PowerCADD 7 is unbelievably buggy!

[David Scott]

[ftribel]

[Alfred Scott]

For everyone who is having 'delay' problems, this may be the result of a 'bad update' to the OS. Clayton Hayes reports that

[Alfred Scott]

Greg Johnson was reporting a delay problem and the result was that when he tried to snap to an object in the drawing, he got the snap indication, but then when he began drawing, it didn't snap at all.

I tried all of Greg's settings and with the same drawing and could not replicate the problem here. He already does the repair permission and disk directory stuff on a regular basis. So he did a complete reinstall of OS 10.4 plus the combinned updater to bring it up to 10.4.7. No improvement.

Then he decided to look at the few third party gizmos that he uses, and narrowed it down to one from Unsanity called Fruitmenu. When he disabled it, the snaps in PowerCADD returned to working properly.

As I recall, Mike Spencer once mentioned using Fruitmenu and also reported a delay problem.

Alfred

[ms]

I am addicted to FruitMenu and will not ever ever ever give it up.

Why? I have an alias to the file server in the apple menu, and to my libraries and base sheets, and use it about a million times a day, that's why.

I DO think that FM slows the system, even though you cannot discern this fact with Activity Monitor. I don't see a relationship with PC and snaps, though.

However, I don't use the other FM features, like Finder contextual items, and perhaps these are the source of some people's problems? In another post I recommended Diabolitin.

http://s.sudre.free.fr/Software/Diablotin.html

–ms

[Greg]

I solved the problem with FruitMenu by simply excluding PowerCADD in the Application Enhancer (a part of the Unsanity modules). Granted, you lose its features when in PC, but simply clicking on the desktop returns its functionality.

I have not been able to determine if the "contextual menu" part of Fruitmenu might be causing the problem. It does warrant some further investigation...

[BB_____]

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[Alfred Scott]

The problem with the WildTools Polygon tool was a general problem caused by the tickle procs (which do the hiliting) for the tool was taking up too much time. I think this may also explain the general problem of 'sluggishness' that people have reported.

I think you can probably go back to using Fruit Menu with WT 8.03.

Considering the industrial-strength bitching that has gone on recently, I'd appreciate hearing from anyone with WT 8.03 if the problems have cleared up. There are many other problems that I fixed, such as the problem with not being able to zoom in or out while using the tools. I've also put in there an accelerated scroll wheel zooming.

It's actually okay to say nice things from time to time.

Alfred

[erikmar]

[Matt]

Industrial Strength? Man, all I've been using is the Bon Ami.




(thank you, Alfred)

[nkoren]

I guess I was one of the people doing the grousing, so I guess I'd better respond. The thing I've noticed with this update is that Powercadd has gotten a bit snappier. There are still lag issues, but they've definitely improved. Thank you! As far as feature-specific bugs, if you look at my post which started this topic, you'll find that almost none of my complaints had anything to do with Wildtools; consequently, they haven't been addressed with this update (nor should they be, of course, since that isn't Alfred's department).

The one significant Wildtools-specific complaint that I *did* have remains unchanged, however: fallout behaviour when using "finger technology" is still really problematic, IMHO. But I guess that's a feature, not a bug, and I've lately taken to avoiding "finger technology" tools whenever possible. The remaining Wildtools that I use have always worked excellently, and continue to do so.

[Alfred Scott]

Nathan,

I think most of the complaints that you had related to both PowerCADD and WildTools, and that is the general issue of sluggishness. I think this is caused by over-drawing and doing un-needed work in the tickleprocs of WildTools. These are in tools that hilite objects when you have the mouse over an object.

In the case of the WT Polygon tool, I was able to fix this, and I made the same change in all of the other tools. However, on Monday, I realized that I had failed to recognize and deal with a situation. This applies to tools like the Trim and Fillet tools. So while I had said that these tools were now fixed, in fact, they were not. However, it was not difficult to deal with this issue and on Monday night I came in and fixed all of these. This will be coming your way shortly.

On the finger technology issue, I did look at what you and others said, and I spent quite a bit of time thinking about it and going over the programming. Clearly, if the tool is falling out on you that often, then something is wrong, either in the tool or that you need to learn the technique. I think it's highly likely that there really is a problem in the tool and that it's a time-issue caused by the tickleprocs. This is what was creating the problem in the WT Polygon tool, so I think it may be doing the same thing with tools that have finger technology.

I'm willing to continue to work on finger technology to see if there's a way to improve it, but it doesn't make sense to do this until we eliminate the time problem caused by the tickleprocs.

On the design of finger technology and how it works, let me explain that there are two completely different tool behaviors here, really two different tools. In the case of the Needle tool, you click directly on an object, and if you miss an object, the tool falls out. We also have the 'striker needle' action, where you draw a line across the objects—finger technology. To let you use either action, I let you choose based on a time and movement issue: click, pause for 5/60ths of a second and don't move the cursor more than two screen pixels, and you will get going with finger technology.

All of this extends to much more than finger technology in tools. It began about 14 years ago when Joe Burke was advocating click-click drawing, which they had in Microstation. His point was that it was a health issue, that working all day by pressing your forefinger, holding a mouse button down and drawing across the desk led to pain problems in your arm and wrist. I could understand and appreciate his point, but it felt so odd to me, particularly when combined with the click-drag action of the selection arrow tool and so much else in the Macintosh world. So I came up with the idea of hybrid-click-click (which Joe hated, but which has proved to be the most popular by far!) which lets you draw with either method, click-and-drag or click-pause-release mouse-and-click.

Apple was already doing things like this with menus, where you could click-pause and something different would happen. I have it all through WildTools. With the Fixed Line tool you can click or click-and-drag. So I see finger technology as nothing more than the same principle of hybrid click-click drawing. Consistency may be the hobgoblin of small minds, but it is the hallmark of great drawing tools. If we make a change, we should do it across-the-board and not just on one tool.

I'll be in Denmark for a family reunion, returning on the 14th. Greg Johnson has reported a significant change in the snappiness of the program, and I'll be interested to see what you and others have to say when I get back.

Thanks,

Alfred

[pbacot]

The click-click approach explains a lot, Alfred. And while I prefer click drag, I appreciate the concern, as I am actually experiencing new pain in my arm and associate it with the mouse work.(sometimes I wonder if a huge mouse pad and a weighted mouse might help-- it's all these tiny movements...)

And it's a dilemma if you need the click / fall-out action.

But even in v. 6, I often have these tools fall out. Something's not handy with this and apparently the sluggish action of 7 makes it worse. Could a key command be required?

[Greg]

I would certainly not want to lose the hybid-click option.

I used to consistently use the click-drag approach, but did find it harder on the small muscles. I also noticed that there were times when the click-click approach worked better. Zoomed way in, or with lots of congestion of objects, the click-click seems to be more sutiable. Also now with Alfred's scroll zooming, when using a WT tool the zooming is much smoother and more elegant.

It does take some adjusment and practice however to get a feel for when a tool "takes" and when it drops out...

[David Scott]