Topic: Civil 3D 2010 - I wish I had this 3 years ago

[Dinosaur]

I was finally able to score a trial download over the weekend and got it running tonight.  I don't know what all the wine party was about on the
Autodesk groups because the new ribbon interface causing the uproar has finally come up with what I wanted the old dashboard to be in 2007.  I probably will never get to be paid to use the thing and there are almost certain to be a few glitches when people start using it in production but it will sure be fun to play for awhile without all those toolbars chewing up what space I could muster on my little 17" flat panel.  Incidentally, the program installed and is running reasonably well in its own XP virtual machine with 20gb of disk space and 2gb of memory to play with - my video card is an aging 128mb AGP. 

[therock003]

So how is it? Is it noticeably better than 2009?

BTW was 2009 the only major Autodesk product with no ribbon? I have used up to civil 2008 so i wouldn't know.

[Dinosaur]

So how is it? Is it noticeably better than 2009?

BTW was 2009 the only major Autodesk product with no ribbon? I have used up to civil 2008 so i wouldn't know.

I don't really know how much better it is than 2009.  I quit using Civil 3D 2008 almost exactly a year ago and have since been living in a world of fuses and circuit breakers without the assistance of AutoCAD ANYthing.  I did manage a couple trial versions of 2009 to play with but the computers were a bit older and slower and I never really gave it a good test.  The ribbon WAS there in 2009, but much like the first dashboard, was geared to using with vanilla commands and quite unfriendly to customize.  The 2010 ribbon comes with Civil 3D fully integrated out of the box with both task and tool oriented MAP workspaces provided along with the Civil 3D workspace.  The interface for Civil 3D has been obtuse from the start and the 2010 ribbon is a decent first step at improvement.