RE: VS 2012

don't worry, Herb - Alan said we don't need multiple monitors; we only think we do...

(grinning, ducking, running)

Philo

Sent from my Windows Phone
________________________________
From: Herb Warren
Sent: 9/19/2012 12:05 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [OT] 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.