It was quite a busy night for all of us. First, our new President, Darrell MacDonald (of Byrne Architects) started off the meeting by welcoming everybody and pointing out some of the new things that we have in store for the upcoming year. Darrell has a determination that will make MUGONS more informative and enjoyable for everyone. For more information, read his President's message inside.
Our guest speaker for the night was Carl Hicks (along with Paul Burns) from Microtek Systems Ltd. Carl gave us an interesting viewpoint of the "CAD Camp" seminar that he attended in sunny/smoggy California. He gave us a detailed run down on what Autodesk has in store for new products they plan on shipping, such as 3D Studio Max, and a newer version of Animator Pro. He also gave us a quick run down on Autodesk's "mentality" (I can tell you're rolling your eyes) and what they predict the future will be like for CAD. Mainly that AutoCAD will eventually be a strictly 32 bit windows based program. (au revoir DOS). We like to thank Carl for coming out on our first night, and we apologize if he suffered any injuries while getting a "ribbing" from the members of MUGONS. (just kidding, ya had to be there).
After the short break, Murray Clack did a couple of demonstrations from the shareware library. I know you're thinking, "what shareware library?" Well, for more information, see the article on the shareware library inside. Andrew Harvie, a CAD instructor from TUNS, introduced a new feature that we will have at each and every meeting called "Command of the month ". This new feature will help introduce members to new commands as well as explain "hidden options" within a command you are already using. This month's command kickoff had to deal with an AutoCAD command/function called "filter". Within a few minutes, A ndrew had taken away the mystery of this command and I can tell you that it works great. Andrew is now a committee member of MUGONS and we are pleased to have him aboard.
To bring an evening to a close, we had our ever popular "open forum" where members discuss their likes/dislikes, problems/solutions of their favorite CAD package. The main open forum for that night were the love/hate opinions of AutoCAD R13. some of the complaints were well justified while some people discovered solutions to some of their problems. All in all, it was a great night and we hope to see more people there next time because we plan on giving MUGONS our best shot ever.