did little to make day-to-day drafting any easier, and it took more than a year and
a half to get to a stable revision.
As a result, many CAD-industry observers, including myself, have questioned whether Autodesk could deliver a release good enough to overcome the bad reputation of R13. I'm pleased to report that Release 14 is possibly the finest
new AutoCAD
I've ever seen. It's not that this version has some particular killer feature; it's more that Autodesk has really paid attention to the fundamental issues of performance, productivity, and software quality. This release is good enough that users of older versions, even those who've said they wouldn't upgrade, will certainly have to reconsider.
Performance
Release 13 required more computer power than most users had on their desks. Further, it had a big memory footprint and created enormous drawing files. Autodesk has tuned R14 extensively for improved performance. This is no mean feat because there's no single thing you can do in a complex program like AutoCAD to make it faster;
performance is the sum of many little things. Autodesk tore out the existing display code and replaced it with a Heidi-based graphics system. The developers reworked complex entities, such as polylines and hatches, that had caused performance problems in the past. They added demand-loading for several program modules. They fine-tuned a number of areas, making many little improvements. The end result is a program that, running under Windows 95 or NT on a Pentium-class machine with 32 MB of RAM, is as fast as AutoCAD R12 running under DOS. Frankly, I never thought Autodesk would be able to pull this off, but my testing confirms that indeed it has.
Productivity
It's one thing to make a CAD program that exhibits fast interactive performance. It's something entirely different to make a CAD program, especially one with a long legacy, fundamentally more productive. Release 14 includes a few new tricks that make it easier for the average user to become productive.
My favorite productivity enhanc
er is the new AutoSnap function, an inference-based object-snapping system. Translation: It tracks objects under the cursor and finds points of geometric interest without requiring operator intervention. For example, if you move the cursor over a line, AutoCAD will place a marker icon over the endpoint or midpoint (depending on where your cursor is). Since most drafting is done with reference to such points of geometric interest (endpoints, midpoints, centers, etc.), this can be a major time-saver.
This feature, while new to AutoCAD, has been available from competitors for quite some time. Ashlar made the technology popular in its Vellum product in the late 1980s. I suspect that long-time AutoCAD users will wonder how they got along without this feature. (They may also wonder why it took so long for Autodesk to include it in AutoCAD, but that's another story.)
A more subtle productivity enhancer is the move to dialog boxes built on the Microsoft Foundation Classes (MFC) library. Autodesk has for y
ears gone its own way in interface issues. But R14 (which runs only under Windows 95 or NT) is about as Microsoft-compatible as a program gets. This change makes AutoCAD more familiar for those who are used to Windows-based programs, and that could translate into a nice boost in overall user productivity.
MFC also helps improve AutoCAD's API. AutoCAD has always been a developer's CAD system, with third parties supplying a wide range of vertical add-ons. The new MFC-compliant ObjectARX API (see the Tech Focus below) offers developers better control and capabilities than they've ever had. R14 also supports ActiveX Automation (formerly called OLE Automation), which will allow users skilled in Visual Basic or Visual Basic for Applications to customize AutoCAD. In fact, ActiveX Automation is very fast and does most of what ObjectARX does, the major exception being that there's no provision for creating custom objects.
One area of productivity that's often ignored is printing. CAD programs are different
from general applications in that they generally drive large plotters and have exacting requirements for quality. In R14, Autodesk has improved printing in at least three distinct ways. First, R14's new internal printer drivers handle OLE objects. By using these drivers, instead of the standard Windows system printer drivers, you get better performance and finer control over output quality. Second, R14 now works properly with networked printers, with no fiddling required. And third, R14 comes with a batch printing program, so you can send an entire job out in one fell swoop.
There is also an advanced batch plotting program included as a bonus on the R14 CD. It adds control over which layers and area of a drawing will get plotted, and it incorporates a plot stamp function, which prints user information at the edge of the drawing. This advanced version is also able to do a "plot test" of a batch list of drawings to determine if any parts of any drawings are invalid or missing without actually doing a har
d-copy plot; this can be a real time saver.
Quality
Autodesk got a big black eye with R13's quality problems. The company eventually fixed those problems, but it's determined not to repeat history with R14. This review is based on a beta version of R14 that is quite stable. It isn't perfect, but the bugs I've discovered are mostly functional failures -- things that are straightforward to track down and fix -- rather than nasty blue-screen crashes that defy easy solution. Moreover, at the time we were testing the product, Autodesk had not announced a ship date for R14, instead indicating that it would ship the program when the software is actually ready. (And by press time, Autodesk had made the new version available.)
We all know, though, that bugs are a fact of life. One of the questions yet to be answered is how well Autodesk will respond in fixing them. One step the company has taken is to institute a paid update subscription service, although it remains to be seen whether updates will
be available separately.
It's Still AutoCAD
AutoCAD R14 isn't a breakthrough product -- it's just a cleaner, faster, more productive version of what Autodesk has been selling for 15 years. It's still expensive. There's lots more to R14 than I've covered here, including improved rendering, better OLE object support, and more powerful printer drivers. And there are also some things that are not as well resolved as they could be (for example, block names over 32 characters or with spaces are not permitted).
Nonetheless, Release 14 represents a small step for CAD, a giant step for Autodesk. The company is now perhaps 80 percent of the way through the process of taking a 15-year-old CAD program and making it ready for the 21st century. There's still work to be done, but Release 14 proves beyond a doubt that Autodesk can and will do it.
Product Information
AutoCAD Release 14.........................$3570 per seat
Upgra
des from R13..........................$ 495
(requires Windows 95 or NT)
Autodesk
San Rafael, CA
Phone: 800-964-6432 or 415-507-5000
Fax: 415-446-1919
Internet:
http://www.autodesk.com/
Enter 985 on Inquiry Card.
Faster on the Draw
