V8i-SS4 vs Connect?

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.

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.

An hour a week is nothing to scoff at. Having a readable D-size (approx. ISO A1) drawing on your screen without having to scroll could indeed offer a significant advantage if that's what you're doing often.
A big screen won't help everybody equally though.

And somebody currently using V8i won't profit from the new Ribbon interface on the same hardware, quite the contrary. You can only try to make the change as painless as possible, and that will always require quite a bit of work. If you're the CAD manager for a dozen or so users, then that would be your job. Many smaller companies don't have a dedicated CAD manager. Not a lot of users at those companies will be thinking that the Ribbon interface in the CONNECT Edition is a godsend.
The vanilla implementation of the CONNECT Edition interface fails pretty badly for just about everybody, and it just shouldn't do that. Keyboard shortcuts play a big part in that as well.
They have to be able to come up with better alternatives than what comes out of the box now.

An hour a week is nothing to scoff at. Having a readable D-size (approx. ISO A1) drawing on your screen without having to scroll could indeed offer a significant advantage if that's what you're doing often.
A big screen won't help everybody equally though.

And somebody currently using V8i won't profit from the new Ribbon interface on the same hardware, quite the contrary. You can only try to make the change as painless as possible, and that will always require quite a bit of work. If you're the CAD manager for a dozen or so users, then that would be your job. Many smaller companies don't have a dedicated CAD manager. Not a lot of users at those companies will be thinking that the Ribbon interface in the CONNECT Edition is a godsend.
The vanilla implementation of the CONNECT Edition interface fails pretty badly for just about everybody, and it just shouldn't do that. Keyboard shortcuts play a big part in that as well.
They have to be able to come up with better alternatives than what comes out of the box now.

Suggestions for ribbon layouts could be uploaded and shared here either in a dgnlib or xml (export as described in help topic 'Importing and Exporting Ribbon Customizations') by anyone who would like to contribute to a discussion about improvements to the out of the box experience.
Bear in mind that MicroStation is a generic CAD application serving a wide range of disciplines and sectors so the tools exposed in the current ribbon are aiming at a broad audience.