This post is to clarify what I’m talking about in my Survey. These are some of the tools I have been using for a few years. I’ve handed them around to a few colleagues I have worked with over the years and they seem to find them handy.

Any tools I release commercially would be a lot more sophisticated than these. I just put these together for my own use and generally stopped coding when they stopped breaking and did what I want them to do.

My first Find and Replace tool. I wrote it because I got sick of the 3 tab-stops between the text fields in the native one. I also wanted to manipulate more attribute properties. This version doesn’t preserve the values of the attributes when you change their TAGs. The release version would preserve them. Oh, this does text too – I left that bit out of the UI but it works. See what I mean about a little rough around the edges?

I wrote this Attribute Generator to generate series of attributes, rather than copy ... click ... edit ... copy ...click ... zzzz. As you can see I'm no UI expert. It ain't pretty but it has saved me a lot of time over the years. The settings at the top-left are for generating ACNE-compatible attributes. It also generates in the correct order so you can bulk-select them and they will be in the correct order when you make a block of them. As you can see, I lost interest when it cam to making them different colours.

LISP isn't my favourite language but I've written (and butchered) a few routines that speed up my day. Quite a few of them are modified versions of the inbuilt ones (BX-BI is ATTOUT-ATTIN with a lot less clicks). I have far more sophisticated versions in the works.

As it stands I have a ton of ideas logged in my FogBugz tracker and some of them are partially coded. I posted my survey to assess the viability of developing these with a lot more finesse to sell them, or should I just hack them together for myself?

Please, let me know by taking my survey.

Thank you for your time spent completing the Survey. Please don’t forget to click “Submit”.
My contact links once more with proper links … If you have any suggestions or questions for me (CADbloke) then please feel free to

• leave a comment below
• send me an email privately via http://www.cadbloke.com/contact/
• or via Twitter at @CADbloke
• or on Linked-In at http://www.linkedin.com/in/cadbloke

A summary of the results of this survey is published at http://www.cadbloke.com/cad-tools-survey-2011-results/. It will update automagically as more responses are received.

If you have a suggestion for a CAD tool you want to see please add it, and vote for them at http://cadbloke.uservoice.com/forums/130553-cad-tools-i-want-to-see

Some related Ramblings:

1. CAD tools survey 2011 Results I posted a survey, "The CADbloke CAD tools feasibility study", to assess the feasibility of releasing a few of my custom CAD tools into the wild. If you haven't already done...
2. CADtools – the early years This post is to clarify what I'm talking about in my Survey. These are some of the tools I have been using for a few years. I've handed them around...

If you have any suggestions for CAD tools you would like to see then please add them at http://cadbloke.uservoice.com/forums/130553-cad-tools-i-want-to-see

It may strike you as a little odd that I would be so open about releasing this info but that’s the way I like to do things. I’m not a fan of keeping secrets just for the sake of it. Also, I believe that your time spent on helping me out should have some payback, and here it is…

This page will automatically update when more results come in so, if you’re interested, come back & see how it’s going.

Here are the results

Thank you once again for helping me out with this survey. If you haven’t already filled it out, please add your thoughts at http://www.cadbloke.com/cad-tools-survey-2011/ .

If you have any suggestions or questions for me (CADbloke) then please feel free to leave a comment below or, alternatively, get in touch with me at http://www.cadbloke.com/contact/ or via Twitter at @CADbloke or on Linked-In at http://www.linkedin.com/in/cadbloke

If you have a suggestion for a CAD tool you want to see please add it, or vote for it, at http://cadbloke.uservoice.com/forums/130553-cad-tools-i-want-to-see

Some related Ramblings:

1. CAD tools survey 2011 I have been coding time-saving tools for my own use in AutoCAD for years. I have had prods from various cohorts over the years to release these tools into the...
2. CADtools – the early years This post is to clarify what I'm talking about in my Survey. These are some of the tools I have been using for a few years. I've handed them around...