Scroll bars and dwg import

[Donald Wardlaw]

One of the things that set VW (then minicad) apart from AC and others was a very smart interface. The smart cursor itself was way ahead of the competition. The interface had an intuitively successful design, which was elegant and (as it was mac only at the time) very mac like.

Upgrading from 10.5 to 12.5, I'm finding some interface changes that make working with VW more tedious and less elegant. The redesigned object handles are the worst example of this. Lines with common endpoints used to give a different look if one, two or both lines were selected. Now, it's impossible to tell just by looking at the selected handle. Is the left line or the right line selected? Or both? All reads the same. Did not used to.

Another interface change that doesn't work well for me is the scroll bar. It used to scroll over a reasonably small range. You could actually use it to scroll across a drawing in a way that was faster than panning or using the scroll arrows. Now the range of the scroll bars is so large that if you use them, you slide so far off the drawing you have to go to fit to window to get your drawing back. Useless.

But there are some neat things too. An example is the dwg import of multiple files. Now that is a piece of work!

I just wish there were people tasked more to the interface details. If you want good design, you have to pay attention to the details.

Regards,

Donald

[Robert Anderson]

Don, have you tried panning / zooming with the mouse scroll wheel? This is an industry standard, and I think a big improvement...

[Robert Anderson]

...I guess what I'm saying is I could turn the scroll bars off entirely.

[Donald Wardlaw]

Robert,

Autocad and Microsoft are industry standards too.

I've never used a scroll wheel and never liked drawing with a mouse. I use a wacom tablet. Just a personal preference. Too many years with a pencil left my hand with a permanent pencil kink that is too tight for a good mouse grip. Maybe the scroll wheel would be fun.

My complaint, and it is a pretty minor one, is that the scroll bars don't work like they used to. In fact, for all practical purposes, they don't seem to work at all. When you guys make the program more functional I applaud. When it gets made less functional I say, "hey, whatchall up to?"

Regards,

Donald

[daomun]

I have to chime in here too. As someone recently coming from v8.5 to v11.5, one of the things I did notice immediately (besides a ton of very cool, useful stuff) was a severe degradation to the Autoscroll functionality. It sometimes works fine, but most times it's like I've dragged into a brick wall. It reaches the side of the screen and just stops. And this is one of the things that really set VW apart from other cad and 3d programs. ACAD does have scroll bars, but no autoscroll. And C4D (and every other modeling program I've used) doesn't even have scroll bars! It is such a pain moving around. Very slow. This is no doubt due partly to the fact that I am so used to the ease of working in VW, that it is hard to adapt. When you have your button pressed down and are dragging something to a place off screen, no scroll wheel, pan function, or scroll bar, will be as fast and elegant as the ability to just keep pushing it towards it's destination point, rather than letting go and scrolling or panning over to where you want it to go, reselecting it (maybe after having to zoom in or out or both) and dragging it there.

I think focusing on the mouse wheel is an attempt to become more AutoCADish. And I have heard a lot of people asking for this, so I'm sure it is very useful for them and an improvement. A good thing. But don't take away the better things in the process. Please.

And I use a programmable four button trackball (Kensington Expert Mouse), which, as far as I know, has no way to emulate the functionality of a scroll wheel on a regular mouse. So there are a few of us that use something besides a mouse, and we need the other options to be efficient.

Oh, and the space bar pan/boomerang option is a very nice addition. It almost makes up for the loss of autoscroll. I find myself using that in it?s place. Not as fast, but better than scrolling. And more dependable than autoscroll.

Just my 2 cents.

Robert,

Autocad and Microsoft are industry standards too.

I've never used a scroll wheel and never liked drawing with a mouse. I use a wacom tablet. Just a personal preference. Too many years with a pencil left my hand with a permanent pencil kink that is too tight for a good mouse grip. Maybe the scroll wheel would be fun.

My complaint, and it is a pretty minor one, is that the scroll bars don't work like they used to. In fact, for all practical purposes, they don't seem to work at all. When you guys make the program more functional I applaud. When it gets made less functional I say, "hey, whatchall up to?"

Regards,

Donald