Re: VS 2012

I said "tablet", but I mean in the old-school sense of the word, not the
newfangled ruined version. It's a digitizing tablet, which has a puck with
crosshairs. We use them for registering multiple (older, or at least
non-digital) datasets into the a current drawing, so yes, pinpoint
precision is required here. For much drafting work, yes, snapping will
generally work sufficiently, and if not, there's always the dreaded
keyboard for COGO-like work....

I went upstairs and talked to a couple of people that spend their days
drafting in AutoCAD - their position is that you'd need a very large
touchpad to get the precision needed even for basic CAD work; a mouse is
annoying because you have to move it *through* space, but that also gives
you as much precision as you need. If you made a mouse that only worked in
the space the size of your mousepad (and couldn't lift it to reposition &
move more), it would be very, very difficult. And that's the problem with a
touch device - one-to-one mapping with the screen dimensions, which means
that for the precision needed you have to do a lot more zooming in and out,
and that's inefficient.

Mind, none of this effects me; I more-or-less gave up being a mechanical
engineer to work in software, and I can't see touch being useful in my
immediate future. Doesn't mean I won't develop for it - that'd be crazy -
just that it's not going to be part of my day-to-day life for a while.
Unless I get a touch pad the size of at least 2 26" widescreen monitors,
which doesn't seem likely....

Herb.