AutoCAD Bad Boys and Girls

When I think back to my first experiences with AutoCAD, I realize that PCs themselves were new and not a lot of people felt comfortable with computers. I did some of my best learning figuring out how to mess with new people. Below are examples of me being a jerk. I'm not proud of my actions (well, maybe a little) but, I learned a lot about digging into software and working things out. If the pay off was a little laugh, well maybe that is just enough motivation for the mischievous AutoCAD users.


Example One: (nuisance)
Change the blipmode to 1. Blipmode leaves a tiny "X" everywhere the user clicks for no good reason. Well I think the reason was in the old days we wanted feedback to where we just clicked.


Example Two: (annoying)
Set zoomfactor to 5. This slows your scroll wheel down to about old-lady.


Example Three: (irritating)
Type in vtoptions and set the Transition speed all the way to slow. This will make a zoom all take about all of a guys lunch break.


Example Four: (offensive)
Change mbuttonpan to 1. this will bring up object snaps instead of letting you pan with the mouse.


Example Five: (painful)
Change pickadd to zero. This makes it so you can only pick one element at a time.


Example Six: (jerk)
Change highlight to zero. This turns off the highlighting of selected objects.

Example Seven: (extreme jerk)

Use aliasedit to change common keyins like E for the line command.

AutoCAD Performance Monitor from Autodesk Labs

Autodesk Labs is one of the coolest things that ever happened. I highly recommend digging around on their site. As far as I can tell they have a bunch of out of the box thinkers, trying to make crazy ideas work like drawing with a Wii remote rather than the traditional interface. 


Today I was checking out the AutoCAD performance Monitor widget.

It provides a color-coded status bar indicating the virtual memory used by AutoCAD based products.  It works on Windows 7 and Windows Vista for both 32-bit and 64-bit systems but really means the most on a 32-bit system because a 64-bit system tends to use only the physical memory.

There is a link to a white paper if you follow the link I provided above.