Tool Palette Enhancements
Tool Palettes have been one of the newest features in recent releases of AutoCAD that all users of AutoCAD can use in everyday drafting. Tool Palettes were first introduced with AutoCAD 2004, and helped to many accessing blocks and other types of tools much easier. Fast forward to AutoCAD 2005 and once again Tool Palettes are enhanced with Tables and the ability to have Command Tools among other changes. Now with AutoCAD 2006 some additional features are added to Tool Palettes to enhance the feature even further.

You are now able to edit the common properties of several tools at one time. This allows you to change properties like Layer and Color for these tools. The common properties will vary based on the types of tools selected for editing. Along with being able to edit multiple tools you are able to organize tools on a Tool Palette with Separator lines and simple Text labels. The final update to Tool Palettes is to support Dynamic Blocks and their custom properties.



If you stayed away from using Tool Palette Groups in the office because it was hard to manage and share them.  You will be happy to know that Groups can now be exported and imported between different machines. This functionality can be found in the CUSTOMIZE command.



Toolbar and Tool Palette Locking
Have you accidentally dragged a toolbar when you went to select a button, or maybe you wanted to make sure a Palette remained in a specific spot on the screen. AutoCAD 2006 allows you to choose between locking the location of Toolbars or Palettes so they can’t be moved on screen. This can be achieved through a couple different methods and in the User Interface (UI). The first is by using the new Lock icon located in the status bar area of AutoCAD. The other method is to use the Lock Location under the Windows pull-down.



Getting User Input Changes (AutoLISP and ActiveX API)
If you use methods or functions like GetPoint or GetCorner you will have to watch out for the new behavior of ignoring the Z value. So if you want the Z value to come through other than the current elevation value you will need to add a check for the current OSNAPZ system variable to your code. This change seems to affect AutoLISP, VBA and ObjectARX equally.

Temporary Overrides
Temporary Overrides are a very interesting concept and you will find some more useful than others. Temporary Overrides do exactly what they sound like; they disable a feature for a certain period of time and are used while a command is running. To use a Temporary Override you press and hold a key down while you want the feature active. So for instance, while you press and hold down the Shift key the orthogonal behavior will be inverted. So if it is On it will be turned off while the key is pressed in.

Once the key is let go, the original state will be restored. Temporary Overrides can be customized through the Customize User Interface (CUI) tool. By default there are 23 active Temporary Overrides that ship with AutoCAD. You can tell when you are using a Temporary Override by a small arrow pointing down next to the cursor. If you don’t see the icon or it doesn’t seem to work the TEMPOVERRIDES system variable might be set to 0 instead of 1.



CUI (Customize User Interface)
Have you ever thought about learning to customize and create your own custom pull-down menus? Maybe you tried in the past and just couldn’t quite make it all work together. Well Autodesk might have just changed the way you think about customizing AutoCAD forever with the in Customize User Interface or CUI tool in AutoCAD 2006. In previous releases of AutoCAD it was possible to make your own Toolbars and Accelerator Keys, but everything else took some tinkering and working outside of the AutoCAD application. The new CUI tool allows you to work in a graphical interface, which will be very different for many of us that just loved to whip open Notepad and crank through the creation of new menu sections.

You can still do that, but it will be a much greater challenge now to a Notepad wizards as the file format has been changed to XML this go around. This change will hopefully allow more people to enjoy the benefits of customizing Pull-downs, Toolbars, Temporary Keys (New), Accelerator Keys and many other items all from a graphical interface. The nice thing about the new CUI tool and format is that you create a macro once and use it in many of the different menu sections. This allows to reduce the number of changes they you might have needed to do in previous releases when you had a Toolbar button and a Pull-down menu item that did exactly the same things.

Some of the other features that are new to customizing the User Interface is the introduction of WorkSpaces which I will cover in just a little bit and the ability to associate an icon to a pull-down menu item. The icon that is used for the pull-down menu item is the same one that is used with the Toolbar button. The icon is actually assigned to the command’s macro instead of related to the Toolbar button like it was in previous releases.


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WorkSpaces
WorkSpaces are a new concept in AutoCAD, but it is kind of based on an old idea that has already existed in the software for some time. WorkSpaces are similar to profiles except they are responsible for controlling the display of Toolbars, Menus and Dockable Windows. They allow you to layout several different groups of User Interface elements and give them a name that can be used to reference the layout. So you could create task based WorkSpaces that contain the tools that you might need. This allows you to maximize the amount of room that you have available for the drawing editor. Once again you use the CUI tool to create and manage WorkSpaces, along with a WorkSpace Toolbar and WORKSPACE command.

Command: workspace
Enter workspace option [setCurrent/SAveas/Edit/Rename/Delete/SEttings/?] <setCurrent>: