HumbleChief

One problem that you will face is that most tutorials all assume you have a basic understanding of how Chief works and that the default settings are already set-up. Absolutely not so an Sherry's advice is key that you understand these concepts before you even start drawing. I found the video below that will help you with defaults. This is imperative before you start drawing. It's from an older version but you should be able to find the relevant info in the newest versions.

I'll see if I can find some more that are most relevant for a beginner.

To me, GUI should be fixed before adding more features....otherwise you will make work harder down the road.  CA needs to be revamped into a modern app. 

Agreed and said as much in an earlier reply to Doug. A sleek modern and easy to use GUI will have many unanticipated benefits down the road. Pretty pictures might sell the software today. I don't envy the decision makers at CA

 I think Cabinets are easier to improve.

I think accusing the Chief software engineers of picking the low hanging fruit is not entirely off base. They've said many times how certain changes are 'difficult' or expensive.

...but 1 in 20 clients (maybe) do I have to put forth this type of interior concept....

In my business it's 19 or 20 out of 20. Only making the point that different businesses need different features etc.

Here is the problem with CA - you guys are getting too wrapped up with minutia that translates into a pretty picture....and not spending enough time on what matters most.

 

Virtually nothing you guys do in cabinets is "real"....in that all you are doing is making a client concept that can be sent over to the cabinet guys and then the process starts again when they design working drawings based on the concepts.  Seriously, unless some of you (can't be many) are making your own cabinets onsite, many of the features related to cabinets can't be as important as streamlining the GUI or other important issues.

 

These videos CA puts out are nice, but 1 in 20 clients (maybe) do I have to put forth this type of interior concept....and even then they aren't actually asking for it.  CA, you guys creating a product that specializes in something that blows the socks off of would-be CAD buyers, but in truth isn't actually needed most the time in the practice of architecture or home design.  What CA is getting really good at is more interior design in nature.

 

Oddly, what CA specializing in would probably have more use in commercial work where this type of interior design/detail is packaged with the architecture.

Good points Johnny and I agree to a point but remember 'what matters most' is what matters most to the individual user. There is no simple "this is what you should be working on because that's what I think you should working on." Too many users too many methods and client bases to generalize so broadly.

For certain business models there's a lot of room for pretty pictures when selling a job in these days of HGTV etc. I have a contractor that I do a lot of work for and we spend a lot of time selling our kitchen and bath designs. These tools help us immensely in selling our jobs. I was NOT a fan of the pretty pictures in Chief for many years and wondered why anyone would want such features. Now those features are working overtime for me and my clients and I've grown to appreciate them. But that's just me and my business model.

If someone does very little actual kitchen/bath design then why bother but for those who it has proven to be pretty valuable.

To perhaps make your point we also never, and I mean never, use our design to build kitchens from. It always, and I mean always goes to the cabinet guy to do final Layouts and measurements but the tools still really help to sell the job, again within my narrow business model.

Is that the market Chief is targeting? If so then bravo, if not and they are trying to capture or retain a different market with users such as yourself then they could seriously be missing the mark.

I personally would love to see the changes you've been suggesting but there seems to be a different direction Chief is going in. Doesn't thrill me but like I said have been surprised how the new tools like cabinet stuff has really helped.

Maybe Google Flashing Details - hundreds of sites and hundreds of pictures.

https://www.google.com/search?q=FLASHING+DETAILS&biw=1024&bih=751&noj=1&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=9fuRVPGrM9jtoATd84C4Dw&ved=0CB8QsAQ

Oops, actually 41,800,000 results.

Simple answer is no. The greatest tragedy is that I'm slowly becoming unemployable because my ACAD/Revit skills are degrading at an incredible rate. Plus I'm 50 years old. No firm is going to hire an old Chief user.

If I needed help I would hire a 50 year young Chief user in half a heartbeat.

I noticed some other things that may or may not be a problem. Here is one. Notice the horizontal blue line and how the walls along it are not aligned.

 

Eric those walls were lined up! I used a cad line to line them up. I don't know what happened?

Bob, I wouldn't use a CAD line to align walls. It can work but sometimes even a little off will create some nasty results.

If you find you need walls to line up exactly across an opening drag a single wall across the opening and then break it to create the opening. Guaranteed to line up then.

Or use Chiefs wall align snaps that will also get them aligned.

I don't have a qualification that allows me to make a comment about the complexity of writing code or even if 'live updates' would be to much demand on the average computers used by CA users.

 

But I would think that even a mediocre software engineer would have the skills required to writ a script activated by an icon that would run on layouts and update on demand. Live updates is only the language used to explain the problem. What is required is 'auto update'. Preferably with a choice to run automatically when a layout is opened and if it takes to long to run that cycle each time layouts are opened then let the  user activated (manual) update.  No new features here. No re- writing the program just enhance the current process of open, close and save the elevation. 

 

If CA allowed this to be a ruby script it would already be done by someone. 

 

This is core functionality and speaks directly to productivity.

Ed,

I'm no software engineer either but the 2 or 3 actions needed to update each elevation, which now includes nothing more than opening the elevation, closing and hitting the Yes button for each view, should be very easy to implement in a simple script.

It's always more complex than I think but I think I see your point and agree that it's probably not as complex as I presented in a post above. If it really is that easy then not having that feature now is a real shame.

Scouring the videos for signs of exciting new buttons to push for architects I see none.

Looks like x7 is the year of the kitchen designer.

See you next year.....

If I were a developer at CA I would be VERY, VERY curious about what this customer is looking for. Curious enough to contact them personally and see what, as an architect, they are looking for then implement something that gets them closer to becoming or retaining them as a customer.

To me the ease of which all tasks can be accomplished should take top priority. It forms the very basis and foundation of the program and will have a cascading, beneficial effect on all other features. If that looks like a modeless interface then so be it, but if it looks like a better idea that your team comes up with then even better. So to me ease of use is priority one.

look at you tube link on facebook site the five -12 videos show the new x7 interface going someway towards improving speed/ accessability. wall layers dbx,object eyedropper etc

Here's the link 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=el6IB4-fDrw#t=65

In Vectorworks I just select a line or other cad item (click) go to the ever present attributes tool (upper left in Johnny's screen shot) and select line type, weight, arrows, colour, fill, hatch, etc.. If you are doing a bunch of the same lines, rectangles, polygons, etc. you just change the attribute selections with nothing selected and then draw as many cad items as you want with these attributes. After, you just return all the attributes to the class (layer in Chief) defaults and continue drawing. Opening the selected item data box and scrolling to do these changes is tremendously time consuming.

I think we get so used to doing things one way we forget there's a brave new world out there. I would LOVE the ability to select a line and have all the attributes right there for the changing instead of diving into dbx after tab after dbx.

 CA doesn't even allow changing line thickness/color without entering into a dialog box and tabbing to another section of the dialog box to then enter the data.  If that isn't archaic I don't know what is.

True this.

That room divider pony wall is a good trick. Never occurred to me.

Agreed - nice trick Eric.

I fought this forever as well. Move to front works most of the time.

https://www.facebook.com/ChiefArchitect?fref=nf

Nice feature.

Not saying any of the suggestions are bad or that they are or are not important. Heck I would like to see everything in this thread and everything in the suggestion forum implemented tomorrow. AND the contributions from the users in this forum, suggestions and otherwise, have helped me immensely but business realities will always supersede my need for a new feature.

One of those business realities is customer acquisition and customer retention. A new customer will not walk away because the elevations don't update. New customers come from aggressive pricing and a feature set that caters to a large sub set of the architectural and design community. I'd say very nice job in this regard to Chief. On the other hand an old customer might walk if the elevations are not live, and that fine line of features has to be measured against the possibility that an old customer will walk, especially with Chief's SSA business model.

I'm not leaving because elevations are not live. Would LOVE to see it but I'm not leaving if they stay the way they are. I bet most are not leaving with elevations the way they are so from a business prospective why put in thousands of man hours to change them when your existing customer base will not shrink and your new user base will most likely even grow because of the current features? Makes no business sense.

Every software company also comes up against another hard reality - making great software. Once software gets to a certain stage why upgrade? I'm using some REALLY old programs because they work just fine - will never upgrade - ever, (unless forced by an OS upgrade etc.)

That's why IMO Adobe and others are going to a subscription plan for their software? Does anyone really need PhotoShop version LCXIIV when the current version will paint the night sky in any color you choose? No need to upgrade anymore. Can't build a business plan on such uncertain revenues. Subscription plans offer a means to forecast future revenues, upgrades do not.

Will Chief get there too? It already is subscription software but when will I/users no longer really need SSA? Or even to upgrade at all? From a business perspective these are very difficult decisions and I think CA has been stellar, no wait I KNOW CA has been stellar. How do I know? Because they are still here, in a very tough business they are still here, and that gets much much respect from me and I'll be happy with my 'dead' elevations until something changes.

Chief has never posted any list and probably never will, even though ,for years, we have wanted to know what's in the works. Sorry guys, but true. Sometimes they give some hints, but very rarely.

To list upcoming features would be business suicide. Why would Chief participate in its own demise? Not gonna happen.

The fixes that go into X7, 8, 9 etc. will not be driven by threads like this. Businesses are not run that way. Think about it. This thread represents a minuscule piece of the CA user base and minuscule doesn't even begin to describe how small a cross section this thread represents. In this thread of very few users there are a couple top requests, one being live elevations, requested by 6 or 8 users, OK make it 10 or 12. Of the thousands of CA users who have no idea what a live elevation is, and who don't use Anno Sets or even Layers for that matter, how does that request become a priority for the Chief engineers?

One way is that it is cheap and easy to implement (remember they're running a business). Can you imagine the complexity of adding live elevations? And the cost? There are parts of the entire program that might have to be re-written - from scratch. So even if it was requested by every single user it would end up low on the priority list because of cost constraints. Very easy to understand and one of the reasons I'm very happy with any changes I get.

Running a software business is very hard and successful businesses do not cater to the user base, they cater to the marketplace if they want to continue to succeed. As users this is a hard reality to face so we get these threads requesting all kinds of cool things because we think that the business cares. Doug cares. He comes here and tells us so but the business is another animal and it can't care about what you want, it must care about what it needs to succeed. Sometimes it will include a change you want and sometimes it won't but those changes will be driven again, by the marketplace, not by the user base.

Another 2 cents

I have come to believe that these types of threads are simply an exercise in exercising. That is, with few exceptions, not many people from CA show up on this forum and not at all sure if they take note of this, or if they do, whether it has any influence on what they will add to the newest iteration. I might be wrong, but the stairs thing, and auto update elevations has been something I've heard about as long as I've been a member of this club and yet it still has not been addressed. That's too bad as I suspect the very best barometer they could possibly have comes from the very people on this forum, who not only actively use, test and find solutions (work-arounds) to problems, but further, help to spread the knowledge with others. That, perhaps more than anything CA could offer in a new X??, is what makes CA so useful.   

 

Just my 2 cents.......

Sadly, this is my perception as well. If you read this thread there are some great ideas and suggestions but how many will we see actually implemented? Few, if any and I don't begrudge the developers. They have an agenda, a business agenda that we the users cannot begin to understand.

This thread is the most useful tool any software developer can have but that business agenda will always trump what the users actually want to see changed. It's just the way it is with almost every piece of software. We can scream about stairs and story poles but there's another list of changes we, the users, can know nothing about. That list is based on factors the users typically don't care about like complexity and cost of implementation. On the other hand the developers care everything about complexity and cost of implementation so there exists this great void between what the users want and what the developers will actually deliver.

Again I do not begrudge the business decisions that CA makes but I am done deluding myself with thinking that suggestions made in these types of threads move any thing more than bytes through the internet. The changes we'll see will be the changes that are decided in headquarters and may or may not reflect ideas presented in threads like these.

Generally I'm pretty happy with new features and appreciate all the hard work it takes to make them so but I've just changed (lowered) my expectations and have learned to adapt to whatever comes my way through the CA development process and be happy with what I get to play with next.

Larry, as you start going through it remember that a lot of the colors that are used in autocad  are user set for working with a black screen. Have you tried changing your CA background color to black just to see what you can work with? It would be worth trying out I would think.

Thanks Gary. I can see all the elements, I just can't change them without painstakingly going through each and every block, changing colors one at a time. If that's how it's done then that's how it's done and I'll muscle through when needed. Was just curious as to what others did.

I ended up looking up some tutorials and learning a bit of ACAD (or DraftSight in this case) and changed the background to white then changed each layer in DrafSight to black. There were a LOT of layers and I didn't get them all but it looks OK in Chief now.

Still curious what others do. Anyone? Do you import DWG's Gary? How do you handle all the various ACAD layers and colors?

I have been trying to get a DWG into my Layout literally for hours. I now apparently have mixed imperial and metric units and can't send to Layout. Is there a default or method to change all units to one or the other?

Text is the only problem all the rest can be changed to black in 2 secs literally. just select all.

Text with arrows seems to get blocked by CA this always causes a headache.

Thanks again for the post Graeme. You're right it does only take 2 seconds, literally, to do 1/50th of the work required to get a usable DWG. The text and arrows are the time consuming bit and in this case there's a LOT of text and arrows. I'm trying a different strategy and will see if I can learn some ACAD and change the original to read all/more black. What do others do with DWG's? Just thrash through it? Is there a better way?