Kubotek Forum

Hey Jason, thanks for bringing this up. I'm the guy that wanted to change this terminology, and our training/support team reviewed it before we implemented it. As far as I know you are the first to question it (but everyone else is welcome to comment too). I am interested to hear more detail from you on this. 

The change is meant to help new users from outside the CADKEY/KeyCreator community understand the concept, so your feedback that you are seeing the opposite impact is a bummer. We have a lot of people run trials of the software without a KeyCreator expert there to personally guide them - which are the one's I'm concerned about. I'm guessing you've been explaining this UI to new people for many years and 2D/3D has not been an issue.  

I've personally talked to a number of users over the years that did not understand what the 2D/3D switch did. Many assumed it had something to do with drawing vs modeling. A few were setting it without knowing why. When we reviewed it, I specifically wanted a descriptive set of termonology here that would be unique in order to help emphasize the unique power of this option - whcih most CAD programs do not have. 

In my view 2D/3D was also an oversimplification. What was formerly called 2D mode is very powerful when you need to project a 3D position to the CPlane XY plane, which  itself can be at any 3D orientation.  

You guys may be aware that Kubotek is getting ready to introduce new variants of KeyCreator with a new UI which is more "office-friendly" (ribbon and content menus, etc.). These are part of a push to indtroduce KeyCreator to significant numbers of new users and grow the community. 

We have been building these as separate products so that we don't force significant interface change on our long time users (which would not be positive for productivity).We have been hopeful that terminology changes and modernizations (without any behavior changes) like this one can be re-learned without much negative impact. We considered leaving some terminology differences between the variant products (ie. not changing 2D/3D to ZLock/ZFree in Pro), but in the long run it didn't seem necessary.