a massive 32 kilobytes of RAM and a proper typewriter keyboard, it was quite advanced for a home computer of the time. The Commodore 64 may have had more RAM, but a lot of it was grabbed by its [...] 14 May 2009, 6:04 pm | 8 comments | Tags: Computing, Hardware, Navel Gazing, Nostalgia, Programming | Category: Hardware, Navel Gazing, Nostalgia |
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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 [...]