The Bearer of CAD News….

First of all, I did not say “BAD” News… Let’s just call it different than what you may be used too.

Normally I try and keep all of my blogs about new and exciting features (and I am not saying these can’t be either, once you get used to them.) But I felt I needed to bring some things right out in the open to everyone, since they have been brought to our attention from our customers. I promise there are a lot more exciting positive things that I will be covering in my future blogs.

First item on the list is the “AutoCAD Classic Workspace”, Wellll… it’s simple; it’s gone. But that should not be a big surprise. The Ribbon has been the main default menu for the last 6 years. (Hence, the reason the old toolbar menu got the name “classic” in the first place.) But, if you wanted, you could rebuild your own from scratch and save the workspace. Oh by the way, the Toolbars button that was on the View tab on the Ribbon is also gone. I’m sure you saw that coming too, right?

Here is what you will need to do from the command line…

Command: -TOOLBAR

Enter toolbar name or [ALL]: DRAW

Enter an option [Show/Hide/Left/Right/Top/Bottom/Float] <Show>: SHOW

(From there you can still right-click on any of the Toolbar button icons to display other Toolbars.)

You can also do a search for TOOLBAR in the Application menu and select one of the Toolbars to display.

Second, item on the list, the drawing window Scroll-bars has been changed to SCROLL-BAR! (That’s right, Single.) The Horizontal one is no longer displayed, despite the “plural tease” in the Display Tab in the Options dialog box. That’s ok, I like the PAN command better anyways. I just wish the Vertical Scroll-bar would change it’s FaceBook status to “Single”.  😉 <rim-shot>

Thirdly, you can no longer turn on the TEXT version display on the STATUS BAR. Ouch! That one hurt me.  Oh well, I guess I will have to learn the pictoglyph version of the drawing aids now. Good news is they have added a lot more access to tools that were not available in prior releases. Maybe, they just couldn’t get it to fit with the text version.

Lastly, I wanted to mention the “New Improved Graphics”.  (Honestly, I thought my eyes were going bad). Objects will appear to be a bit thicker and softer line weight than before, and I am not talking about what I have been calling “The FAT FUZZY CATAPILLAR” when you hover over or select an object. (We’ll have to get back to that one later!) But I have found a few tricks to make the normal display a bit crisper for me. One of things that helped was turning off the new Smooth line display in the Graphics Performance dialog box by right-clicking on the Hardware acceleration icon on the status bar. There is a few other setting I am still working out.

So that is all I wanted it air today, if I run across more I will try and mention them. If you find some let me know, so that I can post them and see if we can get some feedback or workarounds from all of our readers!  I hope this helps you in adjusting to the new AutoCAD 2015 version. It really does have a lot of great features to offer over the older versions. Unfortunately, Autodesk will never be able to please everyone, and technology will always push forward. Like I said… “I am just the messenger.”  Sometimes we need to take the bad with the good or sometimes it’s by design; like one of my all-time favorite quotes from a popular animated film says…

“Ohhh… you don’t know what’s GOOD for BAD!”  ~ Megamind.

http://youtu.be/LOAB2Xa_XC8

Enjoy.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 20th, 2014 at 9:03 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.