Is it me?

[Keith.Turner2]

I have been using Autocad since 1986 but in recent years have 'moved on 'to Inventor my company has a lot of Autocad drawings so I still have to 'keep my hand in' & modify, update older stuff & produce new drawings from time to time. The problem I am having is the latest versions of Autocad are so different to the pre 2004 versions that as an occasional user I struggle with the new look interface even in 'Classic'Style' & find it hard work to use. We are automatically updated with all the versions of Autodesk software so have to try to keep in touch with all the updates & changes as my post title asks 'is it me?' or do others struggle to keep up?

[jaberwok]

No, it's not just you but, if you've been using acad since 1986, you're probably a keyboard basher and you can probably do most of the updating/modifying that way. The older commands don't generally change much.

[Keith.Turner2]

Yes I tend to use a mix of keyboard & icons but the customisation of the toolbars seems different - problem I have is time, I just need a program I can use I don't want to spend hours relearning what should be a simple tool to create drawings.
Programmers seem to have forgotten the old engineering KISS principle - Keep It Simple Stupid!
Inventor has its foibles & can drive you nuts at times but I would not go back to 2D CAD as my primary tool, No Way!

[ccowgill]

yes, jumping from the 2004 version to anything after 2006 will get you the new CUI way of customization, then when you get to 2010, you get to have cuix, which seems to be way faster. Of course, open and close of 2010 seems a lot faster than 09 as well.

[jaberwok]

Do you have the option to reinstall an older version?

[cadtag]

Do you have the option to reinstall an older version?

If on subscription, 2010, and the three earlier versions. e/g/2009, 2008, & 2007 can be run on the same box. 2006 and earlier apparently can't be run anymore if you are subscription

[Keith.Turner2]

We are on subscription - perhaps Autodesk should offer Autocad Lite (LT) as an alternative as 3D is handled by Inventor, as long as lite is kept simple & not buried in add ons Sadly Autodesk seem to have Microsoft Syndrome change for change sake !

[simonaster]

[QUOTE=Keith.Turner2;960832] I don't want to spend hours relearning what should be a simple tool to create drawings.
Programmers seem to have forgotten the old engineering KISS principle - Keep It Simple Stupid!
QUOTE]

The evidence of CAD 2006 and on is that the programmers at Autodesk are not interested in making a ' simple tool to create drawings '.
This is not exciting enough and too difficult to address some of the ' issues ' that these AUGI pages indicate have been around since the dawn of CAD - hatches ! - but just get swept under the carpet of ' Yes, but it's got a great new Ribbon ! '. Wow.

I think that the point and purpose of CAD has become lost to the programmers, who, it appears to me, would much rather be writing a Game-Flight-in-frustation-we'll-fix-it-in-the-next-release tool to get you to continue with the lucrative subscription fee.

The much vaunted ' productivity increases ' and ' increases in screen space ' are entirely out-weighed, for instance, by the time wasted in 2008 whilst it repeatedly demonstrates it cannot load X-REFs, copy and paste between drawings, in anything less than 386- time.
That particular release of CAD is just a toy, unacceptably slow in commercial terms when used in that world, with X-REFs, and Autodesk should be ashamed of it.

Yes I have followed the tips in these AUGI pages re 2008 and slow X-REF loading and they don't work.

For native ' Doing what it says on the tin, without making a fuss about it' CAD 2002 is still my preferred option.

[michael.12445]

I work in a larger office that is attempting to transition from AutoCAD to Revit. I was recently asked to draw several details using Revit's "drafting" mode, which generates strictly 2-D views composed of components, line work, and annotations. Using Revit's "components," such as plywood, drywall, studs, plaster, etc., is very easy, and it wouldn't be too hard to duplicate the effect in AutoCAD using dynamic blocks. But what really leapt out at me was how easy it was to manipulate the line work, text, and annotation in Revit - far easier than in AutoCAD. You don't use primitive tools like STRETCH - if you've drawn two connected line segments, Revit "knows" to maintain the connection as you move them around; you don't bother with trying to set just the right OSNAPS - intelligent hints pop up to help you keep things aligned, orthogonal, snapped to the right points, etc.; and annotations behave as expected, no spaghetti-code "dimvars" to trip you up - Revit even offers to align them with each other as you move them around.

And guess what - they're BOTH Autodesk products!

So there's no reason AutoCAD couldn't lose a lot of the legacy gotchas and glitches that persist in release after release - through more than 20 YEARS of development - other than Autodesk's laziness, greed, or just plain contempt for what used to be their "flagship" product but has been allowed to devolve into an embarrasingly archaic, bloated dinosaur. My suspicion is that Autodesk uses AutoCAD development as a kind of programmers' purgatory where new hires have to cut their teeth before being allowed to move on to really interesting work, or where established but underperforming programmers get assigned as punishment. Even then, just to keep the coders from becoming totally catatonic, they have to indulge their creativity by letting them work on tailfins like ribbons, prettier icons, or other amusing ways of moving the deck chairs around on the Titanic. Yes, once in a while they come up with something useful like dynamic blocks, parametric geometry, etc., but the implementation is almost always complex, convoluted, and user-hostile. Meanwhile, no one can be persuaded to clean up the hopeless maze of legacy bugs, gotchas, and UI inconsistencies.

At one time, AutoCAD was technologically advanced. In order to pull off the miracle of running a CAD program on a PC, Autodesk took it upon themselves to incorporate code that ran under DOS yet was able to hijack system resources to overcome the host OS's 640K memory limit. That kind of techno-moxie is long gone. AutoCAD for Linux? On a Mac? Anyone at Autodesk who might have been intrigued by such challenges has long since been shouted down by cries of "You don't understand the market..."

Or it may just be that Autodesk intentionally hobbles AutoCAD in order to persuade customers to move on to other products like verticals or (like us) Revit. Either way, I hold out very little hope for AutoCAD's future.

[irneb]

You're right about Revit having nice and snazzy annotation & parametrics. And its family system makes DB's look like you're still drafting with a T square & triangles. However, I still find drawing details is "faster" in acad. The actual drawing work is a bit more complex in revit, but that may be due to the "Revit Axiom": you need to think differently. Usually the trick with Revit is to first draw (sketch) it, then dimension it to the size you want. And also (if you're going to do anything complex) start-off by creating some panes before sketching linework, you'll find out why after creating a complex family.

Revit's quite beutiful when drawing some plans, sections & elevations. But then you get to strange things like recesses & projections in walls ... and you simply cannot use a normal wall type anymore. You need to trick it by drawing several walls next to each other, forcing nibs where you want them and not where Revit thinks they should be. And then comes the problem when the parametrics actually work against the user: draw 2 walls too close to each other and they join automatically. Put a window into one of these tricked walls & you end up with only one cut out. Sure there's ways of getting around it, but they usually cause problems further along the line.

For the overall stuff, I like Revit a lot. For details, I use AC then import that into Revit as linework. Then Annotate in RVT and use its referencing to the details like blow-ups & large scale sections.

As to AC being the black-hole into which programmers disapear ... that could be true. Maybe it's used to filter the upcoming geniuses. I'm sure the guy who figured out how to do DB's is now working on something else. That may be why DB's hasn't progressed much since its inception. It seems that AC is relegated to the B class programmer in ADesk. As soon as he/she shows merit, they're moved (as you say) to something more interesting, and as soon as an A programmer is demoted (maybe due to "laziness" or whatever) they go back to the "duldrums". :cry:

The old DOS acads were blindingly fast. I started on R9 & R10. You never waited for a command to complete like you do nowadays. It all started to go cross-eyed as soon as windows was woed. Remember R13? And then as new "features" came about, they just went along and never got fixed to perfection. Just bloating the overall program, but not making it that much better (only slower). :shock:

Strangely, a lot of the new stuff was available (even in the DOS days) through 3rd party add-ons. I used an addon called CadPlan, specifically designed by Architects for Architects. Most of its features are still not implemented in vanilla, and some of Revit Arch & Arch.Deskt. comes close to doing the same thing ... only much slower & more buggy, with much less user control. So it shouldn't have been difficult for ADesk to evolve AC into something approuching an amalgamated Revit, Inventor, etc. while making it as efficient & robust as anything out there. If outsiders could do ADesk's job better than they could themselves, AD could just simply have outsourced! :mrgreen:

[dgorsman]

Given the complexities of modern software design (including new OS's being released at an astounding pace), to be hired as a programmer you don't have the time to really be anything else - including a designer who is an experience product end-user. At the other end, the programs are growing so complex the designers don't have time to learn to be programmers, otherwise they end up with little chance at being hired for either. There just isn't enough hours in the day for people to have a foot in both worlds.