Hi, I'd like to again reiterate my suggestion for something like what i discuss above. But, more importantly than ever for me would be my idea of/hope for:

-- I'd like to treat these special balloons/callouts as visibility toggles differently than isolate layer and differently than hide/show, and differently than the Concept Explorer.

Now that i've been exploring VC6 2D/3D for jusssst over a year, i am finding it very tedious to do some things via Concept Explorer.

Plus, if no one else has this idea, you can get the framework of it into play and thus create prior art. I really, really feel this is a feature (that if not already similarly or actually in play) will prove quite useful. A twist on my thoughts above would be that the balloons could fade or dim in a transparency-like mode.

This would be so very useful for those of us creating veryt huge models, such as a car or building, home or ship, or anything small that has very fine parts and details, like a watch.

Now, these "balloons" with "strings and pins" could be created from floating "pen palettes". Initially, we'd assign properties to a pallet. The palette would auto populate. A keyboard press could snatch from this palette or pad a pin preassigned a sub-letter and that balloon or dart or whatever would be automagically positioned near to where the cursor IS or actually anchored to the part nearby. This would speed up user work capability.

If the pen palette/pad is pre-assigned properties such as "toggle on/off", maybe only one could validly attach to a given area. To facilitate the usefulness, a new VC/Shark bounding box could be designed. This box would demarcate (either as a set, or maybe overlap to create special 'subset' features) areas and thus control what the darts/balloons can or cannot do.

Some dart ideas:

-- layer on-off toggling
-- layer print toggling
-- parts groups toggling

One possibly interesting effect would be when no parts are selected, and we press and hold the shift key while using the arrow keys, we can see our part move around, but the balloon or stringy end of the needle/dart would have a semi-magnetic or room-zenith-seeking aspect to it so that we can still follow the part of interest to the control end of the balloon.

Moreover, some parts of the balloon could be responsive regardless of where it's clicked. So, in effect, the balloon could display transparency and 2 or 3 "quick-select-colors", but the line or string itself could be the toggle. This would mean less mouse travel and reduced wrist action. Left- or right-sweeping over the leader/strings could affect parts (temporarily, by session, or persist across sessions). This would be really useful for reducing having to "dig out" parts by turning off layers.

If an errant piece of geometry is lurking behind something, roping the parts could pull up the ambiguity box, and a dart could be shot at it so the part can be tracked or be made to turn off or do whatever a preassigned dart is.

Now if this all sounds crazy, let me get even more fanciful: imagine what ViaCAD and Shark could be like in multi-touch environs. If Concepts/Punch! have money for serious R&D and disruptive tech, you guys should consider this: 2D drawings on a table could be monitored by peripheral laser. A multitouch input device (with a really good database engine) could allow collaborative in-house or remote workload sharing. Boundaries based on permissions or other rights could enable users to work together, and, going on the vein of multi-touch and laser tracking, projectors could display the objects in a room. Imagine 3D design of a layout of equipment, say in a ship or hospital or lab. It's one thing to use animated characters to show that a person could reach behind equipment, but imagine designers wearing tags that interact with the database lasers. The designer or maintenance people involved could then lie down on mockups and demonstrate feasible or infeasible arrangements.

But, i digress with that previous paragraph. I'd like to see zenith-seeking, multi-characteristics, flexible toggles to advance or replace the feature set of the Concept Explorer.

Oh, and it would be NICE if it worked with Linux & Mac (or, just be OS-agnostic...), but maybe you could interest Google in some way. Or scare them. (Or, they scare you/us, hehehe)