On twitter: #graebert15
Moving quickly along, we are now hearing from Robert Graebert, the chief technology officer (at left), and what's new in the next release of ARES Commander, the desktop version of their software that runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux computers.
Some of the new functions include...
- Drawing tabs
- Import DGN and WMF files
- Direct editing on the screen (toggle with F12)
- Heads up display is an on-screen toolbar with common commands (developed together with Solidworks)
- Command completion by pressing Tab
- Dimension offsets that allows you to place a dim at the next offset snap point (I like this one)
- Layer state manager
- Hide, isolate, and unisolate entities
- Select matching selects entities whose properties match
- Annotation scaling applies to dimensions, text, etc
- Lock layers, and fade locked layers
- Plus Xtra Tools, a menu with 36 commands written in LISP, like Pattern Hatch that applies images as a repeating pattern through a nicely designed dialog box.
If you look closely, you can see some of the new features in the image provided by Graebert, below.
To improve performance, they are getting graphics cards to do more. The bottleneck is no longer the CPU, but how the GPU is used. Zoom is 70% faster, regens are 50% faster. Evening opening files is 10% faster.
Better OLE support in Windows only: PasteSpecial now pastes native objects, like a spreadsheet, as well as edit in place.
LISP has something like 300 functions added.
Currently in beta testing, shipping in November. This will be followed by three service packs, one in each quarter.
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