WildTools Developments

PowerCADD & WildTools
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pjmeli
Posts: 35
Joined: Mon Aug 10, 2020 1:54 pm

Re: WildTools Developments

Post by pjmeli » Tue Nov 10, 2020 12:39 am

The latest update is working smoothly for me. I don't use the join tool much so haven't noticed any issues.

The ability to copy a PC drawing and paste from the clipboard to a pdf document (Preview) perfectly sized without having to go thru the print dialog is golden for me, allows me to add pdf details to a library with ease. A real time-saver. It easily eliminates the need to have Acrobat Pro, which is a mess. Only thing that's useful for is digital signing.

That PowerCadd with Wildtools has so many capabilities that no other software has…there is no substitute. It's a CAD package with page layout/Image manipulation abilities in a one-stop package. Add the GIS tools…what can I say…I love it. Plus the drawings it produces are beautiful.

Kind Regards
Paul

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Alfred Scott
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Re: WildTools Developments

Post by Alfred Scott » Mon Dec 28, 2020 9:52 pm

I have just uploaded a new copy of WildTools 10.6.

BOZO TECHNOLOGY WARNING!
If you have previously downloaded WildTools 10.6, be aware that Bozo Technology will kick in on January 1. If you want to see for yourself, go to WildTools Preferences and turn on Bozo Technology. Affected tools will now have yellow tool icons and when you use the tools, everything will work as normal, and then it will place a duplicate, squiggled copy with a 4X pen size on top of the good object. You can just delete this. With this new copy, the expirations are pushed out for another year and you will be safe from Bozo Technology!

BACK UP your current copy of WildTools.

I know there are fatal problems with the Join tool in this version, so save often. But other than that, all is working properly—we’re almost bug free.

In PowerCADD, select WildTools Updates from the Help menu.

This will take you to a web page for WildTools 10.6.

Click on Download WildTools Development Version link.

You will find that there are a handful of new tools but a huge number of new things for the tools. These are all covered in the WildTools documentation.

The Door tool will operate in metric or imperial sizes. When you select the tool, there is a single button on the button dock, but when your mouse is over the button, it turns into a metric or imperial choice. Easy to understand once you see it.

Recent changes:
New The Needle tool dialog now is fine and it no longer crashes when you Option-click the Needle tool.

New The Grid Line tool lets you place gridlines as hatch objects in a variety of grids, This worked fine in the shipping version but developed problems in WildTools 10.6. It’s now working fine.

Tool setups are now back on. This means that each tool’s settings are stored on disk after you visit the tool’s dialog. Thus, your changes are now “remembered” between sessions of using PowerCADD and WildTools. Many thanks to Todd for getting the link problems worked out.

The Magic Wand tool is now working as it should and showing you what objects will be selected.

The display in the Favorite Lines tool icons is now working right. Again, thanks to Todd for getting the link problems cleared up. Note that you can option-click on an existing object in the drawing with the eyedropper cursor to adopt the attributes of a line style. The tool icon will show the line style, plus the line size, and in the tool’s dialog you can give a name to the style, say ‘water’, ‘sewage’, or any name you like.

There has been a lot of discussion about the Edit Window. When you select an object with the Selection Arrow tool, the Edit Window will show you the “standard display.” When you use a tool, the tool will set up the Edit Window with the fields that make sense to show in the drawing process. So if you are going to rotate an object, the rotation angle is the only thing you care about, and anything else is a distraction, so it only shows the rotation angle. So if you’re drawing a circle, the diameter is the only thing that is displayed and available to editing in the drawing process. When each tool is finished, it calls a ‘show info’ routine to show the standard display for the object.

I now have the yellow highlighting working better with the Join tool, but there are still problems. The idea is that when you click on an object, the tool will look ahead and show you all objects that be joined. It should work with every possibility of objects that can be joined together. I know there is a problem with polygons and beziers and we have a crash. Watch out, and save before trying this.

It’s not clear to me how many users understand the concept of favorites. The only clue is in a tool’s dialog, and you will see little plus and minus buttons on the right just below the display window. When you click on the plus button, you have saved the current setting of the tool as a favorite. Use the minus button to delete a favorite.

The following tools are now working:
Area tool
Section Line tool, with mechanical styles working
Date Stamp tool
Dimension Text tool
Tolerance Needle tool

You can now use the Edit Window repeatedly with a tool.

The Door tool dialog now draws the wall end lines right.

Gradients are now working right in Doors & Windows, so the objects placed now look right, and the Tree Gradient tool works as it should.

Warning
Date Stamp Objects store the current mode, however objects placed with the current beta do not have this information stored and may result in a crash. Best approach is to delete the objects and place them again.

The Join tool crashes if you use it on polygons, bezier, splines, etc.

Alfred

Alfred P. Scott
5407 Patterson Ave, Suite 202B
Richmond
VA 23226

(804) 353-1713
cell (804) 690-4591
alfred@seqair.com
alfred.scott@me.com
www.seqair.com

nametabb
Posts: 41
Joined: Wed May 29, 2019 8:50 pm
Location: Pound Ridge, NY

Re: WildTools Developments

Post by nametabb » Wed Dec 30, 2020 5:42 pm

Thank you Alfred!

Working great here. Will use caution with the join tool.

Thanks again, Bill

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Alfred Scott
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WildTools Developments

Post by Alfred Scott » Fri Jan 01, 2021 7:59 pm

Bozo Technology will likely hit many of you.

READ the entire description above.

Refresh your browser or it will repeat a previous download.

Alfred

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Alfred Scott
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Re: WildTools Developments

Post by Alfred Scott » Tue Jan 19, 2021 7:03 pm

I have just uploaded a new copy of WildTools 10.6.

BACK UP your current copy of WildTools.

In PowerCADD, select WildTools Updates from the Help menu.

This will take you to a web page for WildTools 10.6.

Click on Download WildTools Development Version link.

You will find that there are a handful of new tools but a huge number of new things for the tools. These are all covered in the WildTools documentation.

The Door tool will operate in metric or imperial sizes. When you select the tool, there is a single button on the button dock, but when your mouse is over the button, it turns into a metric or imperial choice. Easy to understand once you see it.

Recent changes:
New The Needle tool dialog now is fine and it no longer crashes when you Option-click the Needle tool.

New The Grid Line tool lets you place gridlines as hatch objects in a variety of grids, This worked fine in the shipping version but developed problems in WildTools 10.6. It’s now working fine.

Tool setups are now back on. This means that each tool’s settings are stored on disk after you visit the tool’s dialog. Thus, your changes are now “remembered” between sessions of using PowerCADD and WildTools. Many thanks to Todd for getting the link problems worked out.

The Magic Wand tool is now working as it should and showing you what objects will be selected.

The display in the Favorite Lines tool icons is now working right. Again, thanks to Todd for getting the link problems cleared up. Note that you can option-click on an existing object in the drawing with the eyedropper cursor to adopt the attributes of a line style. The tool icon will show the line style, plus the line size, and in the tool’s dialog you can give a name to the style, say ‘water’, ‘sewage’, or any name you like.

There has been a lot of discussion about the Edit Window. When you select an object with the Selection Arrow tool, the Edit Window will show you the “standard display.” When you use a tool, the tool will set up the Edit Window with the fields that make sense to show in the drawing process. So if you are going to rotate an object, the rotation angle is the only thing you care about, and anything else is a distraction, so it only shows the rotation angle. So if you’re drawing a circle, the diameter is the only thing that is displayed and available to editing in the drawing process. When each tool is finished, it calls a ‘show info’ routine to show the standard display for the object.

It’s not clear to me how many users understand the concept of favorites. The only clue is in a tool’s dialog, and you will see little plus and minus buttons on the right just below the display window. When you click on the plus button, you have saved the current setting of the tool as a favorite. Use the minus button to delete a favorite.

The following tools are now working:
Area tool
Section Line tool, with mechanical styles working
Date Stamp tool
Dimension Text tool
Tolerance Needle tool

You can now use the Edit Window repeatedly with a tool.

The Door tool dialog now draws the wall end lines right.

Gradients are now working right in Doors & Windows, so the objects placed now look right, and the Tree Gradient tool works as it should.

The Join tool is now working!

Warning
Date Stamp Objects store the current mode, however objects placed with the current beta do not have this information stored and may result in a crash. Best approach is to delete the objects and place them again.

Alfred

Alfred P. Scott
5407 Patterson Ave, Suite 202B
Richmond
VA 23226

(804) 353-1713
cell (804) 690-4591
alfred@seqair.com
alfred.scott@me.com
www.seqair.com

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Alfred Scott
Posts: 272
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Location: Richmond, VA
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Re: WildTools Developments

Post by Alfred Scott » Tue Jan 19, 2021 10:33 pm

If you can't get this approach to work, I've just put a direct link at

http://www.openclip.net/

Alfred

Keith Renton
Posts: 29
Joined: Tue Oct 22, 2019 6:44 am

Re: WildTools Developments

Post by Keith Renton » Wed Jan 20, 2021 2:03 pm

Hi Alfred

I may be wrong but we seem to have lost the option to create new set ups within the door tool though it still exists with windows.

Regards

Keith

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Alfred Scott
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Re: WildTools Developments

Post by Alfred Scott » Wed Jan 20, 2021 5:27 pm

Keith,

In checking the programming I see that it is gone. My memory being what it is, I don’t remember the details or the design, but the dialog is dramatically different and can be resized.

In the past we had popup menu buttons for sizes. While they are still there the same choices are now in the button dock in the bottom of the view.

These choices are probably too complex to have in the button dock at the bottom of the drawing window but they are quickly available with a click on the button dock.

In PowerCADD, we have tools where the icon has two dots to indicate that you can press the option key to bring up the tool’s dialog to make choices. I think the better design is to have these choices available with a click on the button dock. Once you get used to the concept of dealing with button dock, I think you will find it easier and faster to navigate through the choices.

May I suggest everyone read the updated documentation which you can get to from the PowerCADD Help menu? Please note that the documentation now has navigation buttons and hyperlinks so you can navigate through the document just like the internet.

I have been dealing with a nightmare of unexpected behavior in the Join tool since August, and I have found and fixed the problem in the last few days. A few problems still are in there but I can fix them quickly. We will be having much more frequent updates from now on.

I have a number of new things to put into WildTools and I’m always happy to hear from users with suggestions and ideas. Mark Rhodes has a number of things that I will be implementing shortly.

Alfred
Last edited by Alfred Scott on Thu Jan 21, 2021 11:50 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Alfred Scott
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Re: WildTools Developments

Post by Alfred Scott » Wed Jan 20, 2021 8:51 pm

Derek Dubout found a crash with joining b-splines and beziers. I’ve just compiled it and put up a new version. You can download again.

Only WildThing has changed and it has a last modified date of 3:43 today.

Alfred

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Alfred Scott
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Re: WildTools Developments

Post by Alfred Scott » Mon Feb 15, 2021 8:33 pm

I have just uploaded a new copy of WildTools 10.6.

In PowerCADD, select WildTools Updates from the Help menu.

This will take you to a web page for WildTools 10.6.

Click on Download WildTools Development Version link.

Recent changes:

Nuts & Bolts
Changed drawing of 3D details from polygon to Beziers, however there are many problems with the presentations. More work needed on this.

Alfred
Alfred P. Scott
5407 Patterson Ave, Suite 202B
Richmond
VA 23226

(804) 353-1713
cell (804) 690-4591
alfred@seqair.com
alfred.scott@me.com
www.seqair.com

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