Cornerstone Canada

Our company is concerned by the announcement to move to a subscription-based Vectorworks model. In addition to the modified cash-flow arrangement that we are not accustomed to, we fear that the increased frequency of updates could potentially have an adverse effect on staff productivity, so for our firm - it's cause for alarm. Given the time it takes to migrate custom tools, then update our project teams and migrate files with each new annual version, and the potential for breaking tools, or introducing new bugs and problems into important project files - we generally don't update our version of Vectorworks once a project achieves the critical Construction Drawing stage (unless that version of Vectorworks is particularly buggy). These files are our bread and butter, so, although we subscribe to Vectorworks Service Select, we generally do not install each new version of the software that we are entitled to. Once a project is in this mission-critical stage and the workflow is stable - we tend to avoid disrupting it by adding new software - until that project is complete. We hope that Vectorworks will continue to offer a purchase-to-own stream for long term customers, such as ourselves.

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I've heard nothing from Nemetschek about it. We use a couple of iPad's in our office for site reviews & reports, and often load up project PDF's for reference, but having a VW reader at least - would be useful for dimensions. On another front, using a large tablet or touchscreen surface to actually create drawing files - like a digital drafting surface, could be a powerful method to build drawing sets.

A fully functional, or even just a VW reader (or VW Lite) running on our iPad's - allowing us to use VW in the field on our iPads would be useful. Being able to markup VW files with the stylus would be very useful. And now, being able to use iPad's with the coming "Sidecar" capabilities in MacOS Catalina - could be intriguing for VW users.

You're not alone. Users at our firm (myself included) have indicated they've noticed rendering, redraw, and general performance sluggishness in VW 2012. I also heard this from IT at another Vectorworks-based firm we do joint work with. (This may partially be because we've moved legacy files forward - I'm not sure yet). We moved from VW 2008 to 2012, to allow us to migrate our workstations (mostly i5 and i7 iMac's, MB Pro's and the odd Mac Pro) to Lion. File sizes have expanded dramatically, which may begin to strain our backup and archive system as well. We too are disappointed with the Laggy Performance we found VW 2012. AB VW 2012 Mac OS 10.7 Macbook Pro 2011 (Intel Core i7 / 2.2 GHz)

I've also been evaluating VW2011 on several Mac workstations in our office and no matter how I tweak the preferences and settings - have found the redraws too slow to recommend upgrading from VW2008. In addition, file sizes appear to have ballooned (ie: 37.3mb increasing to 62.3mb) which company-wide would add a significant burden to our file storage, backup and project archiving requirements. Unfortunately, I can't recommend upgrading to VW2011. Sadly, we'll need to wait until 2012.

I've been recently evaluating VW2011 for our office implementation and finding the 2d screen redraw time to be unacceptably (even painfully) slow, even on our highest end Mac workstations. The second dealbreaker is that file sizes have increased (from VW08 to VW2011) dramatically (ie 37.3Mb to 62.3Mb). Multiply that file size, and the delay from screen redraws across an office of 40 workstations - and you can see why I couldn't support migrating to it.

In Vectorworks 12, is it possible yet to create a workgroup reference to an (external) layer which itself contains a layer link. This is not supported in Vectorworks 11.

We've been having some problems with Speed in VW11 that weren't evident in 10. Often simple actions of all types seem to cause a pause followed by the prolonged OSX rotating color wheel (for up to 20 or 30 seconds at times). Changing Hardware Accelerated 2D Navigation preference does not appear to have any affect. Nor does restarting VW or the station. The workstations are quite current (G5's / G4's), packed with RAM and are generally quite well maintained. Have others experienced this behavior?

We tend to use groups quite a bit to isolate similar objects of all types, and frequently find ourselves working inside groups. We have a keyboard shortcut to toggle "Show Other Objects While in Groups" however, it would be very useful to have a preference checkbox to allow us to "Grey Other Objects While in Groups". This would provide some useful, context while working inside a group.

A few people in our company (mostly G5's and G4's) have commented on the same problem. Simple actions of all types cause a pause followed by a prolonged OSX rotating colour wheel. One project team has even reverted back to VW 10, in frustration. Changing Hardware Acclerated 2D Navigation preference does not appear to have any affect. Nor does restarting the app or the station. It's very frustrating.

A couple of simple but poweful VW enhancements for us would include the following: 1) The ability to "Grey Objects" outside of groups, instead of simply showing and non showing them. 2) Text on Greyed layers of classes rendered as text, instead of simply the grey text outline box. 3) The ability to delete unwanted classes, but save those similarly classed objects into individual groups. (We often import huge survey files with up to 80 autocad classes (layers) into our site plans, that don't work with our office class setup, and we wish to retain some sort of object "grouping" to be able to sort through those objects later).

Is there a simple way to call up a vectorscript via assignable keyboard command? I like to toggle preferences with vectorscripts, but would like to assign keyboard shortcuts to them to make accessing them - quicker. Thanks andrew abobyn@cornerarch.com