The Ribbon's Length

I wanted to begin discussion about Civil 3D 2010 with a brief one regarding "The Ribbon". The Ribbon is a new user interface that provides a consistent look and feel for users across various products. Civil 3D 2009 had the AutoCAD 2009 ribbon (off by default), with no Civil 3D commands available on it.

The New Civil 3D 2010 ribbon contains a combination of Civil 3D commands and AutoCAD commands co-mingled to provide very logic groupings of these commands on Panels visible by selecting various Tabs. The Map commands are also available on a different workspace. There are quite a few YouTube Videos about the ribbon available for viewing already.

Today, I wanted to point out something that my co-worker Jerry Bartels mentioned during last Friday's Civil 3D webcast. That is that the Ribbon's appearance will change depending upon the resolution (or whether the application is maximized or unmaximized). Below is the ribbon I see by default when my screen resolution is set to my typical maximum resolution of 1400 x 1050.


Notice that some of the icons have desriptive text that assist with the identification of the proper button/command.

Next is the ribbon when my screen resolution is set to 1024 x 768 (I often project at this resolution).


Notice that there are fewer descriptive text. Some will see this and may be challenged to find things as fast as those that have more of the descriptive text.

That is all I wanted to point out today.

Be Better! ...find the best resolution for yourself.

AU 2009 Speaker Proposals

Yes, it has already begun. The initial steps toward AU 2009.

There will be a few changes this year. Most notably, AU 2009 will be held at the Mandalay Bay Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada, December 1-4. There should be over 600 class sessions and there is confirmed space for over 9,000 attendees.

For those of you that are interested in submitting proposals to teach class sessions, you can learn more at the Call for Proposals webpage at the Autodesk University Online Website. The deadline for submitting proposals is April 30th. Speakers and sessions are announced in early July.

This is obviously a great way to share your industry and product knowledge.

Be Better!... teach a class.

Civil 3D "The Road Ahead"

This post is linked to a webpage that contains a series of snippets about different portion of Civil 3D. It can help explain Civil 3D to those that are not very familiar with it. It can help provide some additional propective to those that are somewhat familiar, and it can provide some cool eye candy to those that are very familiar.

Additionally, the page has links to series of upcoming road design webcasts and to the Transportation page of the Autodesk Government Resource Center which contains many "How To's" videos to learn from. I have found these to be very helpful in learning portions of the software that I had not used a great deal.

Be Better!...get your message across.