AUGIWorld Magazine - March/April 2008 - (Page 28) On The Page Back Well, the big news this issue is AutoCAD® 2009. Over the years AutoCAD has changed dramatically, sometimes in small steps, sometimes in large steps. This release is a little of both. Think back to what your first version of AutoCAD looked like compared to your current version, and consider the changes you have already made. The AutoCAD 2009 interface gets a complete overhaul, while the functionality remains basically the same. That’s not to say there are no significant new features, but there are no paradigm shifting concepts to cope with. I think that is a good balance. The new user interface is new to AutoCAD, but not new. It adheres to the Office 2007 and Vista schema, which is almost two years old. If you have already made the adjustment to the new Office 2007 ribbon in Word or Excel, then you’ll feel right at home with it in AutoCAD 2009. I’ll bet those that have used the ribbon for a while have come to appreciate its merits. I first used this interface style in Macromedia Dreamweaver (now Adobe) about five years ago and have thought for some time that it would work well in AutoCAD. David Kingsley Don’t Panic! upgrading. I finally figured out that the justification was simply based on control. He was an old-school AutoCAD “left hand keyboard, right hand mouse” guy, who I must admit was lightning fast at it, but he was in denial that the paradigm he understood had changed. passed, but now that it has been incorporated into so many drawings, we have to “stay the course.” If you currently rely on DIMLFAC in your new drawings, you are likely doing something that is now old school. If you’re under control, you’re not going fast enough! My pick for the best reason to upgrade to AutoCAD 2009 The ribbon This is what Mario Andretti has to say about the difference between drivers and championship racers. If you want to win, you have to push yourself beyond your comfort level. In a surprisingly short time you become comfortable with what you once thought of as out of control! I worked with a man who in his youth was a champion hang glider. He said that the most exhilarating part of the sport was the second or two after his feet left the ground before the wind caught his wings. So I say, respectfully, take a flying leap! The brush-off There are two basic approaches to new technology. There are early adopters and there are steady-staters. There is a strong tendency for people in this industry to resist change. I’m sure many of you have seen it in coworkers. I can understand it when management wants things to remain the same, because change costs money. I have more trouble understanding it when the AutoCAD user is handed a new tool and brushes it off with almost no justification. Often times the first question is, “How do I make it look like the old version?” I consulted on a moderately large project a while ago where the manager insisted on using Mechanical Desktop 5 over Autodesk Inventor® 10. There was no economic justification; the inefficiency of the software was costing the project far more than the cost of Although it is really part of my job to stay up to date on as many products as I can, I don’t always upgrade. Because of work commitments based on older versions, I skipped AutoCAD 2008. As a result I missed an important feature. I consider one of my strengths to be design for manufacture in which annotation, especially dimensioning theory, plays a major role. My first CAD experiences were with old (read historic) mainframe CAD systems that preceded AutoCAD, and in fact Autodesk Inc., by several years. Those systems set my standards of what CAD systems should do. Believe it or not, bit by bit Autodesk is still catching up to them. I have always been troubled by the complexity of AutoCAD’s dimensioning requirements. In my opinion Autodesk has given too much control of this to the user. On more than one occasion I have spoken to Autodesk developers who had previously worked for the old mainframe companies, and most were in agreement. I believe that the most critical aspect of this is the DIMLFAC system variable. I believe its time has I confess Even though it was introduced in AutoCAD 2008, if you are using AutoCAD 2007 or earlier, Annotative Scaling is my pick for the best reason to upgrade. If you are totally confused by DIMSCALE and DIMLFAC and you can’t control the size of text and arrows in viewports, or you think it just plain takes too much effort to get it right, then Annotative Scaling is for you. If you have duplicated sections of your model in scales other than 1:1, and use DIMLFAC so that you can portray it accurately in different viewports, then Annotative Scaling is for you. In short, Annotative Scaling takes all of those tedious little things that are affected by viewport scale and automates them. It senses the viewport scale and adjusts modelspace dimensions, leaders, text, hatching, and even blocks (used as drafting symbols) and scales them accordingly. It also controls viewport visibility of these variable scale objects. If you are familiar with the concept of DIMSCALE=0, Annotative Scaling takes this concept to the next level. This feature alone could justify the cost of the upgrade. Correction In my last column, my research was off and was caught by a courteous reader. The new Orion crew re-entry vehicle does not function like the current shuttle. It is a capsule similar to the Apollo mission crew vehicle and is not steerable. What I portrayed as the new configuration was indeed a front runner in the final selection process, but was not the winner. For accurate information go to http://lockheedmartin.com/products/Orion/index.html. My apologies. David Kingsley served from 1999-2004 on the AUGI Board of Directors and is the Director of Electrons at CADPlayer Web Courseware. He can be reached at djkingsley@cad-tv.com. w w w. A U G I . c o m 28 http://lockheedmartin.com/products/Orion/index.html http://lockheedmartin.com/products/Orion/index.html http://www.AUGI.com
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