Topic Title

Any word on DC12 progress?

Yes

Hah!!
Anything you can share, or are you bound to secrecy with the possible forfeiture of life?

Yes.

[Mark F. Madura]

We're up to BETA 39 in as many (work) days.

MFM

Neil:

What's your favorite new feature?

Josh:

What's yours?

(The cone of silence lifts) Hmmm Mark, that's a really tough question. I really don't know if I could pick just one thing. There are so many things that have really received some amazing enhancements that really enhance the work flow and some of the top things that have been on my wishlist. Sometimes a product is released and you can point out a few new big features that are new and kind of overshadow some of the other small features and tweaks to make existing features better. While I know everyone is really excited about the new Smart Entities, (and yes, they totally rock everyone ) I am really enjoying many of the enhancements to the existing tools which I would say have doubled, tripled or quadrupled their speed and usefulness. I don't want to ramble on too much or give too much away too soon (I'll leave that to those who deserve to show off their hard work) but my favorite three enhancements so far would be.... (drum roll please)

3. Symbol Enhancements - Editing of symbols has been enhanced so much that we are finding many new uses for them now. One thing we are using them for is pseudo MSP details on our regular GTV sheets. It's really exciting for those of us who never got our little heads around MSP.

2. Paragraph Text - I really dig the new text tools and styles. Being able to work with an actual paragraph like in a word processor is so nice. Not having to worry about going outside a boundary box and doing the Clipboard shuffle to copy and paste text to adjust a paragraph of text is truly a time saver. Bold Italic Underline and even the goofy DWG compatible over line. And the new text styles is exactly what I was wishing for and takes full advantage of TTF's settings.

And I think for the number one spot I would have to go to.....
1. Xref Enhancements - Their grrrrrreat! Polycliped, multilayer highlighting, Double Click for Ref. Manager, and others. Being able to use one xref with highlighting for different layers and then being able to polyline clip it is awesome. One example from my two story test plan went from 8 xrefs to one and allowed me to remove 5 layers from my drawing that could now be handled by one xref. It really is a time & resource saver.

And there is absolutely tons more! To give an example, the v.11 What's new HTML file from the Datacad website is oddly enough 11 pages long. v.12's What's New file is up to 18 pages and it is not even near complete yet! Granted there is a more graphics and even some flash animation. There is still a lot of hard work going on behind the scenes now that the beta team has been beating v.12 over the head with tweak requests of the new features and definitely the smart entities. It's really exciting to watch the program morphing from a product that was designed with Architecture in mind and watching how well Datacad has been responding to our feedback and really coming thru in typical Datacad fashion to make it really user friendly and designed for the long haul. I personally would like to thank everyone at Datacad for their hard work and such a great opportunity to be a part of this learning experience. Now onto beta 40!