What's New in Stardraw Design 7.4

Stardraw Design 7.4 includes important new features and a number of enhancements and bug fixes.

New Features

• Back End Upgrades: including a switch from .NET 4.5 to .NET 8 and from SQL CE (now end of life) to SQLite, both of which improve overall performance.
• ARM 64 Compilation: even faster operation for users running Macs with ARM M1, M2, M3 and M4 chipsets.
• Startup: application startup time is approximately 4x faster.
• File Operations: re-factored serialization code means massive improvements in the speed of opening and saving projects. The bigger the project, the greater the improvements; internal tests have shown that saving very large projects can be more than 4x faster.
  With comparative times for application startup, and when using a real-world test project with 26 drawings, weighing in at 71MB on disk and 2.6GB when loaded into memory, we see:

  Version	Startup	File Load	File Save
  7.3 x64	6.8s	33.1s	107.7s
  7.4 x64	1.8s	29.7s	14.2s
  7.4 ARM64	1.7s	26.5s	12.8s

• Drawing Tabs: switching between drawing tabs, especially when going to a drawing for the first time, is now near-instant, even for projects containing huge numbers of products, thanks to a re-working of the way the Available Symbols Palette is populated.
• High DPI support: runs on any high resolution monitor(s), including 4k and above, with full support for Windows display scaling.
• Report Designer: hugely powerful report authoring interface that means you can edit or create you own report templates, accessing all Data Sources for the Application, the Project, the User, and the Products, Cables and Drawings in the Project. More...
• Cables View: like the Products View but exposing all Cable attribute values in a powerful grid interface. More...
• Add Products Dialog: the Products View now uses a sophisticated new dialog to add products to your project: simply click on the new Add Product button. Key features include:
  • No limit on the number of results for a search.
  • New Sort, Search and Filter tools.
  • Data sources are exposed, so you can see if a product comes from the Stardraw Library or your User Defined Products.
  • Multiple different products can be selected for addition to the project in a single action.
  • Attribute values can be set as you add the product(s) to the project, e.g. the Room name, saving multiple data-entry steps.
• Grid Controls: the Products View, Cables View, Available Symbols Palette and Add Products dialog all now employ an improved grid control with advanced data entry and manipulation capabilities. These include:
  • Sorting, Searching and Filtering on any column and any value.
  • Autofill, allowing drag/drop filling of multiple cells, both across and down, with the option of auto-incrementing values.
  • Copy and paste from/to multiple cells.
  • Layout of columns and column sizing is persisted even when changing views.
• Auto-Labeling: choose which Attributes to add to your Block Schematic symbols as dynamic labels, and where. More...
• Cable Fillets: rounded corners on Cables. More...
• Purge Attributes: delete any and all Attribute values and their placeholders from existing projects. More...
• Clone drawing: create a new drawing from an old one but with new Product Instances e.g. to design Room 2 based on Room 1. More...
• Paste EMF: copy from Excel and paste a faithful representation of the spreadsheet data, fully editable. Also improves copy/paste of images from external sources e.g. web pages.
• Copy as Metafile: copy drawing objects as Metafile data which means that the pasted object will be optimal for the destination application.  For example, applications like Excel, Powerpoint and Illustrator which support vector graphics - which can be zoomed and scaled without loss of resolution - will get a vector graphic whereas raster (or 'bitmap') applications, like Paint, will get a raster version of the drawing.

Bug Fixes and Enhancements to existing features

• Drag Pan: click and hold the middle mouse button or mousewheel to drag the view on the current drawing, or doubleclick to Zoom to Document, even while in the middle of a drawing action like creating a new Cable object.
• Hatches: when importing DWG files, Hatches (the AutoCAD method of filling an object) are better supported, including the draw order of Hatches (i.e. whether a Hatch appears to be on top of or underneath another Hatch).
• UDP Wizard Categories: when creating a User Defined Product from an existing product, Categories are pre-populated with the original product's Categories, i.e. the folder structure that appears in the Product Browser.
• User Templates: a better UI to delete User Templates; in the Drawings View rightclick and choose Delete User Template.
• DWG Export: the Export DWG UI has been simplified and no longer includes the redundant 'Scaling' option.
• Personalization Dialog: the Personalization dialog has been split into separate dialogs accessed via the new Tools | Personalization sub-menu. This ensures that changes made in one place are respected by other elements of Personalization.
• Product Attributes UI: in Tools | Personalization all Product Attributes settings have been re-factored and rationalized into a single dialog, Product Attributes, which now handles the default 'Product Attributes' placeholders as well as data used in the Product Attributes Spreadsheet.
• The Product Attributes Spreadsheet now uses .xlsx format instead of .xls.
• UDP Wizard Measurement Units: In the UDP Wizard, Rack Layout symbol dialog, the default units of measurement are rationalized as:
  • Width: Inches
  • Depth: regional setting (Inches/mm)
  • Height: Rack Units (U)
• Print Area: fixes drag/drop definition of Print Area when Windows Scaling <>100%.
• Cut, Copy, Paste: active status now correctly reflects the current selection and/or clipboard status.
• Symbol Browser: the position of text in Symbol Browser thumbnails of DWG/DXF symbols is now correct.
• Undo Multiple Dynamic Copy: fixes behavior of undoing multiple Dynamic Copy actions i.e. Ctrl+Click+Drag to create multiple new product symbols and then undoing those actions.