Right before the Super Bowl, we released another update to the basic Jump 4 Release products. Many of you have already visited us and pulled it. Thank you.
We trust you'll employ it right away and...
Get to Work
In this latest update, we included a new set of "Light" Layer State files to address what I call the Light Meat Dark Meat quandary. How do you like your turkey?
People whine. We whine about perceived bad referee calls, poor or blown singing performances, and tasteless ads. This is a good thing. Nothing gets better if you don't complain about what you think is wrong with it.
Please whine to Autodesk about AutoCAD Civil 3D. It's Beta Time!
Whine to us about the Jump via comments on this blog or emails to support@cadpilot.com.
We need the feedback.
New Light Layer States
People whine - we respond. Anyway, with a couple of clicks you can now easily convert the Jump to work better with black screen backgrounds. Open the Layer State Manager and Import the new Layer State files from the 00_Resources\Layer Standards folder and have at it. From our perspective your preference of working screen background color should be no big deal.
However, it is still best to remember that...
My Preference is Often Only Habit
Many old school CAD people much prefer black backgrounds. I used them myself for many years mostly because back in the Dark Ages we didn't have any real choice in the matter. I remember loud company meetings where the big bitch was too much background light in "the Pit". The "Pit" being a vast cubie space full of CAD pilots pounding out the plan sets hours and hours a day. Glare and daylight were the enemy. Anyone interested in a 37" "high resolution" bowling ball monitor?
Times change, the video technology gets better, and I moved on to consciously mostly employ light screen backgrounds. Frankly these days, I switch around between the two ways of working without thinking about very much about it.
Whatever works for who I am helping and where and how I am helping them.
Just So You Know
The Jump has historically employed, "by default", a color palette tuned for light screen backgrounds. Besides the fact that AutoCAD paperspace "by default" works that way for a pretty good real-world reason, there are actually good ergonomic and "hard" science reasons for our particular color palette choice.
We made our initial color palette decisions based on a bunch of good scientific studies that some big time companies had spent millions of dollars on. Silly me. I got interested in human vision system neuroscience for a couple of years. I bothered to read and somehow mostly understand these mind-numbing things.
In summary - Slightly off-white screen backgrounds work better for most people. Technically, light cyan backgrounds work better than any other else for long-term "ware and tear" reading "printed" material, but that background also causes color differentiation problems for some people's vision systems. The practical neuroscience says off-white is better for both graphics and print for most of the human race most of the time.
Some other study will say otherwise. More on that another time.