Rushed Out?

There are so many little "problems" in AutoCAD 2007 that I wonder if it was rushed out the door? Little picky things that seem to indicate that QA [quality assurance] is not keeping up. Here are some examples of what I mean:

Several releases ago, Autodesk rewrote all the command prompts to make them consistent. When a command needs you to pick points in the drawing, the uniform prompt looks like this:

Specify first corner:
Specify opposite corner:

But the new RenderCrop command words the prompts in this unusual fashion:

Pick crop window to render:
please enter the second point:

Speaking of odd prompts, the sEttings option of the -View command features two square closing brackets:

Enter an option [Background/Categorize/Layer snapshot/live Section/Ucs/Visual style]]:

Here's another one: all commands in the menus can be accessed by keyboard; a mouse is, in theory, not needed. Hold down the Alt key, and then press the underlined letter. For example, to save a drawing for File Save, use these keystrokes:

Alt, F, S

But as of AutoCAD 2006, new commands either lack the underlined letter, or duplicate them with other commands. For example, in the Draw menu, both Helix and Text have the same shortcut, x. To get to Text, you press Alt, D, X, X. That just requires an extra keystroke, but goes against UI guidelines that each command should have a unique shortcut letter.

Next QA problem: some menu items have no underlined letter. In that case, AutoCAD seems to go with the first letter in the menu name. For example, none of the first four items in the Tools menu have an underlined letter:

Workspaces
Palettes
Command Line
Clean Screen

You can get to Workspaces by pressing Alt, W and to Palettes by pressing Alt, P. But you can't get to Command Line or Clean Screen, because the focus jumps to Customize.

The Draw menu has a variation on the problem. Both Modeling and Multiline have their Ms underlined. However, when you press Alt, D, M the focus jumps to Multline, skipping Modeling. Bill Fane found the solution is to press Alt, D, [Enter] to access Modeling, but that workaround defeats the purpose of underling the shortcut character.

Next QA problem: tooltips. Some icons don't display them, so you don't know the purpose of the related button. One example is the Render icon in the palette displayed by the RPref command.

In other palettes, the tooltips appear, but behind the palette! You can't read them, except for the little bit that pokes out from behind the palette.

Next QA problem: TiffIn was a command that imported TIFF files as solids. Clunky and superceeded by the ImageAttach command. When you enter tiffin, AutoCAD 2007 displays a dialog box:

The TIFFIN command is no longer supported.
Use the IMAGE command to attach raster image files.

Except that Image also no longer exits. It has been superceeded by the ExternalReferences command.

Next QA problem: Autodesk has pretty much abandoned giving customers much in the way of printed documentation for $3995. I don't mind, because I prefer online docs. The problem is the sad state of the on-line help. (I've complained about this before several times.) There are links missing, technical errors, incomplete documentation. But with each release, I don't see those problems fixed -- it gets worse, because new commands are added, which incur new errors.

Comments

[R.K. McSwain]

Regarding the errors in HELP. Im not sure your method of complaining, but I thought I would add this.

On most pages in HELP, there is a link at the bottom that says "Please send us your comment about this page".

You can click on that to send your HELP file comments directly to the documentation team. I have done this before and received a response.

If everyone would flood this channel with comments, maybe they would listen...

[Lee Ambrosius]

TIFFIN has not been changed since AutoCAD 2004. If you go back as far as AutoCAD 2004, you would notice that this message box is displayed back then and is not something that is new in AutoCAD 2007.

Technically the IMAGE command still does exist, type in IMAGE and it works. It just happens to make the same internal call the EXTERNALREFERENCES refers to. If IMAGE wasn't a valid command the LISP code (command "IMAGE") would fail and it doesn't. So that is not a defect.

As for the documentation problems, make sure you are using the proper feedback channels. The link in the help system as R.K. pointed out is the best channel and the appropriate channel for documentation problems. They can't fix something they don't know about. I know my doc problems have gotten resolved in the past using this link.

If you are going to write in criticism of other folks' typos, you might first wish to check your own:

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/superseded