Hi Roland.
I've finally found the time to have a go with LDCad. It certainly has come a long way since I tried to break it by loading calc.ldr in the 1.0 public alpfa release!
I'm really impressed with the Relative Grid, and the Selection Info option (once I was able to find it!).
Of course, I now have a couple of suggestions.
* In the Manual Movement/Rotation boxes (and presumably in other dialogs as well), it would be nice if the Enter key was bound to the Apply button so that I didn't have to tab several times to get the button in focus or use the mouse to close the dialog.
* Somewhat similarly, the Reference/Selection properties (the one that comes up when you hit Enter with a selection) looks like the Apply button is the default action, but hitting Enter closes the dialog without applying any changes.
* In the parts bin, it would be really nice to have some visual indicator of which items are parts (that I can put into my model) and which are groups of (possibly other groups of) parts. It's can be particularly confusing when the icon for a parts group is the same as the picture of a part. I know that I can look at the status bar and if it has a part number in parentheses, then it's a part not a group, but that's a relatively large amount of mental effort (I have to look at a different part of the screen, and I have to parse the text there)
* Everything else I had has either already been brought up in either this or a previous thread, or else it's something that I'm sure is a non-issue (like a shortcut key that probably already exists). Seriously, almost every time I've thought "this program really needs Feature X", I find that Feature X is there after all - I was either looking in the wrong place, or I hadn't understood what the option did.
It should be noted that I didn't stray at all into the advanced features like flexible parts or animation.
Looking forward to what I've seen of 1.5!
Owen.
I've finally found the time to have a go with LDCad. It certainly has come a long way since I tried to break it by loading calc.ldr in the 1.0 public alpfa release!
I'm really impressed with the Relative Grid, and the Selection Info option (once I was able to find it!).
Of course, I now have a couple of suggestions.
* In the Manual Movement/Rotation boxes (and presumably in other dialogs as well), it would be nice if the Enter key was bound to the Apply button so that I didn't have to tab several times to get the button in focus or use the mouse to close the dialog.
* Somewhat similarly, the Reference/Selection properties (the one that comes up when you hit Enter with a selection) looks like the Apply button is the default action, but hitting Enter closes the dialog without applying any changes.
* In the parts bin, it would be really nice to have some visual indicator of which items are parts (that I can put into my model) and which are groups of (possibly other groups of) parts. It's can be particularly confusing when the icon for a parts group is the same as the picture of a part. I know that I can look at the status bar and if it has a part number in parentheses, then it's a part not a group, but that's a relatively large amount of mental effort (I have to look at a different part of the screen, and I have to parse the text there)
* Everything else I had has either already been brought up in either this or a previous thread, or else it's something that I'm sure is a non-issue (like a shortcut key that probably already exists). Seriously, almost every time I've thought "this program really needs Feature X", I find that Feature X is there after all - I was either looking in the wrong place, or I hadn't understood what the option did.
It should be noted that I didn't stray at all into the advanced features like flexible parts or animation.
Looking forward to what I've seen of 1.5!
Owen.