Lee Ambrosius is a technical writer for Autodesk and currently writing on AutoCAD for Mac documentation. He has detailed the new AutoLISP functions in AutoCAD 2012 for Mac.
New AutoLISP Functions in AutoCAD 2012 for Mac (http://bit.ly/nyivVA)
I have known Lee for many years prior to him joining Autodesk and one thing is certain, besides being a hard worker he is one of the most knowledgeable AutoCAD experts I have ever met inside or outside Autodesk.
He is a true AutoCAD Ninja.
Thank you Lee!
Those functions aren’t new to AutoCAD 2012 for Mac, they’re also in the Windows version of AutoCAD 2012. However, they are particularly important in the Mac version to provide a workaround for a small subset of the missing Visual LISP functionality.
They are now officially documented and supported thus technically new.
VisualLISP relies on Windows based APIs so not something Mac has, just like VBA.
Technically, and any other way you want to look at it, “new” and “officially documented and supported” are very different things. The functions were new in March, newly documented and supported in August.
It would have been better if they had been both new and newly documented and supported back in March. It would have been better still if they had been new, documented and supported 10 or 12 years ago, but that’s another story.
The exact details of what’s missing from Visual LISP in the Mac version doesn’t appear to be documented, but I know the hole is much bigger than just that which it’s not technically possible to support outside Windows.
Sometimes resources for documentation and testing of an API are the last things on the priority list. If resources were unlimited we could have made everything published and supported in March.