matto

Not that i've found. Maybe you could wrap the object inside a PIO then use buttons in the info palette.

Eric, Just too wonder out loud... The question is would your wish be served by being able to look at the design layer from a different angle? I mean that way instead of moving the plan to suit the elevation you are drawing, you could draw each plan directly related to the face of the plan (ie one, upside down, two sideways) then spin the design sheet to be looking the right way at the part you are drawing at the time. (much like traditional orthagonal hand drawing). that way the information is in the plan once only. (small file size, constitancy of information) then you can use viewports as a digital cut and paste.

Our office has been buying the old "new" iMac's (the iLamp/sunflower) for our office machines for a year or so now. similar situation mostly 2D but most the the office does the occational 3D work. As weel as a few 17"powerbooks. So we have G4's running VW11 and generally mail, itunes, maybe part of office or our databse, safari as so much technical information is web based these days. all running at the same time. VW is still responsive for most things. even large 10meg files. Our Advise would be buy lots of memory, it is the thing that will have the best effect on getting the most out of any machine. but considering the new iMac 20" 1.8Ghz and 1Gb ram is about the same price as the 17" sunflower with 256Mb ram 12-18 months ago. the new iMac 20" looks like a very good cad machine. but the question is does the all in one thing worry you? we found it to be a non issue, that have cad being so visaully intensive upgrading monitors always happens with machine upgrade, and we have no trouble finding uses for the whole machine once it gets a bit to slow for cad 2-3 years down the track.

Do you have a ReDraw; call at the end of your script, with some toogle scripts it's needed to update items.

Indeed it is possible, have a look at the add on package of animations tools that Julian Carr has put together. think you'll find to answers your wish and more. www.ozcad.com.au

There is a third party utility applications for mac osX, that will give you a volume control for each of the active applications. But for the life of me i can't find it at the moment. It would be nice if VW included a volume control in the application, it might also be nice to be able to stop some types of snap points from making a sound, while still being able to snap to those point.

Indeed it is a very common activity in our office to print large drawing at smaller paper. any improvement would be good. i always thought an option in the batch print sheets dialogue box (sadly industry series only) could be to print selected sheets to a common paper size.

You you still have the "export as vectorscript" option. the export isn't as pure as true version export but it should get you close.

It would be nice if there was a button in the edit sheets dialog box to activate or preview the edited version of the sheet in the background before closing the dialog box.

Yes much could be improved in the hatching of objects. [ 08-24-2004, 01:59 AM: Message edited by: iboymatt ]

Please don't forget this issue. It is probably the most important improvement that could be made to Vectorworks at this stage.

The theory has always been in mac-land that destructive acts should require deliberate action on the part of the user. So while i agree that the process is a bit over involved, as it stands. Having a single click process (i.e. a directly called menu function) is going to far. Adding a "purge all" check box to the purge command would seem to be a happy medium. Although that still requires about 4 actions. The other option which could be really useful. A "backup and purge" menu command. That would save a copy of the file then purge all from the active copy of the file.

Grant M, Sorry about confusing your comment. Yep the saved view buttons is more what i would be looking for. It would be great to have one for Viewports as well. Although i'm now not sure why the pop-up menu is in the new layer/class dialogue at all, or maybe why it's there but these dialogs don't have a means to set colour or scale for the new layer, or various attributes for classes. Thanks

Propstuff, in VW 11 a pop-up menu has been added to the new class/layer dialogs, it's near the bottom and not very obvious. It lets you say what state the new class/layer will be added to all the saved sheets. (not saved,invis,grey,visable). Which is a great thing, and speeds things up allot. It has a couple of shortcomings 1. that it doesn't add the visibility setting to viewports. 2. that it can only apply a default to all. Maybe an "Advanced" button could be added, that would pop up a list of all the effected entities (saved views, viewports) and allow for tweaking of the settings.

if you just want to be able to see one class (or even grey the other classes) try organise-->class options-->.... the process is highly scriptable so you should be able to find some variations on the theme at vectordepot.com . Although it would be nice if was an improved way of toogling classes and layers on and off in the main package.

when you have the 2d selection tool enabled the last button on the bar will toogle the wall move mode on and off the P key is the deflaut shortcut when the 2d selection tool is enabled.

i'm not sure why this info is not posted by NNA on the vectorworks site. there was an interview with one of lead programmers of Vectorworks in which there was discussion of speed on various platforms. although is almost a year old. it does have a serise of in Vectorworks Benchmarks, for Mac's including the Dual G5 and x86 both Intel and AMD. You may best guess scale the numbers to compair your two options www.architosh.com

Also, If you haven't already join the vectorscript mailing list. there is alot of good info in the Archieve for it. it will only add 20-30 messages to your inbox a week, and you'll find the people are very helpful.

the other part of the problem (just to make it as clear as mud) Walls can't be constrained. so there is no way to lock down walls that can still be edited, but "know" setback or other requirements.

the new double click any object to edit is really useful. i just wondering would it be also useful to be able to double click an object on a non active layer, and jump in to that layer, like jumping into a group or a symbol, in the same way coming out of the layer would bring you back to the orginally active layer. To me this would be preferable to the "show/snap/edit others" in layer options, for keeping drawing structure. Oh all most forgot, could we get a snap back key. (say apple option ] ) that would bring you back up to the top level, if you are serveral deep. [ 07-29-2004, 01:48 AM: Message edited by: iboymatt ]

Sketchup is very nifty software, but also limited(it does what it does very well, but runs out of skope very quickely, well in terms of the 2-3 year project life of your average Architectural Project). Althou... live sections and elevation, like sketchup has, would make VW very powerful. Not to mention live shadowcasting,... [ 07-26-2004, 04:11 AM: Message edited by: iboymatt ]

Yep all it would be very helpful in scripting especially syntax colouring, and The ablity to cut something out of a drawing and paste it in to the script as Vectorscript would be very useful. An environment similar to Xcode Applescript Studio might be worth looking at. The ability to colapse parts of the a script, say subroutines to just there procedure title. Auto Indenting of sub rountines and such would help track larger scripts as well. Could the Plugin editor be treated as a document, instead of a dialog box. So that Editor could be open in the background (this might need to lock out the script in questions from acting on the other documents). It might help with processor use for what is basicly a text editor. Auto Variables ,or an improved way of tracking variables. an easierly accessable variables list or such? colouring defined and undefined Variables differently? Just a couple of extra thoughs, i'm sure there is more, if the editor is getting a serious overhaul.

The Lite version also makes a great one for the director's computer.

In the olds days of Minicad and Deligraphsoft they had a product called Blueprint which was basicely MiniCad cut back to be a pure 2D version. Which might fit the bill. it would be good for there to be a path of upgrades. If only to help keep well trained VW people in the programme, build a following and such.

Kevin, your right about the class control for the viewport it's self. The problem seems to be that VW's general class vissiblity setting at the time will override that of the Viewport. So that if a class is turned off generally it won't show up in that viewport, even if the class is on for the viewport set in the OIP. Bohlr In the same way, if the viewports class settings turn off the classes but the generally setting are all on does that speed up your rendering times? matt