February 2000

Paul,
Haven't been talking much lately.  Finishing up a couple of jobs before
going on a cruise to Cancun, Cosomel and Roatan next week.  What a life. Got trapped into that one.  'Enry was a bit terse over me beating him to the
punch, what??

Have a Great Time where you all are, regards,

Big Cybe'

Hi Cybergramps,

I'm told that CADVANCE doesn't have a way to set default's for this, and we can't seem to duplicate what you're seeing.  Maybe a little more info as to what the scenario is when this happens, like is it when you open an existing drawing or a new one?  

Just stopped by to say hello and to say that 99.04 did not solve
my True Type Text problem of defaulting to Bold Italic, strike through and
underline.

Any Ideas folks???

One more thing for Shari: you can probably zip some of the files
to a fraction of their normal size. PkZIP and WINZIP will be more efficient
than the usual windows compress.

The site is much improved. What ever happened to the page that was
going to contain screen shots of some of the work the users were creating
with Cadvance?

I just downloaded the V99.04 upgrade and am a little concerned that it still
doesn't include a patch for the fact that you can't click on the toolbar
while the shift key is held down.  This is a bug I reported way back when
beta testing V99.  Also, when will there be some upgrades or patches for V99
Lite?  My two biggest complaints about Lite are the button menu bug that
makes your cursor disappear if you accidentally click on the screen while a
button menu is open.  And the bug that really frustrates our users is the
one that causes tifs, jpgs, etc. to not scale down properly.  The image
scales down but the selection box stays the same size and will mask out
anything in its way.  Our users are having to go to a V99 Full station,
insert their image, scale it down to the size they need and then return to
their station.  This one definitely needs a fix.

Other than that, we're happy.  Thanks for listening.

Suggestion:  Give your V99 users the translator from V99.5 so we can
translate ACAD 2000 files.  Users who receive ACAD 2000 drawings are having
to open them in ACAD and save them as R14 files.  I would think that you
would want to do everything can to keep your users out of ACAD.

Shari,

 I think downloads are useful, if you split them up in packs of 2-3MB at
most. So you could have 6.5 as two files to unpack.

 About 99.5, maybe you can strip the software of any "bonus/sample/symbol"
files, but I believe downloads of more than 4MB won't be practical to many
people - after 20-30 mins, a connection break gets very likely on phone
lines.

 Still there are people around with direct cable access or ADSL and
throughput going into the 1MB / minute range. So I think you should do it,
and see what happens. Have the downloaders report about the results...
record the hits, and warn the people of the amounts to download, with
typical 56k download times... Within two or three years, you might be
selling half of your licences this way.

Paul

The file size for upgrades would be the same.  The free maintenance updates are approximately 1.4mg and have always been available by download from the "Downloads" area of our web site.

We have miscalculated the file size of CADVANCE, finding it to be closer to 80mg, not 40mg.  Without any pdf files, just CADVANCE alone, the file would still be about 20+mg.  (We would need to confirm these numbers though.)

Regards download of Cadvance:
Answering your question with more questions:
What would the download size be for upgrades?
Download size without sample/help (pdf's) files?
Could sample/helps be downloaded later if req'd?
Have help files available as downloadable HTML as req'd?

Question to our users:  What is your opinion of being able to download CADVANCE from our web site?  We have thought about doing this since v8 even though we have not had any requests from our users.  As we haven't heard from you, our users, and since it is about a 40 mg file, we have not done so .  The free v6.5 download is only 4 mg, but we have had many users say that even that size can be a problem for them, only confirming our thoughts that having CADVANCE as downloadable is too impractical.  If you are interested in being able to download CADVANCE please contact me and voice your opinion.  If there is an overwhelming response of interest from our users then we will re-consider and find a way to implement this.