OK, I had to make a plug for this MDL for those of us unfortunate enough to not be on XM yet.
One of the usability enhancements on XM is the middle-mouse button pan, along with the use of DirectX in the display subsystem. All that technospeak means when you press and hold the middle mouse button, then drag, you can smoothly scroll along in your drawing, just like that "other" CAD program, Auto-
Yeah, I know.
So, if you're on V8? Even J? Well, a Russian MDL programmer has created one of the slickest MDLs I've seen; now you can get the same smooth panning using the middle mouse button in V8 or even J:
Check out the website here.
And now the bad news... for some reason, when I use this thing, it will kick me out of MicroStation on rare occasions. Why, then, do I use it? You could say I'm a glutton for punishment... but the real reason is that even with the involuntary exits, I save lots of time compared to using SHIFT-Data to pan. But see what you think.
As an old time Tentative Snap user, and also one who despises a two button chord, I still use ACADPAN in V8i, SS2.
If you try to use a two button chord for either panning or tentative snapping and get the timing off, the result is a data point or a reset. If you are in the middle of some complex construction and end up with either of those when you wanted to pan or tentative snap, the result is not very desirable. With ACADPAN, I have my tentative and my pan from my middle button.
I hope it never stops working, or Bentley gets off the stick and makes MicroStation's Pan work just like it.
I LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOVVVVVVVVVVEEEEEEEEEEEE my acadpan.
The "new" pan in XM/ATHENS is no great improvement. You still have to click on the pan button to start the command. ACADPAN is way better. It does cause crashes in XM and Athens though. Hopefully this can be fixed. I still save tons of time a day even with a couple of crashes.