matto

quote: Originally posted by jfmarch: SketchUp, besides the awful name, looks like a really good tool. My guess is that Autodesk will buy it out and destroy it... i can't see anyone buying them out in the near future. great tool, great people, they have an understanding of the new world of software that the giants miss. Vectorworks doesn't need to emulate the features. it only need to make a bridge, they are different tools for different tasks and if they play well together can both gain from the other being installed on their users computers. Sketch up all so works well with Art?lantis so a plug in bridge woulds be a good thing [ 03-21-2004, 10:07 PM: Message edited by: iboymatt ]

quote: Originally posted by Petri: quote:Originally posted by mike m oz: Surely it can't be that difficult to have them with real names rather than these generic ones. You are right - it is not difficult. Just edit the pop-up value lists of the PIOs in question. yes not to difficult;-) once you get past three or four dialogue boxes Mike you might want to bug your retailer to come in and show you hows its done. i was going to try and post a guide, but realised it is not an easy thing to discribe, but if shown to you would only take 1/2 hour. Much work could indeed be done to improve useablity of the system set up. May i be so bold to suggest that "workspaces" would be the best place to tie all these parts of the program together. instead of the crazy maze of "create plug-in" where it is to easy for a novice user to change something important, and to hard to archive result.

have to agree, after spending a day altering tile layout in bathrooms to have tile band....(long story short) Wanting the drawing to reflect the desired result. as builder have a habit of building what is shown. associative hatches are great things, but improved with definable origin and rotation option on objects. it lends greater confidence that information on the drawing is right and will stay right. best regards matt

also check the file has the right extension (.mcd)

jan15: we can move around dialogue boxes with the tab, and shift tab on all dialog boxes, but we can't activate buttons (like add point in the polygon dialog) with unless it has been assigned a command key combo (i guess this is alt key combo on windows). A lot of dialogs have keys, like layers dialog. and you can add, remove and shift layers going minutes without touching the mouse. but other like polygons don't have local keys, so you need to move to the mouse to add each point. (just checked VW10.5 as well) this double dot method could used for angles as well so that 36.5 is 36.5? but typing 36...5...10 could be 36?5'10" which is 36.0861? sure is more key taps but it's not a lot of hand movement

As i see it the main issue is Unicode glyphs only handle down to 1/4 (maybe 1/8) while in most cases 1/16 tolerance is the common practice , while Vectorworks itself can handle 1/64 tolerance. Therefore unicode single glyphs will not handle all situations which we can imagine makes it differcult for the programmers to manage. As well, as not lending itself to constitancy of drawing standards. The other option is to use supersript/subscript for fractions instead of common numbers, which in theory is much easier to handle, and will give all faction a constitant look. In any case, if this sort of change is implimented should be a user selectable option, but could be a very handy one.

just a question on the 17.5 to mean 17'5". In Australia we use metric for all drawings althought the change from imperial is within the lifetime of alot of people we deal with. so the ability to enter imperial on the fly is very handy. i just imagine the reverse would be true for you guys using imperial, that you the abilty to enter metric data and have it convert to imperial, for info in catalogues from europe and such. The other way to handle this may be to have a keyboard mapping toogle in VW, i mean if the programme could be made to believe that the . key on the keypad was really a ' key then you type 17.5 on the keypad it would appear on screen and to the programme to be 17'5, but if you typed on the keyboard it would appear as 17.5 proper. just an idea. it would also be nice if they added local hot keys inside all the dialog boxes, just like in layers, so that all tasks within a dialog box could be completed on the keyboard.

Yep, good improvements. Dash-styles have been good to us since the early days, but with all the improvements in the programmes graphic engine and such there must be scope for a few tweaks like these. With the elastic line, so that you have soild line at each end, if it could be the first segment of the style at each end, be this a line or a blank. can i add two other tweaks for consideration -dash styles to have names not just a number. it still would be nice to have a handful of day to day(user selectable) styles appear graphically in the attributes Palette, the rest could be listed by name simlar to hatches. -can we define a style to have a blank first instead of a line. [ 03-11-2004, 05:17 PM: Message edited by: iboymatt ]

now if only we could make that a button.

and if your on mac OsX just hit that nice "save as PDF" button at the bottom of every print dialog box. Os9 you will need to get a full copy of adobe Acrobat then it just acts like any other printer.

do the file have an extention on them (such as .mcd) you can sometimes fool the computer by adding the right extention then opening the file from the open menu in vectorworks.

At least on OsX. It seems that it is Vectorworks Itself that takes up any un-used processor when ever it becomes the active application, even if it doesn't even have a file open. Even classic apps or other power apps like Photoshop don't seem to behave like this. [ 02-17-2004, 11:50 PM: Message edited by: iboymatt ]

Could the pop lists for Layer/Class include the graphic indicators for visablity? thanks matt

our office is on almost all Apple LCD either the ones on the iMac or Studio Displays they work great, clean, crisp display, good for all day cad work. having seen a digital vs a VGA Lcd screen, i say go digital (apple or LCD's with DVI) if your not convinced get the store to hook up two to the same computer (same video card if possible) the same photo or cad page on both will prove what it is your paying for.

Being laptops the systems may not be running the underlying unix maintinace scripts, which run between 3-5am when the computer is either switched off or asleep. These can also reduce vectorwork crashing and improve system stability if run regularly. You can check www.versiontracker.com for tools to either edit the time (crontab) to when the computer will be on and awake but maybe fairly idle.(or check the net for a guide on how to edit the crontab yourself using terminal) as well as tools to let you run the scripts on demand.

in your applications-->Utilies folder you will find "disk utility" run Repair Permissions then restart. that can help.

About the most productive use of workgroup referencing open a new file and workgroup reference the corupted file as it doesn't open the file, it can help. also try not to leave the file saved with anything other than 100% print scale in page setup. as this can be a cause of this sort of coruption

another vote for this piece of usefulness. don't forget grey layer and don't save as well. if we could set a general behaviour in preferences that included the option to set by sheet, that would be the best.

option 2 works really well. We can hope that things will be better in the future thou. ;-)

we don't used mixed network but we do use Os X server a couple of thoughts You can set the name of mac server possiblely the same as it windows workgroup name. instead of by ip address or it may sound silly but if you turn off mac fill sharing on the server. the mac clients should still be able to access via the windows sharing. the other option maybe to use WebDAV as common sharing system. [ 01-28-2004, 07:20 PM: Message edited by: iboymatt ]

if we had a Slab type object (like walls but flat) we could use it for all these sorts of things. sinks in benches, lights in ceiling, services penetrations in concrete slabs. although symbols would need to able to have the object itself and the cut-out required.

Scale and rotate would add so much to usability of hatches. also a function in hatches pallette that creates duplicates of hatches rotated and or scaled.

quote: Originally posted by Tristan M: Just remembered another change I would love to see... I would like to be able to customize the line styles provided, not just the thickness of the stroke (as is currently available), but also the length/scale of the dashes and be able to create my own combinations such as is available in Adobe Illustrator. Unfortunately, when working digitally between different programs for presentation I still end up going back to Illustrator to adjust line styles and dash types. Have you had a look at the menu item "Dash Styles..." it kind of buryed in multiple menus. Page-->Set Attribute Defaults-->Dash Styles... here you can make your own dash styles and set if they scale with lineweight as you seem to be requesting. [ 01-18-2004, 10:30 PM: Message edited by: iboymatt ]

hey if anyone hasn't seen this by now, it's worth a look... http://www.asktog.com/index.html one of the orginal GUI designers for the mac and his comments on Mac os X. Of most interest to us (the vectorworks crowd) would be his discussion of information density in user interfaces. think about how we are using VW how much visual tracking of the screen you do to do simple tasks, sure there are loads of useful keyboard shortcuts, but most of the time you will still visually check settings before drawing. This and other wishes for increase density of information in the VW interface, would seem to be things that will give increased comfort and productivity. yes you can have the saved sheets palette open and it will highlight the last double clicked sheet, but think about how much screen real estate this palette takes up, even with a small set of drawings.

Seems like a really good idea to me. Maybe it be something similar to Illustrator styles? something nice visual. That the name of the last sheet called stays bold and maybe shown in the bottom bar (user pref's) then if you do something that moves you away from that sheet a plus sign is added (or similar(say a red strikethru maybe)) to the name.