Visual Tablet Software

[RobertR]

Years ago, we used digitizing tablets (large configurable tablets with a 12 button puck/mouse). we printed overlays associated with the acad.mnu and all was good. Then we found "VisualTabletPro" by the Zak Morris company (zmc.com) which took our overlay and put it on our screen as a popup. All was GREAT. We customized it to our hearts content and productivity abounded.

Then, sadly, our company went out of business and we lost our "visual tablets".

Then, happily, we got a new job and use AutoCAD 2011 on windows 7.

Sadly, "VisualTabletPro" won't work on AutoCAD 2011 and I am unable to find a competing program that does the same thing.

My question is this....

Does anyone know of or use a program that has customizable, on-screen "popups" for AutoCAD commands?

[ReMark]

Are you looking for some kind of "heads up" display for AutoCAD commands?

[RobertR]

Yes. VisualTablet had 4 popups that you could customize however you wished. TABLET-Model.jpg I tried to find some other software that did the same thing, but I didn't have any luck.

[RobertR]

You would push down on the right mouse button, move the mouse (up, down, left or right), the "tablet" set to that direction would popup and you would release the mouse button over the command you wanted to activate.

[ReMark]

I vaguely remember when the program was introduced. I don't know of a replacement for it. I'll keep looking though.

[SLW210]

There really is no need for that in AutoCAD 2011. Might as well learn to use and customize the ribbon.

[f700es]

That or just develop better keyboard aliases. Seems like one would be moving the mouse too much, much like using a ton of older toolbars.
Too each their own.

There really is no need for that in AutoCAD 2011. Might as well learn to use and customize the ribbon.

[RobertR]

The beauty of the VisualTablet was that you didn't have to shift your focus to the keyboard for typing in an alias. Also, the point of it was to eliminate all of the toolbars, ribbon, and clutter from around your drawing area. Since you created what the popup looked like, you could take that one command that you used (the one that's buried in flyouts) and put it on-screen. On the popup shown above, I have everything I needed for layers, dimension, modifications (move, copy etc), steel items, drawn items, inserting blocks, etc.

Turn off all of your toolbars and ribbon and see how much more drawing space you have to work with.

[f700es]

Oh I am a big Ribbon hater. My favorite setup was in 2008. I had 2 rows of toolbars at the top including Standard, Layers, Properties, Layers II and a few others. That and the DashBoard was all I had open. Lots more drawing room than with the Ribbon.