Fullscreen Mode Mac - Archicad 16

[archislave]

Yes, Folks! I have been writing about this since 2006 when I first used Archicad on Mac. I was struck by the fact that Archicad was a loose colleciton of the icon bar and project navigator. They only loosely stick together and do not form a unified monolithic window like on Windows or other Mac OSX apps from Apple. To me this was a left over mode from OS9 classic.

Well, here we are waiting on v16 all these years later and Graphisoft still has not taken the time to update the UI after ten years of OSX. Full screen apps are now required by OS X Liion to be fully compliant.

I think Graphisoft will have egg and rotten tomatoes all over their faces if they do not give use a new gui in Archicad 16.

[archislave]

I have and it is not great but organized and logical. No less user friendly than Archicad. There are great things about Archicad like pet palettes, eye dropper and a few other things.

Do you use a Mac because if you don't you don't know how annoying it is with the separate gui. I use a Macbook and switching from it to a connnected monitor means I have to call up the saved environment scheme for each... selecting clicking ok several times. Then the drawing windows get tucked up under the top menu bar so that you can't see the name of the current view or acces the close or minimize controls. In windows Archicad behaves as one single window that can automatically expand to fit the entire screen of a notebook or full size monitor. Us Mac users do not have that option, however Apple has been programming it's own Pro apps a a single window since 2001. They push full screen apps in Lion which is not possible with the separate elements gui of Archicad.

[Bricklyne Clarence]

archislave wrote:
I have and it is not great but organized and logical. No less user friendly than Archicad. There are great things about Archicad like pet palettes, eye dropper and a few other things.

Do you use a Mac because if you don't you don't know how annoying it is with the separate gui. I use a Macbook and switching from it to a connnected monitor means I have to call up the saved environment scheme for each... selecting clicking ok several times. Then the drawing windows get tucked up under the top menu bar so that you can't see the name of the current view or acces the close or minimize controls. In windows Archicad behaves as one single window that can automatically expand to fit the entire screen of a notebook or full size monitor. Us Mac users do not have that option, however Apple has been programming it's own Pro apps a a single window since 2001. They push full screen apps in Lion which is not possible with the separate elements gui of Archicad.

I use both ArchiCAD and Revit, as well as both Macs and PC's, and while I do agree that that particular aspect of ArchiCAD's GUI can be annoying, inM Macs ( sometimes even occurring in PCs after a crash and restart) it pales in comparison to teh headache that is trying to perform simple 2 or 3 click commands in Revit while trying to do the same thing and having to tunnel and burrow through dialog boxes and drop-down menus as many as 8 levels deep just to change a wall material, for example.

It's supposed to be a design program not an ExcelSpreadsheet or Engineering program.
How are you supposed to design ostensibly beautiful buildings when the tool that you're using is the farthest thing from beautifully designed itself.

And of course, the Microsoft Ribbon which was supposed to make Revit more intuitive and streamlined only made it worse and is universally reviled in the Revit user community, and with good reason.


But if that's logical and organized to you, then I suppose, different strokes for different folks and all that.

[Anonymous]

archislave wrote:
Well it looks lie we still have the same GUI from 2005 and no fullscreen feature for Lion. So very sad ... I am moving to Revit. At least windows 8 will look better in my Parallels partition.

You'll need some very decent hardware to run Revit in parallels 😉 I've always found it very slow....

[archislave]

Interestingly, I had an email exchange with Phil Reed the original developer of Revit. He said he always runs it in parallels on his macbook just fine. I think it is one of the latest processors i7 and very fast. Anyway, that is what I am going by. The most drastic option is to run window in bootcamp unders windows 8. I would miss Mac but at least I would have the clean Metro apps and only have to see ugly Windows desktop when I ran Archicad Windows or Revit.

You might say why spend extra on a Mac. Well, build quality is amazing and solid. I have seen some of the new windows Ivy Bridge Ultrabooks and they still do not have the satisfying feel of unibody aluminum. Plus, the fact is I can always choose to run windows or mac on the macbook.

[Anonymous]

archislave wrote:
Interestingly, I had an email exchange with Phil Reed the original developer of Revit. He said he always runs it in parallels on his macbook just fine. I think it is one of the latest processors i7 and very fast.

Phil Reed is probably one of the most knowledge and capable people when it comes to Revit. He got started working with the company that developed Revit before they were bought by Autodesk and then kept working with Autodesk until just the last few years. He's not the original developer but you're talking to the right person and yes he's run Revit on a Mac for years.

At this point I still wouldn't switch to Revit. With ArchiCad 16 object creation seems like it is now going to be easier and quicker, and with Teamwork I'm working with several other Architects as needed on projects instead of staffing up or down and getting more office space. It really is like we are next to each other in an office. I wasn't sure how it was going to work with Teamwork in different locales but it has been a painless experience.

[archislave]

Well, it sounds like the Archicad Mac GUI is ok for you since you have an iMac. It does not work will when working on the Macbook and then plugging into a monitor. I wonder how fast one could run Archicad Windows via Parallels on the Mac. Windows Archicad is a unified GUI frame for a lack of better term.

[Bricklyne Clarence]

The ArchiCAD GUI is not that high on the list of priorities of things Graphisoft should be working on to improve the software.

Not saying that the GUI doesn't need to be reviewed, but there are so many other things that I believe they can and should spend their development resources on that badly need improvement.

[archislave]

I don't know why there are so many users who make excuses for GS slow pace. People accept that they can only get to 2 or 3 new features for each release. Why is this so? Do they only have five programming staff?

It looks like they would decide one of these years to release a totally revamped product and make the investment in hiring enough staff. I don't understand. The bad thing is they are losing market share every year from what I can tell. Maybe someone knows more about this than me...

[Bricklyne Clarence]

archislave wrote:
I don't know why there are so many users who make excuses for GS slow pace. People accept that they can only get to 2 or 3 new features for each release. Why is this so? Do they only have five programming staff?

It looks like they would decide one of these years to release a totally revamped product and make the investment in hiring enough staff. I don't understand. The bad thing is they are losing market share every year from what I can tell. Maybe someone knows more about this than me...

- Because we understand that they are a small firm without the development and marketing resources of an Autodesk.

- Because we also understand that unlike Autodesk, they are maintaining ArchiCAD as a cross-platform product working well on both PC's and Macs' - something that the much bigger Autodesk isn't willing to invest resources in.

- ....and most importantly, it's because despite all that, they still produce a far superior product and software than Autodesk does, otherwise we wouldn't be having this discussion and you would have switched already.

Holding their feet to the fire and holding them accountable for what we expect to be improved in ArchiCAD doesn't mean we get to be unreasonable or even unrealistic about what to want, especially given what they lack in resources and what they face in relentless Autodesk marketing.

For all your complaining and talk of threatening to leave ArchiCAD for Revit, you seem to be glossing over the fact that despite everything, Graphisoft have had more significant improvements to ArchiCAD in just this version alone than Autodesk have had in the latest 2 versions of Revit combined.

[Karl Ottenstein]

Personally, I hate Lion's full-screen mode: for too many applications, it means that my other monitors are covered with the Lion fabric image, and nothing useful. Where I might have had other apps open on those monitors to read info/etc - they are now blank.

Having a separate WE palette layout for each combination of monitors would be required whether AC supports Lion full screen mode or not - you'd still need to specify what should be on which monitor.... unless you want to LOSE that ability, which is what Apple's Pro apps have done - giving you only very limited control over what, if anything, can be placed on extra monitors - which will otherwise just display that fabric image.

Nothing about the AC Mac interface gets in the way of me getting work done, which is the only reason I'd be more supportive of improvements. Almost every app that I use on a daily basis has a floating interface pretty much like ArchiCAD's, with the only exceptions being Apple's own Pro apps (Final Cut Pro X, Aperture, etc.). So, not sure why Graphisoft deserves such scorn.

Cheers,
Karl