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VW 2014 Baffling downgrades


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Our office has just upgraded to 2014, from 2011, and there's a number of small, but darn irritating changes which seem to be generally a bizzare move backwards:

1. Lag - I assume this is a hardware issue, but we are running 3.4Ghz i5 imacs, and even on brand new drawings the lag is significant and frustrating

2. Dashed line menu - used to be one, concise menu for changing line thickness and dashes in one, now 2 separate menus - why?

3. When drawing a polyline, or any line for that matter, when you used to zoom in and out everything else would fade/grey into the background, so on a long line you could see where the line you were drawing was, making it easy to join long polylines together - no longer does this

4. Duplicate - When using the command duplicate-move, you could hold down cmd between commands, so, for example, when duplicate-moving a number of times you could quickly repeat the command - now have to release cmd to press enter.

5. Polyline/polygon tab - defaulted now on polygon, which, personally, I never use, I virtually always use polyline, so this is an extra step to get to the tool

I realise these are small issues, but over the course of the day, they add up to extra stress and a lot of time lost, and for the life of me I can't understand why they've made these changes. Does anybody know a) reasons b) how to get back any of this functionality?

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

1) If it is hardware this may be mitigated by going to Tools > Options > Vectorworks Preferences > Display and disabling Enhanced Navigation graphics.

2) This is so that line styles are now an easily manageable resource rather than sort of trapped per-file:

3) I do not think I have seen what you are talking about before, if you could post a screenshot of what the old software was doing I can take a closer look.

4) The default key should be alt/opt on a Mac to duplicate move, you can hold that key down and repeatedly click objects to duplicate move them without letting go or hitting enter.

5) Do you mean the Polygon tool vs the Polyline tool? They should be two separate tools in the Basic palette, not stacked together unless you are using a customized workspace. Default hotkey for Polyline is "5" and Polygon should be "8".

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Cheers Jim

1) That seems to have made a small improvement, although it's still definitely not as quick as the old version - I've got them open side by side and the difference is more than just noticeable.

2) Interesting, I can understand why this has been done, but I'm not sure it helps for general day to day use where you want to quickly change between line styles, in particular dashed lines.

3) Heres a screenshot of what happens - the vertical line you see is part of a rectangle underneath the line I'm drawing, making it a lot easier to see the polyline.

http://imageshack.com/a/img836/8743/nucy.png

4)What I mean is when duplicating an exact distance e.g. 100mm repeatedly, normally I would go cmd D-cmd M enter, repeatedly. This is no longer possible, by the looks of things

5) I'll look into the reasons behind that, I assume we must have a customised worksapce.

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

1) What is the graphics card in that machine? It can be found in the System Profile under Apple > About this Mac > More Info > Displays tab.

4) Confirmed on Os X here, works as it used to on Windows. Many of the underlying guts of the Mac UI have changed between those two versions, ill submit it and see if it can be corrected or if its because of switching from the old Carbon to Cocoa. (Old and new Mac APIs)

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You seem to suggest it is just my specific workflow, but I respectfully disagree. I cant imagine any workflow where this missing feature is an advantage.

To implement a method to add things, while there is no workable method to remove them is a very basic deficiency. We get files with more and more redundant line types. Since there is no reasonable method to reduce them, people just put up with it.

This way Vectorworks will get a reputation of being "messy" or unprofessional.

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

Did none of the methods, Purging the document after the style was no longer assigned or replacing via the resource browser work for you?

I agree that Vectorworks needs the ability to replace ALL resources in-place though. Where anywhere a resource is assigned, it can be replaced by another specified resource of the same type.

The INTENTION was to make Line Styles easier to work with, especially across multiple referenced documents. The main reason the old way of handling them had to go was because they weren't manageable outside a sing-user workflow. I don't mean to say the new method is perfect, but now that we have seen the problems that you (and plenty of other users, didn't mean to single you out, my wording was poorly chosen) have encountered and are going to address them in a way that ends up being better than the original.

I certainly wish all of this was seen ahead of time, but sometimes we have to fix what we can when we come across it. I am seeing a lot more review is going into changes like this for future releases than in previous releases to prevent issues like this from affecting your workflow so dramatically.

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

They just changed the naming system, still works out to about 1 version per year. Once on Service Select you get everything immediately, which works out better and cheaper than upgrading every 3-4 versions instead as many people used to.

There are talks about making upgrades more modular so users can pick and choose to get updates to certain components more easily, but a lot of big features (64bit included) are taking priority at the moment.

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