V8i-SS4 vs Connect?

We've been preparing for CE with a lot of our free time and invested hundreds of ours into it.  With the release of SS4 would our time be better spent investing in integration of SS4 and testing it for bugs and issues that might keep us from being able to use it on a main stream project?  I'm excited to work in CE full time but I need a little help from Bentley in knowing were we should be focusing my efforts moving forward.  The anticipation of a quarterly release of updates for CE has been for lack of a better word disappointing and there are quite a few deal breaker issues to resolve in the current build before it would be viable for a real project.

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  • Hello Grant,

    MicroStation V8i SELECTseries 4 is our final commercial release for the V8i generation. Our focus moving forward will be on MicroStation CONNECT Edition updates.

    Thanks,
    Daniel Eng

  • That being the case, Bentley should allow to switch to classic interface. Ribbon is a torture.
  • Hi Pablo,

    Unknown said:
    Bentley should allow to switch to classic interface. Ribbon is a torture.

    A possibility to display tasks the same way as in V8i is not enough? In my opinion Bentley explained clearly that Ribbon is the way they will go and old menus are gone, so the tasks dialog is probably the biggest concession we can expect.

    Personally I think much bigger problem is Ribbon speed as it's so slow when loaded and workflows switched. I hope it will be solved in the comming version.

    Regards,

      Jan

  • Check whether your Keyboard Shortcuts have a key for 'ribbon menu workflow'. I have '#' set to run this key-in which then pops up a numbered menu listing the available workflows. So # followed by 1-4 will quickly switch workflows, it's the quickest way I have found.

    Marc

  • I've actually found the Ribbon and the new API to be a god send, but let me first say that the out of the box ribbons were indeed awful.  I re-built them into a simple workflow that automatically changes based on the users work space (2D vs 3D).  The entire collection of CE ribbons that we need can be found within a single ribbon now and the other ribbons below are used for cell libraries.  I replaced the old "main" tasks with the spacebar menu added in CE and so far all of my users like it.  You can see the new ribbon below to give you an idea of how much nicer the ribbon can be.

    Now onto why the new API is better.  Who here has windows 10, and runs on multiple monitors?  How about multiple monitors of various resolutions?  I've got a windows 10 laptop with a 4k display and (2) 1920x1200 displays and I run all (3) at once.  It wasn't until I got this laptop I understood why the new windows API in microstation was such a big deal.  In v8i with each display having a unique scale (100% for the 1920x1200 and 200% for the 4k display) V8i defaults to using your "main" display as selected by windows to scale it's interface.  This means if my laptop (the 4k display) was set to my main display which is what I prefer, and I had v8i in the other 2 displays the icons and other scaled stuff on the screen was about 1/3 the size it would normally be so small the icons were piled on top of one another.  Admittedly I haven't tried it in SS4 yet so I have no idea what that result will be but I suspect that none of that was fixed in SS4.  Now the awesome of windows API in CE really shines because those displays scale themselves correctly regardless of what monitor I have microstation running in.  I can run 3 instances one in each and they scale prefect in each.  So while I agree that out of the box ribbon left a lot to be desired, moving forward with advancing technology it's a better system.

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  • I've actually found the Ribbon and the new API to be a god send, but let me first say that the out of the box ribbons were indeed awful.  I re-built them into a simple workflow that automatically changes based on the users work space (2D vs 3D).  The entire collection of CE ribbons that we need can be found within a single ribbon now and the other ribbons below are used for cell libraries.  I replaced the old "main" tasks with the spacebar menu added in CE and so far all of my users like it.  You can see the new ribbon below to give you an idea of how much nicer the ribbon can be.

    Now onto why the new API is better.  Who here has windows 10, and runs on multiple monitors?  How about multiple monitors of various resolutions?  I've got a windows 10 laptop with a 4k display and (2) 1920x1200 displays and I run all (3) at once.  It wasn't until I got this laptop I understood why the new windows API in microstation was such a big deal.  In v8i with each display having a unique scale (100% for the 1920x1200 and 200% for the 4k display) V8i defaults to using your "main" display as selected by windows to scale it's interface.  This means if my laptop (the 4k display) was set to my main display which is what I prefer, and I had v8i in the other 2 displays the icons and other scaled stuff on the screen was about 1/3 the size it would normally be so small the icons were piled on top of one another.  Admittedly I haven't tried it in SS4 yet so I have no idea what that result will be but I suspect that none of that was fixed in SS4.  Now the awesome of windows API in CE really shines because those displays scale themselves correctly regardless of what monitor I have microstation running in.  I can run 3 instances one in each and they scale prefect in each.  So while I agree that out of the box ribbon left a lot to be desired, moving forward with advancing technology it's a better system.

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  • Unknown said:
    Now onto why the new API is better.  Who here has windows 10, and runs on multiple monitors?  How about multiple monitors of various resolutions?

    Thanks for your perfect formulation of important feature! It's great example why it's wise to don't make conclusions after the first sight only (hey, it has ribbon, it has to be ugly and very bad software of course) and there are substantial benefits comming with new technologies.

    With increasing usage of 4k monitors (and also ultra-wide 21:9 monitors like I have) it will become more and more visible how many applications cannot be used efficiently because they are developed on Windows 95 pixel-based paradigm and offer ugly hardly to use GUI (menus, palletes, fixed size icons...) and they will have to be rewritten or they will die.

    With regards,

      Jan

  • Thanks Jan,

    It was one of those perfect moments of serendipity when I fired up the brand new laptop with that 4k resolution which is really pretty turned on v8i and spit out my coffee laughing at the result. It took 30min of messing around to sort out how to maintain the different resolutions and make it "work" by forcing one of the lower res monitors to be my "main display" then manually moving the task bar. Sadly this has some issues still but once we are able to move to connect the problems go away entirely. Not to mention you can run CE in more then 2 instances! I think up to 4? Now I just need (4) 24" 4k displays stacked in a 2x2 array.
  • I haven't dabbled in 4K nor 21:9 monitors. It's quite possible that using these monitors offers challenges for productive CAD with the V8i generation. But the goal is to be as productive as you possibly can, not to use the biggest monitor money can buy. If it boosts your productivity, go for it, if it doesn't don't.
    Scaling well to 4K is nice, but it's not the goal. Productivity, that's what it's about. And that productivity still suffers with the Ribbon interface in CONNECT.
  • Your never going to reach maximum productively with any off the shelf interface. It takes some customization to really achieve maximum productivity and Connect is far better at user optimization of keyboard input than V8i.
  • The interface I shared above is very similar in layout to the heavily customized task manager we've used in v8i, I remember when the task manager first became a thing and we hated it for honestly ALL the same reasons people hate the ribbon. Having to constantly shift tasks /menus as you move from 3D to 2D is a pain and it's annoying. Ribbons are a bigger even more obtuse example of this out of the box failure forcing people to shift ribbons even between tools within the same design space. As David has pointed out none of the out of the box interfaces will ever work for everybody. Bentley choose to simply create an interface which has all the tools at the forefront and nothing hidden in drop down menus which at least has value in helping brand new users find everything more easily.

    As an example we do not use the animation or visualization tools for much of anything. I know lots of users on these forums don't work in 3D at all which is a place we spend half our work flow. As for higher resolutions I can say there is a substantial difference in even a 1920x1200 display I use now vs the 1080P displays that become massive common place in the mid/late 2000's for cheap. Text for example is not legible in v8i at the lower resolutions without zooming in more. From experience the difference is only 2 zoom levels but that means more maneuvering around a drawing to fill out a bill of material and less time typing. That directly relates to productivity your referencing. With the 4k display on a D-Size print I can read everything zoomed out all the way so the productivity is even faster when filling out that same BOM. That's only 2 minutes saved per drawing on average a good detailer at our office can draw 7 details a day that's a bonus hour of productivity per week.