Chris D

Like I say, I have to try and remember how to do it each time... That's the problem...it's complicated and you don't do it very often...so you forget how to do it every time...

Nice bit of kit. /envy

It does look rather like it's from the 1970's....with its coloured lines on a black background. You can work in greyscale but not with coloured lines on a white background.

I downloaded this and tried it on my iPad last night. It's surprisingly full featured really...not just a viewer, but an editor. It's lacking one key aspect to be useful...you can't actually create new files within the app - you can only view and edit files that you have uploaded to your AutoCAD WS web space. Of course, a workaround for this would be to create a load of blank files in your web space and edit them as 'new' files each time you need a new file. The benefit of this would be you could pre-load your blanks with some useful pre-drawn blocks (symbols) etc. I can see myself using this for the odd site survey, in the absence of a VW app for the iPad.

There is no command line Henry, just use the tools on the toolbars. Many of these have keyboard shortcuts, just like AutoCAD. The only time I miss the command line from my ACAD days is when i want to look back at my last handful of operations.

I find Record Formats useful, but annoyingly complicated to set up. I have to try and remember how to do it each time. Part of this is that they try and do two things, one is to display the attached data as text within the object, which necessitates the rather convoluted method of attaching record formats to text objects, but the second, which Waldo alludes to is simply to store that information with the object (without displaying it). This latter function could be implemented in a far simpler and more user-friendly way, either through the Resource Browser or the OIP.

So, the window PIO can crash a clean file, the stair PIO can crash a clean file... are we evaluating VW2011....or beta testing?

Flash as a development platform is different to the Flash plug-in for browsers. I understand that Flash is easy to use, hence its wide deployment, but there is no reason Adobe's tools cannot be repurposed towards the creation of standards-based content, indeed this is already happening. I haven't missed the Flash plug-in from the iPad, I don't need it for YouTube, iPlayer or much else. Flash has little relevance to the discussion about a native VW app for iOS or Android.

Nor I, though I must set the record straight. With Macs, I think you get what you pay for. I've owned computers since the ZX81, used Macs in the 80s and early 90s, switched to Windows 95 like many people and used PCs for the next 10 years. My last PC (at home, not the office) convinced me there must be a better way...it came with wi-fi, bluetooth, a TV card and all sorts of bells and whistles...even a wireless keyboard....a pretty well specced machine for 2003....on paper. In reality it was less than the sum of its parts, the wi-fi didn't work, the TV needed an IR receiver on the end of a cable to use the remote, as did the crappy RF interface for the "wireless" keyboard. It ran Norton anti-virus that made the fans go crazy, and yet still got a boot sector virus. Worst 1000 quid I ever spent. I replaced it with a second hand eMac...which had no bells and whistles, but was quiet, reliable and a joy to use. I've since bought a 2010 iMac and it makes me smile to use it...completely silent, fantastic screen, boots in the blink of an eye, robust wi-fi and bluetooth....I could go on. Best 1000 quid I ever spent. I could have had two Dell boxes for what I paid for it, but no way I'd swap. I note from your comments that you don't actually own a tablet. I think this is revealing, because Windows tablets have been around for years, and nobody bought them. Android tablets are now on the market too, but you haven't bought one. I want to ask you this question about why NV Inc should invest in Android (VW works on Windows already) - why should they put their money into a platform, when you haven't? The iPad is a great platform...if you haven't used it, don't knock it. It has a large and rapidly growing installed base, and I believe is worth investing in. I don't want to knock Android, it may well become the Windows of the tablet world, but from my own experience, I'll stick with Apple.

What are you planning to do with that USB port on your Android tablet? (Which one have you got by the way....?) I've never understood this particular criticism of the iPad. You're not gonna plug a mouse in to a tablet, or any other peripheral, and if you were, why not do it wirelessly over bluetooth (works excellently on my iPad with my iMac BT keyboard). You're not going to use a USB stick for expansion...too slow by far...and for swapping files, DropBox is far better than a USB stick. 16 gigs is a lot of CAD files too...but if you're determined to store them on your device instead of in the cloud, get the 64 gig model... If we're talking smartphones rather than tablets, forget it. There is absolutely no point to a VW app for iPhone or Android phones...the screen real estate is too limited on a phone to be useful. A 3.5 inch display is smaller than a business card.

Well, whaddya know.. "AutoCAD WS is now in the App Store for iPad and iPhone" http://www.9to5mac.com/28702/autocad-ws-is-now-in-the-app-store-for-ipad-and-iphone

The VPN route would be painful and data-hungry over a 3G connection out on site. As for the DWG route...the reason I like VW so much is that it's a hell of a lot faster to actually get anything done....especially something like field drafting. To be reduced to AutoCAD style tools, and end up with dumb DWG data, would be a waste of effort really. Having said that...I'll be downloading AutoCAD WS on day one...it's the only solution on the table at the moment after all..

Of course, what NV Inc need to know, is what would we be prepared to pay for such an app. Autodesk can afford to give away an iPad app as an up-sell for their entire DWG based ecosystem. Nemetschek's portfolio is more fragmented....they'd have to produce native Allplan, Archicad and Vectorworks apps...with user bases a whole magnitude smaller. Of that reduced and fragmented customer base....how many have iPads? So basically, a VW based iPad app will have to pay its own way. For comparison, premium iPad apps that actually do very little, such as OmniGraffle, cost 50 dollars and above. Are we willing to pay? 50 dollars, for viewing and field drafting? Who's in?

I think you need to define what you want the iPad app to do...now you've had an iPad for a couple of months (me too). I thought i'd use the iPad at work, but I don't....it's just my 'sofa computer'...and unbeatable for that..I hardly ever fire up my home iMac any more. Productivity isn't the iPad's strong point though. Even iWork for iOS, which looks great at first, is a pain to use to actually get anything done. Maybe some of this is the perils of early adoption...iPad 2 will be more powerful (please..more RAM...woefully short in practice), and we'll soon get multitasking, which is one of the barriers to any sort of productivity at the moment. I know for sure I wouldn't use a full blown CAD package on a 10 inch touch screen, and I won't use pen input on the iPad until it has a digitizer...the current capacitive styluses are too clumsy. So what sort of VW app do we want? VW Viewer would be handy...better than viewing PDFs if you can change view/zoom/class/layers etc. Handy for spinning a 3D model around in front of a client too? VW Site Survey app? I'd rather use the iPad with a basic version of the VW tools....2D walls, windows, doors...than take a laptop with full blown VW to site when I want to do a quick survey of an existing building. What else were you thinking?

I'm getting stability issues with 2011 too. I got a long beachball of death followed by a crash on an empty file just now....all i tried to do was create a custom window to have a look at the PIO... We don't want to upgrade hardware too...

We're already using a mix of 12.5 and 2008 and the idea was to consolidate...but I get your point. The trouble is that the two versions we'd have to run are 12.5 and 2011, which are pretty different, and switching between the two during the week would be a bit of a pain.

I'm trying out the 30 day evaluation of 2011. I've opened one of our big site plan files, originally drawing in version 12.5 to see how it handles it. The answer seems to be....very poorly indeed. This is a big file...55Mb, but version 2008 handled it fine, actually quite zippy. With version 2011 it is practically unusable...it literally takes about 2 minutes just to switch between sheet layers. I can understand that 2011 is optimised to work with objects created by itself, but if we can't work on our current project files, we simply can't upgrade. Anyone else having problems?

If they are symbols, you can use the symbol replace tool to do this.

Maybe in the US, you order your doors by leaf size. Maybe it's something to do with the wider use of timber frame instead of masonry over there...maybe the wall opening size isn't so important. Well, in the old world, we use doorsets*, and we specify them by the wall opening size in which they fit. Almost exclusively. No, exclusively. I've never seen it done any other way. *Doorset = door and frame bought together. Google results persuade me this is a UK term. Now, you CAN buy door leafs separately from their frames, but you wouldn't find this approach on any project where an Architect was involved...hence you would never need it in a CAD system. You see what I'm getting at. VECTORWORKS ONLY ALLOWS YOU TO SPECIFY DOORS BY THEIR LEAF SIZE. IT DRIVES ME NUTS, ALONG WITH ALL OTHER UK VECTORWORKS USERS. This has not been fixed in VW2011. I don't really care about Leaf Size. Leaf size varies by manufacturer, depending how thick the frame is, how much shim gap they allow, etc etc. What I do care about is Wall Opening Size. (We refer to this as the 'Structural Opening', regardless of whether the wall is structural, or even if it is a stud partition). I want to pick the Door Tool in Vectorworks 2012, and it offer me a metric '910 door' (910mm wide wall opening). This would fulfil 90% of my needs for doors on any given project (well, housing at least). Then, I'll know you're listening.

I can confirm the problem still exists in v2011. This upgrade isn't selling itself yet.. Right, off to the wishlist with this one (again).

I'd be very interested to hear your experience with this. Reading through the 'What's New' I can see that a lot of the selling points relate to BIM capabilities. For the 2D workflow, scaleable symbols and perfect preview text seem to be the biggies (big enough for the upgrade?). Our reservations about BIM are twofold...the first one is WHY? when it looks like a lot more effort to get your 2D drawings out the other end (and the client doesn't always want the 3D model...or at least want to pay for it). The second is that the BIM tools in VW just don't look like our buildings....tight urban sites in the UK have funny stairs, funny roofs, funny shaped panels of curtain wall...etc etc. I just don't think we could model our buildings with the VW BIM tools in a way which would produce reliable 2D drawings at the other end. We only use one of the PIOs....the door tool...mainly because it is more parametric than using symbols. But at least as of version 2008, the door tool was still terrible...you can't even specify a door by its structural opening, which is the main way we specify door sizes in the UK. I've no idea whether this has been changed in 2011?

They don't play on the iPad or on the iPhone. As for downloading them...well that sounds like hassle....the point is, I wanted to watch them on my "sofa computer", rather than at my desk...

All these movies about new features...I'll watch them tonight on my iPad....oh wait...I can't, because they're in .MOV format instead of MP4.. grrr C'mon guys, Autodesk has got an app out and you lot can't even get your marketing materials to work on iOS yet.. EDIT: huh...ironic... http://www.nemetschekvectorworks.co.uk/vw/competitions.jsp (win an iPad...)

Hey....thanks for the link...this looks like a BIG release...lots of new features and fixes.

Sounds interesting. I hope we're offered a subscription service....at the right price of course....