Hijacked

[jggerth]

Installing Project Cooper hijacked the dwg association, and mapped it to itself. That's pretty poor behavior - considering the number of other applications (Autodesk and otherwise) than can read, write, or otherwise process dwg files. This is especially galling since PC will not open genuine or generic DWG files! Only its own special dwg variant, so double clicking is generally going to cause a fail. Heck, even Quicktime offers to not hijack media file associations, and Apple has never been noted for lacking self centeredness.

Also hijacked the DXF extension, but can't seem to do anything with it....

Option A would have the installation identify if DWG or DXF associations exist, and offer to take them over, but give the user the option to leave the file associations as is. Option B would go a step further, and enable the OS to identify PC files as PC flavored DWG, and only attempt (with user approval) to associate those files to itself. Option C would start with either A or B, but add a PC option to the right click Open With... menu in Windows Explorer.

Any of those options would be a far better customer experience than the unwanted behavior today.

[Anonymous]

I agree. I think options "A" or "C" would be fine. I was able to open a
Cooper file in ACAD, do some very slight mods (no new entity types) and than
re-open in Cooper, but I think that will be rare at this juncture. I
completely agree that extension hijacking is bad, but understand the target
audience will be CAD noobs that probably have no CAD program installed.

--
Nick

wrote in message news:6300825@discussion.autodesk.com...
> Installing Project Cooper hijacked the dwg association, and mapped it to
> itself. That's pretty poor behavior - considering the number of other
> applications (Autodesk and otherwise) than can read, write, or otherwise
> process dwg files. This is especially galling since PC will not open
> genuine or generic DWG files! Only its own special dwg variant, so double
> clicking is generally going to cause a fail. Heck, even Quicktime offers
> to not hijack media file associations, and Apple has never been noted for
> lacking self centeredness.
>
> Also hijacked the DXF extension, but can't seem to do anything with it....
>
> Option A would have the installation identify if DWG or DXF associations
> exist, and offer to take them over, but give the user the option to leave
> the file associations as is. Option B would go a step further, and enable
> the OS to identify PC files as PC flavored DWG, and only attempt (with
> user approval) to associate those files to itself. Option C would start
> with either A or B, but add a PC option to the right click Open With...
> menu in Windows Explorer.
>
> Any of those options would be a far better customer experience than the
> unwanted behavior today.

[jggerth]

A cad noob in an organization that uses CAD is very likely to have TrueView and/or Design Review installed. I could see those people using a lightweight, dwg-compatible to initiate some designs, and add minor edits to existing drawings. But getting their file associations hijacked is a no-no.

The one-way trip envisioned by the dev team really is not something useful in an organization. Possibly for the stand-alone sketcher, but the inability of Project Cooper to open arbitrary files renders the home/occasional user rather hamstrung. There are tons of woodworking plans on the web in R12/13 era DXF files, and that's a place a lightweight CAD app would be useful Not being able to work with existing content is a huge negative

[yschober]

Thanks for the feedback! I'll make sure to pass it along to the rest of the team.

[GilesPhillips]

I agree with the above post on hijacking - thankfully I rarely open drawings from the shell, but when I do, it's a right royal pain.

I'm wondering if it's really the right thing to have PC use the dwg file extension - certainly the current situation is far from ideal, but given the limitations of PC, wouldn't it be easier to either have an export option, or build the ability to open PC files in autocad/LT ?

I guess I'm a little fuzzy on Autodesks' overall strategy with respect to the use of the dwg format..

G