Shareware Review - June 98

Product: IGNITE

Author: Engineered Design Solutions

Contact: http://www.inwave.com/~duhvinci/

The one really annoying change going from AutoCAD R13 to R14 is that in R13 when you had a drawing open and issued the open command the current drawing would be highlighted and in R14 it isn't. This makes it impossible to open the next drawing in the directory by simply hitting the down arrow key and enter. With Ignite! the current drawing remains highlighted and you can open the next drawing file in R14 just like you could in R13.

Besides giving you enlarged bitmapped views of your drawings Ignite! also gives you a scrollbar of drawing bitmapped previews of the current directory which you can use as icons to open which ever file you like. Another nice feature of Ignite! is that it can be run run prior to AutoCAD since it is a stand alone executable. You can even use it like a mini drawing manager with previews since you can delete and rename drawing files within Ignite!.

The only complain I have is that the default command to invoke Ignite!, "Ignite!", is a real pain to type every time you open a drawing from within AutoCAD. A little renaming and a defun change to the Ignite! lisp routine solves this problem.

The shareware version is a fully functional program with a really annoying nag screen. But since registration fee for Ignite! is only $19.95 it won't break anybody's pocket book to register. Also, you don't have to reload any software after you have the registration number since the code just needs to entered. Click on the Ignite! link above or visit Engineered Design Solutions Home Page at http://www.inwave.com/~duhvinci/ to download Ignite! or for registration information.