Adventures in Learning my new CAD System

I'm going to skip calling this an update on the 1 by 1 engine because its only relationship to the engine is to use the CAD to create the drawings of parts that go into the engine.  

As I said last time, I've been plunging into the new CAD program, Alibre Atom.  The program comes with links to handful of exercises and lessons, but nothing that really says "do this, then this."  So I dove into a 196-page tutorial that creates an assembly out of four parts.  Along the way, I kept stumbling over some issues I couldn't find a way around; not terribly big issues, but ones that affect usability. 

The bigger of the two issues was that the mouse didn't behave how the tutorial says it should in a couple of important areas: panning the model around on screen to allow better looks at some areas, and zooming in and out.  Like most (all?) modern software there are multiple ways to get the job done and I was able to use those, but it was always a puzzle why the mouse didn't behave like the tutorial said.  

The second issue was using the "UNDO" command, or CTRL+Z, as pretty much all standard Windoze apps do.  Sometimes it did nothing while other times it did what it was supposed to.  

I ignored those issue and pressed on through the tutorial, completing it last Friday.  The final thing you do in the tutorial is something my current CAD program can't do.  I grabbed a video of my computer screen doing it.   

What's happening here is that I "grab" the end of the dark blue handle and move it around the screen as if I was turning the handle myself.  The model moves exactly as the model should move in real life.  The advantage is that it allows you look for clearances where parts might bump into each other - with the disadvantage that it can't change the feel of the mouse so you're still looking for places where part images overlap by tiny amounts. 

This is something Rhino could never do.  It would allow me to move one part, or one group of parts, but the members of the groups were fixed in relation to each other and there was no such concept as an assembly drawing.  

After this, I asked for help over on an owner's forum and found that there's a way to configure the mouse if you want it to behave differently from the documentation.  I had never changed it but taking it off "Preset 1" and setting it to "Alibre Classic" fixed the mouse issues.  

The Undo/Redo problems are due to the structure of the program.  In the middle of that video, the three Cartesian planes are defined (XY, XZ, YZ).  To create a 3D part, you first start out on one of those planes in a 2D drafting subprogram.  You end up switching back and forth between 2D and 3D modes as you build up the parts and the Undo stack is forgotten when you change in either direction.  If I go into the 2D drafting, change some aspect, go back to 3D and find I made a mistake in my change, Undo from that 2D change isn't available in the 3D drafting side.  Confusing?  Yeah.  It will take some getting used to. 

Now that I'm not totally at zero on the skills-o-meter, I might be ready to try to import that first part, the connecting rod that I showed last time. 

The conventional wisdom is that with such a simple part, I should just create it from scratch myself.  I might try that.  Alibre has an option for tracing lines in a drawing, which should make it easier than drawing from basic shapes.  If I can get the drawing imported.