Kool Aid

Umm? I just did a Shape-file export from VW. No long/lat was required. I don't think there is a facility to define one. Or the projection/grid.

There are thousands of master grids. Anyone can create one. There are even hundreds of National grids and subgrids, used by the Surveyors General etc. Now, most GIS-programs use the Long/Lat -coordinate system, which obviously is not relative. When doing conversions, one may apply a Cartesian (often Mercator) projection with a specific origin. It seems that VW has very limited choices of conversions. Should Albuquerque be in North America, you may be lucky, though.

This is how it (I believe) works: When someone launches VW, the settings are read into memory. If they're changed, only in memory. When one quits VW, the settings are rewritten. If the friendly Network Admin has meanwhile copied a new settings-file into one's computer, that will be overwritten. Including the thickness of the weightless lines. While Finland is the only country in the world which gets regular snow-cover to its entire area, it is not covered with snow all the year. Besides, the tradition precedes snow-mobiles (except skis and reindeer-sleighs) by a few thousand years.

If we didn't have to subsidise & support the pathetically inadequate DOS/Windows-platform, for the benefit of Caravan Park dwellers, a VW sheet could become an Object in Pages, automatically updated.

Do I perhaps agree and disagree with both of you? I think I do. Now, batch conversion has worked flawlessly for me and created an archive-copy (which is not the same as a back-up) of everything. The complexity of a program such as VW is way beyond something very simple like Pages or Photoshop. Also far beyond the Microsoft Office -suite, in which one can work in a compatibility mode. With Objects, things are not nearly as simple as with simple Dumb Data. Trust me, Christiaan: I'm a consultant! Notwithstanding, the user interface could be better - a lot better. The default could very well be ?Ignore previous version and convert automatically?. The default? Actually, we don't have even an option??The dialog just pops up!

I don't use the Eyedropper much, but now I need to; in classifying previously unclassified information: countless items in an imported PDF. Methinks the tool should use the overall snap settings, ie. the snap box size and, optionally, the behaviour (ie. showing the said box.) The current zero tolerance is intolerable!

Oh dear. I think I now realise what he is talking about? Didn't before? In the file VectorWorks Preferences.xml, there is this section 2 5 7 10 14 20 28 39 55 79 0 which seems to carry the, well, Preferred Line Thicknesses in the famous units of mils. A red face day for me, once again. Anyway, since it is a part of the entire global preference settings, it should have been transferred. Maybe there was a non-restarting issue? As we all know A mil (mile in English) is a unit of length, usually used to measure geographic distance, fairly common in Norway and Sweden. Today, it measures by definition 10 kilometres, but earlier in history it had different values. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwegian/Swedish_mil In Finland, it is called ?peninkulma?, or actually ?peninkuuluma?, meaning the distance a dog's bark (Peni is a generic dog's name) can be heard. Closely related to ?poronkusema?, which is the distance a sleigh-pulling reindeer ("poro") runs between urinations; the Sami people measure distances with this unit. A ?peninkulma? is the smallest distance to the closest neighbour a True Finnsman can tolerate; any closer, and he'll fetch his axe and take care of the intruder.

That look helps to hammer in the locations?

A good question, Mr. Pallet! The overall preferences dictate the workflow, too. The Dictator may have been in any part of that whilst the user may be in another. So, the poor user may need to change the workspace and the active tool set every morning; move the pallets and what have you. Not a good idea, this is. Can't be done on the fly.

No, Christiaan, I haven't. Only locally.

Blah blah blah, Mr. Pallet.

You can, can you? Pallets are a good means for delivering goods so that they can be fork-lifted!

Forget symbols if they're all different size! One of situations like this I've dealt with are street tree databases in Excel, Access, Oracle and what have you. You just read the (tab-delim) data file and draw the circles accordingly. Possibly also attach a data format to store other data in the source file and you have a quite capable GIS-system. EDIT Even without? In a job long, long time ago I just mapped the diameters. MapInfo was not able to do that.

It doesn't? Has worked for me since it was introduced. Even with thousands of files and serious gigabytes of data. Not used it across networks, though.

Get ******-trained first, let's discuss consistency after that. I'll be here in 2020?

Ha ha! PARC developed some UI-devices, not an UI. I knew you'd be ignorant of this, too. The first designed UI was created by Apple ***************** ****************. Is the Stack Layers -button in a tool palette? Anyway, thanks for the laughs once again!

After giving this some serious thought, I've decided to agree, too. Lists, bullets etc. are of limited relevance to me, but could come handy. What I really would like to see is proper kerning! (I sometimes use Pages just to print Word-documents to get that!) Tell you what: NNA should dump the disastrously bad Windows platform and integrate VW with TextEdit and Pages, making VW the truly leading MacOS CAD-program. Why should we Mac users continue to subsidise the Wal-Mart variety?

Only bad ways. The likelihood of losing the integrity of the coordinate system is very high. That may not be an issue if one does not collaborate with other designers, but if one does, it definitely is.

Batch convert?

Ahh! And you will remember the brilliantly-designed icon of the command-cum-tool-cum-object and where it is buried in your palettes! It is of course immensely important that a tool one uses five days a year, is there always. Whatever, my young friend, whatever? What else do you have for us in your Lego-piece box frustation?

Should it? If you have even an extrusion, in an arbitrary location & rotation, what would you edit? How about a complex solid with a Boolean path 20 steps deep? A symbol with in a symbol? A parametric object within a parametric object? A wheel within a wheel? I have the feeling that what you are after is a fundamental change of VW's 3D-concepts. For better or worse, of course.

This is a very good suggestion. Command palettes are still quite useful and since they can be a part of a template, always available ? when applicable.

Actually, it (to your eternal joy) comes from the good old Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines by Bruce Tognazzi et al., which Microsoft has also mainly applied in Windows. Often badly, but nevertheless. That is the basis of all modern operating systems' GUI. There is, for a good reason, this distinction. As an IT-consultant, a SW developer and a computer user long before your mother was born, I (and my users) appreciate consistency. What you advocate, is a third UI-concept in the same UI-device. Having trained maybe 200 VW-users in the past 20 years and countless others, even the two present at present (object & tool) are confusing enough. Setting global operational parameters with a palette tool serves no useful purpose whatsoever. These are, by convention across platforms and programs, accessed with menu commands and dialogs.

Well, tough! Welcome to reality: things may not work the way you want. Can you please ask Mother Brudgers to buy you AutoCAD to play with?

I guess the whooshing sound didn't wake you up. Which sound? Ahh, the U.S. economy sinking ever further? No, not really. Perhaps I was reading the credits of the latest version of Photoshop.