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.
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.
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
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