I’ve closed the poll about the button images. It’s a general thumbs-down from you on that particular change, albeit not a spectacularly vehement one.

I agree with most of you. The images themselves don’t offend me greatly, but their role in making things harder to find means that Autodesk erected another unnecessary barrier to Ribbon acceptance. The images themselves have crisper edges, but are sadly devoid of colour, making them harder to tell apart. One exception is with the object snap buttons, which I consider an improvement over their predecessors.

More important than that is the fact that there were many, many things Autodesk could (and should) have done instead of putting development resources into this area. I know from personal experience that creating button images can be a very time-consuming job. I have some sympathy for the poor Autodesk people who put the effort into producing these images, only to have customers wishing they had never bothered. Nobody likes wasting their time.

This sort of thing (there are many other examples), makes it obvious that Autodesk needs to obtain customer feedback on design decisions much earlier in the development cycle, while there is still time to throw out the dumb ideas. Doing so would offer Autodesk a lot of potential for more efficiently targeting its resources, to the benefit of both Autodesk and its customers.

I’ve closed the poll for those of you who are using 2009 with the Ribbon turned off to show us the reasons why. The top 10 choices were:

1. Tab concept means extra clicks (65%)
2. Uses up too much screen space (64%)
3. No advantage over existing methods (64%)
4. Dislike concept of hiding tools - want buttons to stay visible (60%)
5. Too hard to find things (51%)
6. Using it minimised requires an extra click/hover (47%)
7. Doesn’t make good use of my screen size/shape (45%)
8. Tab switching is too slow (45%)
9. Customising it is too difficult (44%)
10. Ribbon content doesn’t match my needs (44%)

I was hoping that the poll would help Autodesk in deciding how best to improve the Ribbon in future releases, but it’s pretty hard to do much about the top 7 choices here. Except number 2, perhaps; the Ribbon could be considerably tightened to remove waste space, in the same way as the excellent AutoCAD 2009 floating toolbars.

The new poll is slightly related to item 5 above. Autodesk combined the Ribbon with a change to the button images. Personally, I don’t think this was a good idea. If you move people’s stuff around, changing the appearance of that stuff is only going to make it harder to find things and reduce people’s acceptance of the changed interface. Enough of my opinion, what do you think?

I was interested to see Shaan Hurley reporting the Ribbon usage figures from the Customer Involvement Program (CIP). Shaan’s figures show Ribbon non-users at 46%, my poll results show it as 71%. Why the discrepancy? Is somebody telling fibs? I don’t think so.

First, blog nauseam poll respondents represent a biased sample, comprising people who are more interested in AutoCAD than average users. Dare I say more knowledgeable? More likely to be power users or CAD Managers, anyway. They are probably more likely than average users to make changes from the default AutoCAD settings. But Shaan’s CIP users are also a biased sample, comprising those AutoCAD users who have CIP turned on. Are users who go with the flow and have CIP on also more likely to go with the flow and leave the Ribbon on? Possibly, but I would have thought the CIP-on bias would be less significant than the blog-reader bias.

Second, Shaan’s sample size is likely to be very substantially larger than mine. I currently get about 5000 unique visitors to this site each month, with only up to about a hundred bothering to respond to a given poll. Shaan’s numbers are likely to be in the hundreds of thousands, and thus much less prone to a few people skewing the results.

Finally, the method of measurement differs. My poll is totally open and transparent, but requires active participation by the respondent. This means that the more strongly you feel about something, the more likely you are to be measured.

Shaan’s measurement method avoids that pitfall. However, because the details of the CIP measurement mechanism aren’t public, its accuracy is open to conjecture. For example, if somebody spends 8 hours working in a Ribbonless session and then tries out the Ribbon in another session for a few minutes, does that count as a score of 1-1, or is the time used taken into account? If somebody works Ribbonless except when using the Block Editor (personally, I think the Ribbon works well there), is a flag raised that says the Ribbon was used during the session? Does that then count as one Ribbon Session and no Ribbonless sessions? (Shaan, you’re very welcome to put that speculation to rest with some details of how it works). In any case, the number of part-time Ribbon users is likely to be small enough not to make a huge difference.

In summary, I’m quite prepared to accept that Shaan’s CIP numbers are likely to be closer to reality than my poll results. I think “about half and half” is a decent compromise answer to the question posed by the title of this post.

The question is, is that a good result? Shaan says he was surprised by the results, but doesn’t state whether he thought the Ribbon would be more or less popular than that. Before I ran my poll, I would have said that a significant minority, say a third of users, were going Ribbonless, and that a good result for the new interface would have been if less than 20% of AutoCAD 2009 users were going out of their way to turn it off. Whichever numbers you choose, the Ribbon is doing a lot worse than that. Why? Please fill in the poll on the right and let us all know. Whatever the reasons, we should be grateful that unlike many software companies, Autodesk has at least given us the choice.

Following on from the earlier poll to find out what you were doing with the Ribbon (mostly turning it off, apparently), I’ve added a poll for those of you who are using AutoCAD 2009 Ribbonless. I hope I’ve covered all the bases with my 23 possible reasons! You can pick as many or as few as you like.

Judging from the results of the Ribbon usage poll (and the usual poll caveats apply), you are turning off AutoCAD 2009’s Ribbon in droves. I’m surprised. I thought there would be a significant minority of 2009 users who turned it off, but it looks I was wrong and it’s a large majority. The non-Ribbon numbers have hovered around the two-thirds mark right from the start and have now settled above the 70% mark. If nothing else, this validates Autodesk’s decision to make the Ribbon optional and keep all the old user interface elements.

Now I’m curious about the reasons. Why do so many of you dislike the Ribbon so much? Is it an unwillingness to change, a reaction against Microsoft’s influence, or are there more practical reasons? Is it screen space, extra picks, performance, customisation difficulties, difficulty in finding things, or something else? Did you turn it off straight away or did you give it a fair go first? Is the whole idea a write-off as far as you’re concerned, or is there something Autodesk could do that might convince you to use it?

Please comment and let me know. If I get enough responses, I’ll post a multiple-choice poll to get a better idea about how many of you have the various reasons for going Ribbonless.

Looking at the comments, it seems not everyone is happy with the Matt Stein interview. If so, I’m sorry you feel that way about the piece. In my own defence, I would point out the following:

1. I like to think my work at Cadalyst represents a balanced viewpoint. I pride myself on being fair. Whether Autodesk deserves praise or criticism for something, I provide it. But an interview isn’t really the place to do that. An interview is supposed to be an opportunity for the interviewee to say things, not a platform for the interviewer’s opinions. My job as an interviewer is to extract information, not provide it. In my opinion, the best TV interviewers listen a lot and say very little. Confrontational interviewers can be fun to watch, though.
2. I have many other opportunities, both here and in Bug Watch, to express viewpoints that may conflict with what Matt had to say. Matt doesn’t have a blog or a regular Cadalyst column, he has this one chance to put his point across to Cadalyst readers. I think it’s fair to let Matt make best use of that opportunity and not beat him down with a confrontational style.
3. I think it’s important for readers to understand the thinking behind the user interface changes. You may not agree with Autodesk’s thinking (in fact, I often don’t), but if you know what the thinking is, you can argue against it more convincingly.
4. I don’t want to go into too much detail about this because it involves private correspondence, but getting this interview published at all was an effort and a half. Anyone who wants to get access to an Autodesk employee’s comments for publication has to go through Autodesk’s PR people. While the people I dealt with were pleasant and cooperative, the pace at which things happened is best described as glacial.
5. As a result, one of the first set of questions I asked and a whole set of follow-up questions didn’t get answered in time for publication. Cadalyst could have waited for that to happen before publishing, but AutoCAD 2010 would probably have come out first, rendering the answers somewhat irrelevant…
6. With all that said, I actually agree that part 1 of the interview comes across as a bit soft on Autodesk. The very fact that Shaan Hurley thinks it’s unbiased is a bit of a worry. However, I think some of the questions in part 2 are fairly probing. Have a look around and see how many comments you can find by Autodesk employees that are critical in any way of the current product line-up. Getting a public admission that “Ribbon customisation should be easier” out of the AutoCAD Ribbon’s number one fanboy and past Autodesk’s PR people is, in relative terms, something of a triumph.

Enough from me, what would you have asked? Let’s hear what questions you think the interview is missing. Maybe there will be a chance to ask them one day.

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!

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.

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 that? I’ve added a poll to find out. Please vote only if you’re an active AutoCAD 2009 user, as I want to see what people use in production.

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 for me in pre-release versions of 2009, I’ve seen severe ViewCube stability problems in the shipping software.

I’ve seen the following problems in just a few minutes use of the ViewCube, on two different PCs:

• Picking the WCS button under the ViewCube and then picking a different visual style led to AutoCAD going into an endless loop where it kept flashing up and removing the WCS menu about twice a second. Ctrl-Alt-Del was needed to get out of this. This lock-up could be repeated by using the UCS button and picking in the drawing area to make the UCS menu go away.
• In my attempts to reproduce this on another PC I couldn’t immediately do so, but by using the Home feature and changing visual styles I could make my cursor disappear so it looks like AutoCAD is locked up. No cursor was visible anywhere within the AutoCAD window (including crosshairs, pickbox and arrows), but the normal Windows cursor was visible outside AutoCAD. I could use the invisible AutoCAD cursor to highlight buttons and could therefore close AutoCAD without losing anything.

So, if you are using the shipping version of AutoCAD 2009, I suggest you save all drawings in your session before experimenting with the ViewCube. I would be interested in your experiences with the ViewCube. Is it reliable for you?

One thing that’s regularly asked whenever a new AutoCAD release hits the streets is how to make it work like the last release. I think you should give any new features a fighting chance before turning them off or ignoring them, but that’s entirely your choice. Let’s assume you’ve made the decision to go back to the future; how do you do it?

• Menus and Ribbon. You can turn menus on with MENUBAR 1, close the Ribbon with RIBBONCLOSE, and so on. However, there’s an easier way; just switch workspaces. In the bottom right corner there is a little button that looks like a gearwheel. This is the Workspace control. Click on it and pick the item called AutoCAD Classic.
• Dashboard. The Dashboard is gone, but you can have a vertical Ribbon instead. If the Ribbon is not visible (it won’t be if you just selected the AutoCAD Classic workspace), enter RIBBON to bring it back. In the tab title row (the bar with the word Home in it), right-click and pick Undock. Now you can place and size your Dashboard-like thing as you see fit. As before, you can right-click on things to change the various settings. However, getting the contents exactly the way you want it usually involves using CUI, and that’s well outside the scope of this post.
• Background. Many of you will want a black background, of course. Right-click on the drawing area and pick Options…, then pick the Display tab. Don’t be tempted to choose Color Scheme and set it to Dark, because that just changes the appearance of various user interface elements. Instead, pick the Colors… button. On the left, choose a context you want to change (e.g. 2D model space), choose the appropriate background element (e.g. Uniform background) and choose the particular shade that takes your fancy. There is a Restore Classic Colors button, but that only takes you back to AutoCAD 2008. When you’re done, pick Apply & Close, then OK.
• Status bar. Right-click on a status bar button, turn off Use Icons and your text-based status bar buttons will return.
• Classic commands. If you prefer not to leave the various new palettes on screen all the time, old versions of various commands are still available: ClassicLayer, ClassicXref and ClassicImage. Going back further, there are command-line methods of doing the same thing: -Layer, -Xref, XAttach, -Image and ImageAttach.

If you’ve allowed AutoCAD to migrate your settings (I never do), some of the above will already be done for you, but by no means all of it.

One of the great things about AutoCAD is that we can still do this sort of thing. Microsoft has a lot to learn from Autodesk in this regard. If you’re using Word 2007, you are going to have a Ribbon and that’s the end of it, so be a good little user and learn to love it. Oh, and don’t even think about trying to modify it. Whatever you might think about Autodesk’s development priorities, design decisions and feature implementation, at least in most cases Autodesk leaves us with a choice.

You may be used to accessing pull-down menus with Alt-key combinations, e.g. Alt+F to get at the File menu. You can still use those keystrokes to get at menus in AutoCAD 2009, whether or not the pull-down menus are in place. If the pull-downs are visible (MENUBAR=1), they are given priority over the Menu Browser. One difference is that if the pull-down menus are visible, you can either press the keys together (e.g. Alt+F), or you can press and release the Alt key, then choose the menu (e.g. Alt, F). With the pull-down menus turned off, you can use only the former method; just pressing and releasing the Alt key is ignored.

Here is a list of the Alt-key combinations that will work with either the pull-down menus or the Menu Browser:

Of course, the above only applies in the standard AutoCAD environment. In a custom environment, things could be quite different.

The following key combinations apply only to the Menu Browser. Unfortunately, they are ignored if the pull-down menus are visible:

The last combination can be used as a prelude to searching the menus, or simply as a way of exposing the Menu Browser without having to click on the red A.

Like Recent Documents, the Menu Browser pane also stores a Recent Actions list.

• Like Recent Documents, the length of this list defaults to 9 and can be set to up to 50 in Options.
• Similarly, you can pin actions in place to prevent them slipping off the end.
• Unlike the command line recall (up-arrow) method of retrieving recently entered commands, this feature only remembers commands you selected using the Menu Browser. Even if you use pull-down menus, those commands will not be placed in this list.
• Also unlike command line recall, the list is remembered between drawing sessions and even AutoCAD sessions (i.e. you can close AutoCAD without losing the list)

One more feature that’s crammed into the Menu Browser pane’s limited space is the Open Documents list. This allows you to switch between the drawings you currently have open. It has a similar interface to the Recent Documents list, including the persistently pale preview:

Unlike Recent Documents, the filenames are displayed in the correct case, although this is not true in the preview where the name and path are all in upper case. Another glitch in the preview can be seen above, where it says Currently Oper instead of Currently Open By:. This only happens intermittently and doesn’t concern me greatly.

In the same way that Recent Documents doesn’t eliminate the equivalent feature in the File pull-down menu, Open Documents doesn’t eliminate the equivalent feature in the Window pull-down menu. Note that this applies only to the traditional pull-down menus you get if you set MENUBAR to 1; the File and Window menus in the Menu Browser are missing the lists of documents.

If you want to switch between open documents quickly without looking under the red A, the Ctrl+Tab and Ctrl+Shift+Tab keyboard combinations still work in AutoCAD 2009, as they have ever since the multiple document interface was introduced by AutoCAD 2000.

Another thing you will find lurking under the big red A is the Recent Document list. This is a mixed bag too, but most of it is good. It differs from the traditional list that still lives under the File menu in several ways:

• Although the default maximum list length is 9 items, you can allow up to 50 items into the list by changing a setting in the Options command’s Open and Save tab.
• If the list exceeds the space available, a scroll bar appears. This has the same problems as elsewhere in the menu browser: more clicks are required and there is no auto-scroll.
• If you hover over a document in the list, it displays a preview image along with some other useful document information. Unfortunately, that preview image always has a white background, despite the fact that the first thing most of you are going to do in AutoCAD 2009 is turn the background black.

• The file and path names are ALL DISPLAYED AS UPPER CASE, NO MATTER WHAT CASE THE NAMES ACTUALLY USE. THIS HARMS READABILITY AND MAKES THE WORST POSSIBLE USE OF THE LIMITED SPACE AVAILABLE. SORRY, AM I SHOUTING? Is that better?
• Using the cute little push pins at the right of each document name, you can pin documents in place to prevent them being pushed off the end of the list.
• You can change the order in which the documents are displayed using this menu:

• You can also change how the documents display using this menu:

Using the last three features together, your document list could end up looking something like this:

So if the Menu Browser isn’t much use for browsing menus, what is it good for? Searching menus, for one thing. Let’s say you’re a very occasional 3D user trying to make a 3D model look pretty. You want to access commands for placing lights, putting the sun in the right place, and changing visual style settings. You don’t really know where to look in the Ribbon or menus. What to do? Click on the red A and just start typing what you think the command is called. With a bit of luck, the appropriate menu item will present itself and you can click on it.

This video shows three successful Menu Browser searches by typing in “light”, “sun” and “vis”.

The whole thing is over in 14 seconds. That’s quite impressive in comparison to a manual click-and-hunt search. It’s not foolproof, though. It’s a menu search, not a command search. That means the command you’re after has to be in the menus before it can be found. If you type in something like “osnap” or “oops” you’ll be out of luck, even though they are both valid AutoCAD commands.

You have undoubtedly noticed the large red A in the top right corner of the AutoCAD window. Personally, I don’t like the look of it. The concept is rather Fisher-Price and the execution is poor. No competent graphic designer would align the top of the red A exactly with the top of its surrounding button area like this:

There are so many examples of poor graphic design in AutoCAD 2009 that the overall visual effect is close to that of a rather amateurish shareware product. That’s not what you might expect of a multi-billion dollar company that can undoubtedly afford to pay talented people to do much better, but it’s a relatively trivial matter. You probably want to know how it works, rather than what it looks like.

What’s living under that big red A? It’s called the Menu Browser, and it’s a mixed bag. There’s some useful new stuff under there, which I’ll cover later. In this post I’ll just describe using it to browse menus. Frankly, it’s not very good at that. The video below shows you why, and here are some notes to go with it.

• On a fast machine, the reaction times are slightly sticky. Users of slower machines will experience some frustration; I have waited over three seconds for a reaction. Just like the Ribbon, it’s the initial click that hurts the most, with subsequent clicks on the red A being rather quicker.
• Because the menu structure is one level deeper than traditional pull-down menus, you need a minimum of one extra click to do anything.
• Because the Menu Browser is artificially limited to a small section of the screen (no, you can’t resize it), the menus don’t all fit. That means you not only need to perform extra actions to select certain commands, you need to perform extra actions to even see them. That is, if you’re browsing the menus, this new interface is markedly inferior to the old one.
• With pull-down menus, you need a click to start with, then you can hover (or optionally click) to burrow down until you get to the command you’re after. In the Menu Browser, you need a click, then a hover (or optional click), then it’s all clicks from then on. That is, it’s close to the exact opposite of what you might expect, it’s not even self-consistent, and there is more clicking required than before.

If you regularly use pull-down menus, you may as well type MENUBAR 1 as soon as you install your new AutoCAD. You will lose a strip of screen real estate, but you will have your old menus back.

If it’s an unhappy experience using the Menu Browser to browse menus, what else can you use it for? Among other things, you can use it to search menus. More on that later.

There’s one screen-based user interface mechanism in AutoCAD 2009 that you probably won’t see bragged about in Autodesk marketing materials. That’s a shame, because it has some strong points:

• It can be docked on the side of the screen or allowed to float free.
• While floating, it can be resized to the desired width and height.
• If you do dock it on the side, any unused height can be used to place either docked or floating toolbars.
• Out of the box, it provides access to a large number of the most commonly used AutoCAD commands.
• In default form, it is context-sensitive, providing you with the options relevant to the command you’re using.
• It can be modified (using CUI, unfortunately) to provide access to any commands or macros you like, using a tree or sequential structure as you see fit.
• The interface reacts more quickly to user input than the Ribbon or Menu Browser.
• Rather than cryptic graphics, it uses plain text labels that are easily understood. This is particularly useful if you have a block library where part numbers are used to identify parts that are visibly similar to each other.
• It provides an interface that users of old AutoCAD releases will be instantly at home with, and I mean old.

Have you guessed yet?

I seem to remember first hearing about the imminent demise of Screen Menus around the Release 12 timeframe. I wonder how long they can survive into the 21st century?

Autodesk deserves credit for keeping stuff like this going after all this time, a long time after it has gone seriously out of fashion. I’m sure the amount of resources it consumes is minuscule compared with the more modern interface elements. I know there are still some people who have a use for screen menus, and the same applies to image menus. All the tablet stuff is still there too, although I haven’t tested it.

Seriously, I’m more impressed by Autodesk’s retention of the Screen Menu than I am by the introduction of, say, the Steering Wheel. Autodesk is unlikely to brag about it, but maybe it should.

Testing performance under Vista can be an interesting experience. The trouble is, Vista tries to improve its performance by observing what you do and caching it for later use in case you do it again. This leads to something akin to the observer effect in science, where the very act of observing something has an effect on what it is you are observing.

Every time I test Ribbon tab switching performance in Vista, the results improve. In XP, the worst tab switching time I saw on my Core2 PC was 1.6 seconds for the first exposure of the Tools tab. In Vista, the same thing took 1.2 seconds the first time I tried it, but subsequent attempts (after closing and restarting AutoCAD but not rebooting) gave results in the 0.5 to 0.6 second range.

I tried turning off Vista’s pretty Aero interface and saw improvements of about 0.1 seconds in every measurement. With Aero off and testing a second time, I saw first tab switches from 0.2 to 0.6 seconds and second tab switches between 0.3 and 0.5 seconds. Most switches were around the 0.3 second mark.

While I hesitate to base any firm conclusions on such shaky ground as these rather unscientific tests, I can say this with some confidence: it is possible to have a system running AutoCAD 2009 under Vista where the Ribbon tab switching performance meets in most cases, and is close to meeting in all cases, the 0.3 second mark that most users perceive as instant response. However, your mileage may vary. Correction: your mileage will vary.

One of the things I like least about AutoCAD 2009 (at least in Release Candidate form) is that I find it very “sticky”. That is, I find myself having to wait for an instant here, then again there, yet again over there. Most of my testing has been on a middle-aged Pentium 4 (3.0 GHz dual core - not too ancient), and it is particularly noticeable there. On my newer Core2 machine, things are better.

When AutoCAD 2009 starts shipping, I suspect your perception of it will be strongly influenced by your hardware. Top gun users on slow machines are going to feel frustrated; slower users on fast machines will wonder what the problem is.

I made a video that shows Ribbon tab switching performance. This is an important aspect of the new interface. Because the Ribbon hides tools behind different tabs, quick access to those tools relies on near-instant tab switching. How well does AutoCAD 2009 do at that? Let’s have a look on a fairly quick PC (Core2Duo E6600 with 4 GB RAM, under Windows XP SP2 32 bit). I intend to do the same in Vista later.

Measured on a faster machine and viewed objectively, it looks rather better than my perceptions from the slower machine had led me to believe. The real problem is the first exposure of each tab, because after that the tab contents can be retrieved from cached memory. The Tools tab is tardiest; 1.6 seconds here translates to 3 seconds or more on an older PC. For the most part, the tab switching speed is acceptable after the tab has been exposed for the first time. For most users, a delay of 0.3 seconds between input and response is quick enough to be considered instant, and most tabs switch in a time fairly close to that after the first exposure.

One way of avoiding or reducing tab switching frustration is to make your own custom Ribbon with a home tab full of the things you use most of the time. How easy is that? Unfortunately, it’s not. Using CUI to make Ribbon parts is not a pleasant experience. That interface makes the Ribbon look super-snappy in comparison. The Ribbon’s more complex internal structure combines with CUI’s snail-like performance, bugs, restrictions and design errors both old and new, to make custom Ribbon creation a loathsome task.