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Inventor Professional 2012: Little Things Mean a Lot
24 Mar, 2011 By: Bill FaneThe seemingly small changes in this release can make a big impact on your productivity.
When I first saw the "What's New" list for Autodesk Inventor Professional 2012, announced on Tuesday, there didn't seem to be much to it. There were only 65 entries (as opposed to the usual 200 or so for most new releases of almost any software), of which 20 had to do with "Tooling" (aka Moldflow), and 9 involved Simulation. Most of the remaining 36 entries involve part modeling, with little or no attention paid to assemblies. None of the new or enhanced features seemed to be real attention-grabbers that would make a good headline for a product review.
Closer inspection revealed that Autodesk's Manufacturing Solutions group has gone for quality instead of quantity. The individual changes may be small, but they have been thoughtfully chosen to help increase your productivity one step at a time, and collectively they really add up.
Autodesk Inventor Professional 2012 will begin shipping in early April. It is available as part of the familiar AutoCAD Inventor Professional Suite and the new Autodesk Product Design Suite Ultimate ($9,995).
And On Today's Menu We Have
Let's start with the new Marking Menu functionality. Instead of foraging through the ribbon for commands (and Inventor's ribbon is still better than most applications), all you need to do is to right-click anywhere in the graphics menu. This brings up a context-sensitive halo of common commands surrounding the cursor, plus a panel listing of secondary commands. Move the cursor toward the command you want, click on it, and away you go! My use of the ribbon has dropped almost to zero.
To further improve things, there has been a significant change in the dialog boxes and mini-toolbars. First, the mini-toolbars that appear during operations such as Extrude, Revolve, Fillet, and so on have been improved and expanded such that the dialog boxes are hardly needed anymore. To this end, the second improvement is that the dialog boxes initially appear as a small bar with a drop arrow to open them, thus saving screen real estate. In addition, most of the mini toolbars fade away until you scroll the cursor near them.
The mini toolbars fade away (left) until you need them (right).
Here's another nice touch: When you select a face for a new sketch location, the model automatically rotates so the sketch plane faces you square on, as if you had also run the View Face tool.
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