In Praise

[Cloud Hidden]

Since most of my posts in this area are gripes, I'll try to balance that with praise for VS.

It is saving me hours and hours of work. Sometimes I use it to create a spheroid and then squash it into an oblate, and it was always hard to get the exact height when doing this manually. Now I can automate it, and better still, have the script calculate the physical limits on the oblate-ness, lest I try one that's too flat for my app. The script makes it sooo easy to experiment with stuff that manually was a pain.

The latest is a script that's saving about 3 hours a pop. I have a hemisphere (or oblate), and need to calc the material patterns--they look like segments of an orange and are called gores--that are sewn together to make the spherical shape. Old method was an old cad program that would output a file with the necessary technical data. Could import that to a spreadsheet and work out the numbers I needed. That software doesn't work anymore. In one day of scripting (why didn't I think of it before...duh!), not only can I now get the numbers, but also get them shown in useful units (spreadsheets don't do so well with ft and in), AND draw the gore pattern with all the cut lines properly dimensioned. From 3 hrs of work to 1 minute!

So, while I will continue to gripe about the things that don't work, or change...thanks for making VS available and keeping it going. It's critical to my work.

[Jonathan Pickup]

my tools are extremely simple but they save me heaps of time. I have tried to show my clients how easy it is to make simple scripts like drawing a line of a specific colour and weight just so that they realise what a time-saver they have....