Subtitles of the Movie

What other new features do we have available to us in AutoCAD 2009? Well the next set of tools that we have available to us are on the Status Bar at the bottom screen. Gone are the buttons now with Ortho, O-Snap, Polar and O-Track, they're all icon driven, you'll notice this at the bottom on the Status Bar, the other benefit is when you right click over one of these icons now, you can actually go in and change the settings on the Shortcut Menu. You do not have to go into the settings dialog box like you used to. For example I might want to change my Object Snap settings, so I right click, I can just switch them on, on the Shortcut Menu, I don't not have to go into the dialog box. Another new feature available to you is Quick Properties, when this is switched ON or switched OFF as the case may be, I can look at objects on the drawing and quickly ascertain their properties. I'm just going to switch Quick Properties on, I'm now going to draw a center radius circle and position it in the center of the screen on the Objects to Layer. This is a layer that I've created previously you'll notice here in the Layer Properties Manager. My circle now should I hover over it and click on it, the Quick Properties box appears on the screen, notice I automatically get properties anyway as you can the Circle, Color, Layer and Line Type, but I can edit them in the Quick Properties box like so. To close the Quick Properties box, I just click on the cross and the panel closes, this tells me that Quick Properties will be turned off. So what happens there is when I clicked close that particular panel not only will I close that panel but I will switch off Quick Properties, you get the option not to show that dialog box again. Notice now down at the bottom Quick Properties is turned off on the Status Bar, I can then delete that particular object. Also on the Status Bar you'll notice we do not have any Model tabs or Layout tabs anymore, these are driven my icons here. We have Model, we have Layouts, what we also have are Quick View Layouts and Quick View Drawings, new features in AutoCAD 2009. If I click on Quick View Layouts it shows me the Layouts that are available to me. I have Model, I have Layout1, I have Layout2. Notice it tells me that these Layouts have not yet been initialized; this means that I haven't set up any settings for the Layout or any page Setups. To come out of this I click on the cross here, close Quick View Layouts. If I open up Quick View Drawings, what I can do here is I can look at my drawing itself but notice when I hover over the Quick View Drawing, I can look at Model and it goes into Quick View Layouts for me. Again I can also close this by clicking on the Cross, they both provide very quick graphical user interfaces to look at the information you have in front of you. A new feature here you have Realtime Pan and Realtime Zoom and for 3D drafting you have your Steering Wheel and your Show Motion buttons. Again these are available also on the Ribbon at the top of the screen. If you're using Annotation Scaling, again you can click as you could in AutoCAD 2008 and you can switch on your Annotative Objects and Scales using the icons similar to AutoCAD 2008 as well. You can edit your workspaces; you can switch between workspaces by clicking on the little Workspace icon, again available down on the Status Bar. Let's have a look at the last new feature in AutoCAD 2009 that is utilized in a 2D drafting environment. I mentioned Layout Properties Manager earlier, when you click on the icon in the Home area of the Ribbon on the panel here the Layout Properties Manager appears, it is now on a palette, it's not a dialog box anymore, hence, you won't get OK, Apply and Cancel at the bottom. You can also Auto-Hide, so only the title bar appears, you can hover over it to bring up screen real estate. In this particular case I have two layers available to me, Objects and Objects2, I already have a circle drawn on the Layout Objects2, I am going to make Objects the current layer in the Layer Properties Manager. What I'm also going to do here is Setup my new Layer Management Tools, these are available to me on this icon here, the little spanner. The new Layout Notification, it tells me when I can evaluate new layers added to a drawing, I don't need this is in this particular case. This is the one I want to look at, Isolate Layer Settings, I'm going to set my layers to fade when their locked and I'm going to set it to the default settings here, 50 percent and click on OK. I'm then going to close the Layer Properties Manager by clicking on the Cross on the title bar here and I'm going to draw a new object on the Objects Layer. It's going to be a rectangle and it's going to go from the center snap of the cirle like so and what I'm going to do now, obviously objects is the current layer and it can't be frozen or locked. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to click here on the Layer Control, I'm going to make Objects2 a locked layer. As soon as I lock it and left click on the drawing, notice it fades, when I hover over it, it is a faded layer and it's locked. If I hover over this one notice it's much, much, more prone and the color is more definite. On a busy drawing this will save you a lot of time by helping you find the objects on the current unlocked layers.