A new build of IntelliCAD was just recently released, for those of you who did not know, or were not sure.

This build is "mainly a maintenance release" and "improvements can be found in the areas of performance, working with 2013 .dwg files, selection and dragging, text, and printing."

CMS Blog announcement here:
http://blog.intellicadms.com/intellicad ... able-.html

Find the software installer downloadable here:
http://intellicadms.com/site/DOWNLOADS/

I already have several things to keep an eye out for while working with this build. I will be bringing my insights, reflections, and experiences to this thread.

Fired it up after downloading.

The installation process went smoothly. The installer copied about 5000kb of new information to the directory using the CUSTOM installation method.

I immediately loaded an AutoCAD 2013 document. Intellicad took a little time to initialize, then prompted if I would like to reset my menus and toolbars to take advantage of the updates. I allowed this.

My template file was not affected.

I was then prompted that I'd opened a 2013 DWG and Intellicad only supports up to 2010. Intellicad converted the document to the 2010 file format as expected. So, so far, no change, I can't natively open 2013 documents as I thought I'd be able to. But I'm not complaining.

I went on to discover that they have changed the selection window marquee and added a camera icon to the cursor during selection. This will be a great help to identify if a mouse click grabbed a grip handle or hit open space and brought up the selection marquee. Pleased with this change.

I then tested something I found quickly in the last build: editing justified text (any justification other than left) would push text away in a diagonal motion. It was predictable, but incredibly annoying to rearrange text that was justified if it had been edited. I'm happy to report that this is gone and I can edit my justified text entities without losing their position.

In the previous build, I had encountered selection anomalies where occasionally, accidental clicks while an entity was already selected would select other nearby entities with similar attributes (usually color), but I never observed a particular pattern to this. However, with a limited attempt at reproducing this affect, I'm happy to report that it seems resolved.

Overall, performance does seem to have increased.

I'll continue to add to this thread when I have new feedback to contribute.

I did just manage to cause Intellicad to crash while using print preview, with Windows prompting the standard "CMS IntelliCAD 7.2 Professional has encountered a serious problem and needs to close..."

This is one of the first times I can remember print preview causing a problem....



Unfortunately, I get this symptom EVERY time I try to do a print preview now. I was able to get one document to print preview, the first time I tried it, but now, IntelliCAD will crash every time I select print preview, in any document, even after restarting my machine.

Because of this I must rescind my previous recommendation and suggest that users wait before updating to ensure that they will not experience similar symptoms.

...My Nvidia GPU drivers are out-of-date (320.49). I will update to the newest release (331.82) and report if this alleviates the issue.

Updating my GPU drivers did not resolve the issue.

However, I did note that trying to do a print preview on my template drawing, which only has a single node on the default "0" layer, does not produce similar symptoms.

I'm relieved, but still troubled to realize that only new drawings will now be able to use print preview, and all drawings created with the previous version will experience this issue.

But, if I figure out what is exactly causing this, I'll certainly advise here.

Working through the day, with these experiences:

Selection is smoother and more precise. Icons have been added for other selection modes. Using the Logitech G600 to input commands to the prompt, the keystrokes are input faster and thus the commands are executed faster, giving this device better performance.

My VBA code, custom written, has had some elements broken. This is probably due to code that needs to be cleaned up. When bringing in nodes, some are drawn to model space with RGB 0,0,0 as the color, effectively making them invisible. Also, one of my VBA functions cause IntelliCAD to crash when it kicks out to entity selection. Lots of things could have caused these breaks and I'll report my resolutions later on.

Correct me if I'm wrong but I think they added some new Arrow head styles as well.

Today, I did a complete removal of IntelliCAD and a full reinstall, which alleviated some issues I was having (hopefully the print preview one).

I did encounter a problem setting up my toolbars, where the 'Entity Properties' toolbar got cutoff and I couldn't get it back to fullsize. A second removal and re-installation were necessary to resolve this.

My VBA is still broken, seemingly whenever it kicks back out to do entity selection for a selection set, the program crashes. No debug option is available from the VBA editor. It might have something to do with the form being properly managed before selection begins, but I need to do some further invesitigation.

My VBA also shows similar symptoms when using the GetPoint library function. The VBA crashes and prompts that the GetPoint method is invalid.

I'm given an option to debug or end, debugging doesn't reveal any clues and ending leaves me at the modelspace with a non-responsive IntelliCAD.

I ended up with the same symptoms in a new VBI project.

I can conclude that since I haven't changed the code, the updated build certainly redefined libraries/objects and therefore has broken my code. This isn't necessarily the first time this has happened (or essentially in the reverse.... upgrading from 7.1 to 7.2 made it possible to work with some objects, I can't recall, that previously weren't co-operating), and I suppose this is expected in the course of updating...

however it's still frustrating. What was workable before is now basically un-usable, and I will probably have to roll back a version.

I'm curious if this new build has been optimized for Windows 7 and/or 64-bit versions of Windows? That would reasonably explain why some things are not working in my WinXP environment...and it would be a great excuse for me to start re-developing my custom code in a 64-bit environment.