Automate your views with Change View

Original Article Date: Dec 21, 2005 

With thanks to Alexander Molotov for developing Change View. He has certainly out-done himself this time with this utility that contains various tools for automating the view display. Automove, Eagle Eye, and AutoCADish panning are just some of it's amazing features.

Alexander writes:

Change View is available from http://www.mdlapps.com/ and was developed for MicroStation users who wish to increase their productivity when working with MicroStation by automating base operations that are used in your everyday work. This utility contains the following customizable functions that will increase your productivity and production quality:

• Eagle Eye – Opens a second window and zooms into the working area with one button
• Automove – Automatically pan the view when working near the view’s edge
• Custom Button Assignment – Assign any keyin to your mouse buttons
• AutoCAD Pan View – Pan view just like in AutoCAD
• Saved Scales – Save and recall viewing scale of the current view
• Move View with keyboard arrows
• Show/hide all opened applications

Change View has flexible settings, so you can configure most of the fuctions as you wish. Please note that this article only describes a couple of the features found in Change View. For the most current information and descriptions, please visit our site – http://www.mdlapps.com

Eagle Eye
Design files typically contain elements drawn at different sizes and scales and when you can see one element perfectly fine, you may not be able to see others because of your zoom ratio. In this case you often are forced to open another window to view the smaller elements or ruin our eyesight trying to discern what they are! Eagle Eye allows to zoom in the image with just one key press without changing the scale of the working view.

By default, Eagle Eye works this way - when your mouse is above an unreadable element, press CTRL+Shift and slightly move cursor over the element. Change View will open view 8, and zoom in on the elements near your cursor. When CTRLl+Shift are released, view 8 closes.

Automove
When working with some operations, you may be required to move/pan your view frenquently. For example, you a very long element, but cannot decrease viewing scale. In this case it can be convenient to you to use Automove which automatically pans the current view when a datapoint has been entered near the view boundary. So what took 7 mouse clicks before (5 data points and 2 additional clicks to move view), now only takes 5, and that's a 30% increase in productivity!

Button Assignment
By default MicroStation only has three commands mapped to the mouse buttons: Data Point, Tentative Snap and Reset. But even a simple mouse with only three buttons allows you to program eight different mouse clicks: Left Button, Middle Button, Right button, Left+Right Chord, and these combinations with the ALT key. What's more is that modern mice have five or even as many as eight buttons that can be customized.

Change View allows you to assign any keyin to any button click. To do so, go to Settings > Change Settings > Button Assignments and fill in the fields for Cursor 3 to Cursor 8 with your favorite keyins. Then select the Assign Key-ins button to make the assignments. To ensure that it was successfully completed you should to look at the message Menu successfully attached is displayed in the Message Center.

This feature is not only convenient but it's profitable too. If you call your favorite or boring operation operation 1200 times per day, and assign this operation to mouse button – you will get not less than 0.5 seconds per call. Or 20 minutes per day!!! Or almost one additional working day per month!!!

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