Shared Tool Palette Headaches

[stusic]

For me and my users, it's very broken. Without including the icon image, it's difficult to discern various tools, and with no way to maintain the location of tools within a palette, it makes it difficult to locate similar tools. Since it's so difficult to use the tools, my users tend not to use them and use less-desirable workarounds.

Besides, ribbons seem to be the way that most software is going, so I think it'd be better to work in that direction than to continue with toolbar and tool palette formats that I doubt will see much more support or enhancements.

I agree that converting existing palettes would be nice, but maintenance of new ribbons will be much easier once they are made. I think there's no conversion avaialble because the ribbons offer so much more functionality that palettes and ribbons just don't really translate well.

[Coloradomrg]

I agree that the ribbon is probably the 'future' more than the palettes are, but until I can figure out a way to ease the pain of converting I'll be keeping our palettes around. They were a huge improvement over the old toolbars that they replaced.

A simple to create tool palette button = a pain in the rear to re-write into a ribbon button.

[bcaron931713]

Has anyone figured a good way to share tool palettes? Like, where the icons show up? Maybe stay in a particular order? It looks great on my machine, but icons don't show up on anyone else's. Also, when I add a tool, I put it along with other similar tools, but it shows up on the bottom of everyone else's palette. Any fixes/workarounds? Most of the tools are just blocks, but some are custom lisps.

I'd love to move to ribbons, but there's still people who use toolbars.

Thanks!

Phillip,

This workaround used to work for me when I was in an office that used tool pallettes:

Before you publish the catalog to the shared location, on each tab of your palette, right-click and Ctrl-A (select all), Ctrl-X (cut) and Ctrl-V (paste). This will update the order of the tools on the tab to what you personally are seeing on your screen.

As far as the order of the tabs themselves, I believe that info is saved locally on each users machine. (New tabs you create will show up at the bottom of their palette.) Overwriting the each users .aws(?) file may work, but I never tried it. Users can drag the tabs to the desired locatiopns themselves.

Hope this helps a little. Others may have good ideas too.

-Brian

[tmullins]

After countless hours experimenting, the only thing I have found that works somewhat consistently is a "reload" button on a palette that basically wipes the current palette paths out and replaces them. This seems to typically work as far as reordering the icons.

Something like this:

(command "*_TOOLPALETTEPATH" "C:/putyourpathhere/tool_palettes/palettename1/Palettes,C:/putyourpathhere/tool_palettes/palettename2/Palettes")

[cwood704]

Phillip,

This workaround used to work for me when I was in an office that used tool pallettes:

Before you publish the catalog to the shared location, on each tab of your palette, right-click and Ctrl-A (select all), Ctrl-X (cut) and Ctrl-V (paste). This will update the order of the tools on the tab to what you personally are seeing on your screen.

As far as the order of the tabs themselves, I believe that info is saved locally on each users machine. (New tabs you create will show up at the bottom of their palette.) Overwriting the each users .aws(?) file may work, but I never tried it. Users can drag the tabs to the desired locatiopns themselves.

Hope this helps a little. Others may have good ideas too.

-Brian

Thanks Brian! This was exactly what I was looking for!
Using your "Ctrl+A, Ctrl+X, Ctrl+V" method on each tab did the trick. It makes sense too...I understand that in order to update the order of any newly added symbols/tools, you have to clear the tab of all tools and re-add them in the order you want them to display before you publish them to the network. This is an easy and quick enough way of doing that in a "mass" fashion.

Thanks!
Craig