Workarounds

Yes, workarounds. Here’s a straw poll: love’ em or hate 'em?

There are two kinds. One is something that the software is not really designed to do but clever users have found a way to achieve it anyway. The Dave Method may be an example.

Then there’s the built-in kind. I am thinking of the introduction of temporarily blank viewports in Layout when moving them for example. Another is the injunction to turn off snapping points to make Layout faster. In fact, both these are attempts to make what some would call an inadequate piece of software appear to do what you might have expected of it in the first place. It’s a bit like “go faster” stripes on the side of a dobbin of a car. Layout does work faster but at the cost of some considerable compromises.

Maybe we could call these the Private Workarounds and the Corporate Workarounds? I expect y’all can think of other examples.

This may be relevant …:

Hmmm… I think a tip is different from a workaround. A tip is a piece of advice alerting you to something the software allows you to do that you didn’t know about. A workaround pre-supposes a problem and is a way of mitigating it (not solving it entirely). That’s my understanding, anyway.

There is perhaps a third category of workaround that is invented to circumnavigate a specific bug, not a just a general deficiency like Layout rendering speed. Like Pro users downloading and using the old STL exporter extension for Make during the period when Export Selection was broken in Pro (now fixed). Or, always closing the welcome screen and opening a new file from File/New to avoid the Tag Window name column resizing bug on Mac.

I’m a big fan of category one, the clever extending of the capabilities by unorthodox uses.

Still a milder fan of the second, finding ways to use the software as is, like modeling in M and pretending they are MM to avoid the tiny face issue.

A begrudging fan of the third kind, for restoring functionality that is lost by mistake. Like using custom extensions to restore the lost ability of adding Tag names to in the Entity Info Window on Mac.

One hopes that the general arc of all workarounds is toward being made obsolete by the continuing improvement of the software.

Hear, hear!

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