Introduction to the AutoCAD 2009 Ribbon
Last Tuesday MSNBC, CNN, and every other American news outlet dubbed February 5, 2008 as “Super Tuesday”. Seeing that Virginia (where I live) wasn’t included in the Super Tuesday primaries; Super Tuesday wasn’t much different than any other Tuesday. Fast-forward a week to February 12, 2008, and you get what I call a Super Tuesday! Autodesk had some pretty exciting announcements to make. No Carl Bass (Autodesk CEO) isn’t running for president. Instead, what Autodesk is about to do is release their line of 2009 products, and you know what that means. An all new AutoCAD, Civil 3D, and the many other Autodesk products!
So what can we expect in AutoCAD 2009? Well the list is somewhat long. If you would like to see the complete list, hop over to Shaan Hurley’s Between The Lines Blog, and check out his The 2009 Products Including AutoCAD 2009 post. Stay tuned here at The CAD Geek Blog for some indepth looks at the new features within both AutoCAD 2009 and AutoCAD Civil 3D 2009.
The most notable of the scary new features is the all-new Ribbon. Microsoft Office 2007 was the first mainstream product to employ this new GUI. Autodesk in their 2009 release of AutoCAD have followed suit with their version of the Ribbon. At the end of the day, the Ribbon is really nothing more than the new Dashboard, but with some twists. Below you will find a quick video introducing how to use the new Ribbon in AutoCAD 2009.
Popularity: 84% [?]
Pretty cool. My users will hate it. Is that your computer clicking away? Time for a new hard drive…
John - There is no doubt about the drastic nature of The Ribbon. Having used Office 2007 for some time now, it wasn’t too big of a shock for me. Even still as drastic changes such as this are introduced - it’s hard to remain a progressive.
As for the audio. I thought the on board mic on my laptop would do better than it did. I’ll have to get something a little better for future videos.
Same old AutoCAD, great new look. Really, Autodesk, limit your new releases to every two years and make them worth it! It will take a couple of months just to get used to the new look but with seemingly few “real” functional upgrades and new features.
Everyone I know has used AutoCAD 2009 hates it. It much slower then older verisons of AutoCADs. It takes extra mouse clicks to complete the same task, the UI has 3 different styles mixed together. Autodesk needs to move away from introducing a new version every year.
Where are the old pull down menus across the top. I couldn’t even find the plot command until I found it when clicking on the big A.
Kurt - AutoCAD 2009 does ship with a “Classic” workspace. That will return things to “normal”. Now if you want to use the Ribbon, but still have your menus too; click on the name of your Workspace from the CUI command. From there you can adjust the properties of your Workspace, including Menu bar On/Off, and Model/Layout Tabs On/Off.
Does anyone even click the icons anyway? If so it seems awfully inefficient. All the commands are the same, so just type them in as usual and there’s no adoption period.
Adam - I assume you too are a long-time CAD user, who learned CAD before the advent of toolbar buttons. In my experience, most power users are keyboard commandos, down to the customized acad.pgp file. On the other hand, look to the way CAD is taught in the classroom. There, most teachers focus more on the toolbar buttons than command line. Although personally partial to the command line, I can see valid arguments on both sides.
There are a great deal of visual learners, and toolbar buttons tap into that learning style. When I look to the users I support, I tend to find a large portion of them using toolbars. Fundamentally, it comes down to the way they learned it in school, and that’s what works for them. While I am partial to the command line myself, said users are still productive and profitable, so how can one argue with that?
I went to a Central Illinois AUGI session last night and we were discussing AutoCAD 2009. Some are still based in AutoCAD 2006 (myself included) and we discussed the different changes. The Ribbon was the main discussion point and that Office users should have no problem. My main concern is getting everyone up to speed were I work. Other desktops in my office have 2004 LT and the company is looking into upgrading but its a slow process.
Larry - a blended AutoCAD 2006 & AutoCAD LT 2004 environment isn’t going to really be an issue as both versions use the same DWG file type. AutoCAD 2009 uses the AutoCAD 2007 file format, so if you want to have a blended environment you’ll need to be sure you save things in 2004, not 2007.
Beyond that, I will mention that AutoCAD does ship with a “Classic” workspace that essentially uses the R13-2008 core windows interface.