Yearly Archives: 2016

Merry Christmas!

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Or choose whatever you prefer as your greeting:

Geseënde Kersfees
Joyeux Noël
Glædelig Jul
Feliz NatalCrăciun Fericit
සුබ නත්තලක් වේවා
Puthuvalsara Aashamsakal
Wesołych Świąt
Nollick Ghennal
Alassë a Hristomerendë
Feliĉan Kristnaskon
Среќен Божик
Selamat Natal
Joyeux Noël
Christmas inte mangalaashamsakal
Veselé Vánoce
Suk sarn warn Christmas
Vrolijk Kerstfeest
メリークリスマス
Cualli netlācatilizpan
Meri Kirihimete
Kirîsmes u ser sala we pîroz be
Счастливого рождества!
Христос се роди
शुभ क्रिसमस
عيد ميلاد مجيد
Hyvää joulua
toDwI’ma’ qoS yItIvqu’
Καλά Χριστούγεννα
聖誕快樂
Mutlu Noeller
Izilokotho Ezihle Zamaholdeni
Feliz Navidad
חג מולד שמח
Sretan Božić
God Jul
Schöni Wiehnachte
메리 크리스마스
Gledelig Jul
መልካም ገና!
Frohe Weihnachten
Веселого Різдва
Vesel Božič
Nollaig Shona Dhuit
Happy holidays
Iselogbe
圣诞快乐
Zalig Kerstfeest
Krismasasya shubhkaamnaa
ਕਰਿਸਮ ਤੇ ਨਵਾੰ ਸਾਲ ਖੁਸ਼ਿਯਾੰਵਾਲਾ ਹੋਵੇ
کرسمس
djoyeus Noyé
Priecïgus Ziemassvºtkus
Kellemes karácsonyi ünnepeket
Nadolig Llawen
Frohe Weihnachten
Nollaig Chridheil
Felicem Diem Nativitatis
क्रस्मसको शुभकामना
Chuć Mưǹg Giańg Sinh
Gozhqq Keshmish
کرسمس مبارک
გილოცავ შობა-ახალ წელს
Buon Natale
শুভ বড়দিন

AutoCAD 2017.1.1 Update

9 Replies

Thanks to Jimmy Bergmark, I now know that the controversial subscription-only* AutoCAD 2017.1 Update has itself been updated. Jimmy was brave enough to install and run the execrable Autodesk desktop app and discovered the update update. Rather you than me, Jimmy!

Here’s the readme. You’ll need to get at it using Autodesk Account.

I note that a bunch of crashes are fixed by this update update. Perhaps that is related to the magical missing AutoCAD 2017.1 crash information? Who knows?

The update was apparently released over a month ago on 17 November 2016. Autodesk needs to work out an alternative mechanism to Autodesk desktop app so that those of us who won’t/can’t use it will still be informed when updates become available. If only there were some other method Autodesk could use to communicate with customers! Too hard, apparently.

* not really

AutoCAD 2017 for Mac released, still half-baked

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AutoCAD 2017 for Mac and AutoCAD LT 2017 for Mac have been released. Here’s a video highlighting exciting and innovative new features such as drawing and layout tabs. Despite such stellar advances, it’s safe to say that AutoCAD for Mac remains half-baked, even after all these years. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

According to Autodesk, these are the features missing from AutoCAD 2017 for Mac:

LAYDEL, LAYMRG, LAYWALK and LAYVPI
Tool palettes
New layer notification
Navigation bar
ShowMotion
Ribbon*
DesignCenter**
Sheet Set Manager***
Steering wheel
Feature finder for help
Model documentation tools
Dynamic block lookup parameter creation/editing
Table style editing
Multiline style creation
Digitizer integration
Geographic location
Simplified, powerful rendering
Material creation, editing, and mapping
Advanced rendering settings
Camera creation
Point cloud
Walkthroughs, flybys, and animations
DWF underlays
DGN underlays
Hyperlinks
Data extraction
Markup set manager
dbConnect manager
WMF import and export
FBX import and export
Design feed
Import SketchUp files (SKP)
Design share
3D print studio
Reference Navisworks models
Right-click menus, keyboard shortcuts, and double-click customization
VisualLISP
.NET
VBA
DCL dialogs
Action recorder and action macros
Reference manager (stand-alone application)
Password-protected drawings
Digital signatures
Workspaces
User profiles
Autodesk desktop app
Migration tool enhancements
CAD standards tools
CUI import and export
BIM 360 add-in
Performance Reporting
Sysvar monitor

* To be fair, AutoCAD 2017 for Mac does have a Ribbonesque feature, albeit one that that looks more like the pre-2009 Dashboard than the Windows-style Ribbon.

** Autodesk claims Content Palette to be roughly equivalent to DesignCenter, but it claimed that (wrongly) about the awful and short-lived Content Explorer. It’s wrong here too; Content Palette on Mac has nowhere near the functionality of DesignCenter on Windows.

*** Autodesk claims AutoCAD for Mac’s Project Manager is functionally equivalent to the missing Sheet Set Manager.

Also, some PDF export features don’t work when plotting, only when using Publish.

No workspaces? No model documentation? No hyperlinks? No table style editing? Various kinds of reference files unsupported? No Visual LISP or DCL? Still? Come on Autodesk, you’re not even trying.

That’s before we get on to the lack of third party applications, vertical variants and object enablers. Is Autodesk expecting full price for this thing? Really?

It’s not all bad news, though. Not having Autodesk desktop app is no handicap at all. Also, according to Autodesk the following features are unique to AutoCAD for Mac:

Coverflow navigation
Multitouch gestures
External reference path mapping
OpenGL Core Profile support
OS notification for updates
Language switching in product

Well that’s all right, then.

Autodesk to pull the plug on 123D

2 Replies

The reason you should never rely on SaaS for anything important is that, well, you just can’t rely on it. If the software breaks, or the vendor goes under, or decides that line’s not profitable enough, or just loses interest, you’re screwed. More importantly, you’re screwed on a timeframe that’s out of your control, and probably much shorter than you would like. You can’t just go on using the software until you’re ready to move on, like you can with perpetual licenses.

Thanks for the latest lesson, Autodesk, regarding 123D:

Over the past few years, millions of people have unlocked their creativity with the Autodesk 123D apps and community. We’ve grown from one desktop tool in 2011 to multiple apps across desktop, web, and mobile.

We’re incredibly proud of these products, and even more proud of what you all have MADE with them. But we recognize that the portfolio has become complex. We are making some changes to simplify our Autodesk portfolio and workflows for people everywhere who love to make things. We are consolidating these tools and features into key apps such as Tinkercad, Fusion 360, and ReMake.

Today, we are sharing the news that in early 2017, after we complete this consolidation, we’ll be shutting down 123dApp and turning off many of the apps to new download. Rest assured that we remain committed to providing free tools to hobbyists, kids, hackers, and makers around the world. We value you, your models, and are going to do this consolidation in the right way.

You’ll be able to access and download your content from 123dApp in the coming months. We will make every effort to make sure you will be notified before we make any changes to the apps or website.

What’s next? We’ll be working closely with you, the 123D Community of users, to make sure your questions are answered. We’ll be sharing more details on this blog and our support forums, and will notify you when we start to implement changes.

Autodesk is committed to help people make anything and we are committed to help you continue to do just that. Look for more detailed information in the next few days, weeks and months.

–The Autodesk 123D Team

Whether Autodesk’s definition of “the right way” coincides with that of users remains to be seen. Of course, Autodesk 123D is free and you get what you (don’t) pay for. But if you think Autodesk won’t do this with its paid SaaS products, you’re dreaming. The same applies to any vendor, but Autodesk in particular has a horrible history of killing products and leaving masses of crying orphans to fend for themselves.

Steve’s fencing year 2016

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Some of you may be aware I’m an active veteran fencer. I’ve been a bit quiet over the past month because I’ve been away, attending two major fencing tournaments. I’ll post some video later, but here are my national and international medal results this year:

Australian Fencing Circuit 1, Melbourne, Australia
  • Veteran Men’s Sabre – Bronze and 50+ Gold
Asian Masters / Oceania and AFC 3 Veterans, Perth, Australia
  • Asian Masters / Oceania Veteran / AFC3 Veteran Men’s Sabre (50+) – Gold
  • Asian Masters / Oceania Veteran / AFC3 Veteran Men’s Foil (50+) – Bronze
  • Asian Masters / Oceania Veteran Men’s Sabre Teams (Australia A) – Gold
  • Asian Masters / Oceania Veteran Men’s Foil Teams (Australia Green) – Bronze
Commonwealth Veteran Fencing Championships, Christchurch*, New Zealand
  • Men’s Sabre (50+) – Gold
  • Men’s Sabre Teams (Australia) – Gold
  • Men’s Foil Teams (Australia) – Gold


* I flew into Christchurch the day after the earthquake.

Australian Open and Veteran Fencing Championships**, Canberra, Australia
  • Open Men’s Sabre Teams (Western Australia) – Silver
  • Veteran Men’s Sabre – 50+ Gold
  • Veteran Men’s Foil – Silver and 50+ Gold
  • Veteran Sabre Teams (Western Australia – Captain) – Gold
  • Veteran Epee Teams (Western Australia – Captain) – Gold
  • Veteran Foil Teams (Western Australia – Captain) – Bronze

** At these Championships I fenced in 11 events and came away with 7 medals, which I believe is a men’s record for Australian events.

So among other things, I’m 50+ Sabre Champion of Australia, Oceania, Asia and the Commonwealth. The Western Australia Championships were also awarded a couple of weeks ago, where I won Veteran Championships in all three weapons and the Master-at-Arms (all-rounder) Championship. All-in-all, a pretty good year!

BricsCAD startup LISP bug fixed

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In my previous post I have a real problem with BricsCAD, I related my then-latest interaction with the Bricsys support system:

Steve Johnson
05-12-2016 05:30 UTC
I don’t know if this is a BricsCAD problem or a DOSLib one, so I am reporting it to both Bricsys and Dale at McNeel. I’m also not sure if this was happening in earlier versions.

If I load DOSLib during an S::STARTUP call and then use the (dos_msgbox) function later in that call, this fails the first time round because BricsCAD things the function is not defined. Opening a second drawing results in the call working as expected. I’ve chopped down our startup routine so you have an example.

; error : no function definition ; expected FUNCTION at [eval]

Awesome Bricsys Person
05-12-2016 12:32 UTC
Hi Steve,

There was a regression introduced in V17.1.10 that caused startup code to execute too early under certain conditions, before the lisp engine document context was properly initialized. This has been fixed now for the next update.

Steve Johnson
06-12-2016 02:43 UTC
I must say, the responses I’ve been getting to my support requests have been absolutely bloody brilliant. Cheers!

Let’s just finish the sequence, shall we?

Second Excellent Bricsys Person
13-12-2016 19:18 UTC
Hi Steve,

I have very good news. The fix is included in BricsCAD V17.1.11, available for download.
Thank you for your help.

Following a fast and straightforward download and install, I can confirm that the bug is fixed. The elapsed time from my bug report to the fix being publicly available and me being informed personally of the fact was 8.5 days. Note that this isn’t a workaround, patch or service pack, it’s a permanent fix that is now automatically in place for everybody who downloads the software.

Edit: the new version was actually released at 4 PM on 9 December, so it was less than 4.5 days from report to fix. Outstanding!

I should mention that I also received a prompt and relevant response from Dale at McNeel, despite the fact that the problem was nothing to do with him!

For somebody used to dealing with Autodesk, this is a breath of fresh air. Bricsys team, take a bow!

Autodesk perpetual license owners to get screwed big-time

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Hidden in amongst a bunch of the usual highly dubious subscription statements from Carl Bass is an announcement that spells doom for Autodesk perpetual license owners. I will resist the temptation to skewer Carl’s spin (for now) because this announcement is much more important:

Bass also confirmed that the company plans to converge the two existing subscription models — maintenance and product subscriptions — into a single offering over the next two years. “If you look out to fiscal year 2020, we want to be in a place where, first of all, we have a single kind of offering with a single back office and infrastructure to support it, one that will be a combination of product subscriptions as you see them plus a consumption model on top of it. That’s where we see the business heading.

“Along the way, it’s how do we motivate customers to move from one model to another in the program, what are the price points, and how does that transition work? In our mind, getting to a single model is really important. It will give the best service to our customers, it will be the most affordable for us to have, [and] we can start getting rid of some of the systems that were designed for a different era and concentrate on giving a world-class experience to users.”

Translation: Autodesk is going to drive up prices of maintenance subscription (perpetual license keeping-up-to-date fee) to match the much higher prices of product subscription (rental). Maintenance subscription will then be merged into oblivion. Your return on your long-term investment in Autodesk software will be zero. Your reward for decades of loyalty to Autodesk will be to have your software costs blown through the roof.

If you’re not already making plans to abandon the Autodesk ship, you really need to do so now. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. Don’t say Carl  didn’t warn you.

Get out or get screwed big-time. I mean, get out or get motivated to transition into a world-class experience.

I have a real problem with BricsCAD

3 Replies

To be precise, I have a real problem with writing  about BricsCAD. I’ve written some pretty complimentary things about BricsCAD lately. In the interests of balance, I’ve been intending to write about some of the issues people can expect to deal with when moving from AutoCAD to BricsCAD. Such issues certainly exist. The problem I have with that is that the issues keep going away!

Here’s how it usually goes. I find a problem in BricsCAD. I submit a support request. Within hours, I get a meaningful response from a person who understands the issue. Within days, I’m informed it’s been fixed internally and the fix will be in the next update. Within a week or two, that update is released. I download and install the updated version. It’s basically a full reinstall, but all settings are seamlessly retained and it’s faster and less painful than an AutoCAD Service Pack installation. The whole thing from start of download to completion typically takes 5 or 6 minutes. The problem is gone, and I have nothing to write about!

Here’s the latest interaction. This is typical, and has been repeated many times:

Steve Johnson
05-12-2016 05:30 UTC
I don’t know if this is a BricsCAD problem or a DOSLib one, so I am reporting it to both Bricsys and Dale at McNeel. I’m also not sure if this was happening in earlier versions.

If I load DOSLib during an S::STARTUP call and then use the (dos_msgbox) function later in that call, this fails the first time round because BricsCAD things the function is not defined. Opening a second drawing results in the call working as expected. I’ve chopped down our startup routine so you have an example.

; error : no function definition ; expected FUNCTION at [eval]

Awesome Bricsys Person
05-12-2016 12:32 UTC
Hi Steve,

There was a regression introduced in V17.1.10 that caused startup code to execute too early under certain conditions, before the lisp engine document context was properly initialized. This has been fixed now for the next update.

Steve Johnson
06-12-2016 02:43 UTC
I must say, the responses I’ve been getting to my support requests have been absolutely bloody brilliant. Cheers!

 
Now, can you imagine the same scenario with Autodesk? I’m sure many of you have lived through it. First thing would be an automated response. A day or two later would be a confused support person coming up with totally unrelated links to Knowledgebase articles. A series of increasingly frustrating back-and-forth emails might go on for days or weeks until the Autodesk person finally plays their trump card, blaming the third-party routine (incorrectly) and/or stating that they don’t support users’ customization.

Such a problem would stay in AutoCAD indefinitely. Repeated reports, year after year, using subscription support and the forums and formal reporting mechanism in the Autodesk Beta program, would make no difference. Eventually I would give up and the problem would never get fixed. Again, this is typical, and has been repeated many times. This applies to bugs, incompatibilities, feature design, performance issues, user interface difficulties, documentation system idiocy, you name it. It’s massively frustrating and I know many very smart people who have given up even trying. The only exception is documentation content; that gets fixed as soon as possible, within the limitations imposed by Autodesk’s arcane systems.

The difference in attitude between Autodesk and Bricsys is glaring, stark, obvious. Autodesk pays lip service to providing customer service and software quality. Bricsys just gets on and does it.

So what’s actually new in BricsCAD V17?

4 Replies

A big problem I have in communicating the improvements to BricsCAD in V17 is that there are such a huge number of them. This isn’t an AutoCAD 201x-style touch-up masquerading as serious progress, this is a real  upgrade. You know, an AutoCAD V12-style upgrade that veteran AutoCAD users will remember from the good old days before Autodesk got bored and distracted. Dozens upon dozens of new features, improvements to existing features, performance improvements and bug fixes. Lots of stuff that’s genuinely useful.

I could write three posts a week on the changes and not be finished by this time next year. So I’m going to be lazy. I’ll pick out a few features for future posts but for the big picture I’ll point you to the official list. This isn’t a marketing document, it’s a technical list of terse descriptions of changes (to the Windows version only – remember BricsCAD supports Mac and Linux too), and it’s large. To give you some idea of the scale of changes, there are 3,200 words describing new V17 features, for example:

DMDISTANCE3D Specific measuring modes for cylinders, circles, and spheres have been introduced. Distance can be specified between boundaries (nearest points), central points or axes of the corresponding geometries.

 
There are 1,600 words describing improvements, such as:

IMAGEATTACH Multiple selection of images from a single folder is supported now so multiple images can be attached in one go. This is especially useful for images with geo-information attached.

 
There are 1,450 words describing fixes, like:

MATCHPROP When the source entity was non-annotative and the target annotative, the target undesiredly remained annotative.

 
There are 1,100 words describing API changes and fixes, e.g.:

BRX/LISP/SDS wcmatch() now supports the (undocumented) space character as a pattern key to match any contiguous sequence of whitespace characters (space, tab)

 
That last one is a fix for a bug that I reported in V16. Within ten days of submitting my report, I was informed directly by the developer that the fix had been done and would be available in V17. Here’s another one of mine:

BRX/LISP Improved sds_getFiled() / (getfiled) behavior during a Save operation when default filename argument is empty.

 
Elapsed time between my report and acknowledgement by the developer that a fix would be forthcoming? Just under 12 hours. Less than 3.5 hours after that, I was informed that the fix had been implemented. Hands up all those people who have had similar experiences with Autodesk?

Autodesk has some great documentation people

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The most heavily commented post on this blog is AutoCAD 2013 – An Autodesk Help writer responds, featuring Dieter Schlaepfer‘s response to posts and comments here about AutoCAD 2013’s Help. I don’t always agree with Dieter but I respect him enormously, and not just because he was brave enough to stick his head above the parapet in a hostile environment. Dieter is a principal technical writer at Autodesk with many years’ experience and is therefore responsible for large amounts of documentation content. You’ve almost certainly read his work.

I’ve been critical of AutoCAD’s Help system since it was broken in 2011, and I make no apologies for that. The Help system sucked then, it sucked even worse in 2013, and it continues to suck badly in 2017. None of that’s Dieter’s fault. It’s the Help engine that’s at fault, or to be more accurate the Help engines, because the online and offline engines still both suck in various ways. Clearly there’s someone important at Autodesk satisfied with the ongoing Help engine awfulness, but that’s not Dieter. He’s responsible for content, not the engine. Content isn’t the problem. The content is actually very good, and gradually improving as Dieter finds ways to do so. It’s just that the system for accessing that content is so terrible that not many people get to read much of it these days, which is a crying shame.

I digress. Dieter’s awesome.

Also awesome is Lee Ambrosius, who does a great job with developer documentation. That job’s less visible, but still very important and performed to an excellent standard. Lee is very technically knowledgeable and understands users, developers and their documentation requirements. Within the confines of the systems he’s forced to work with, Lee has done the very best job it would be possible for anyone to do.

Everybody knows Lynn Allen, of course. Not just an entertaining and engaging presenter at AU and a thousand smaller gatherings, she has been producing beautifully prepared tips-and-tricks and what’s-new articles, posts and documents for so long she must surely have been a toddler when she started. The value of Lynn to Autodesk and its customers is hard to calculate, but is clearly immense.

Last but not least, Heidi Hewett has done an exemplary job for many years in producing preview guides, posts and other documents. You don’t get to see some of them because they are confined to pre-release testers, but I assure you that they are done to the same high standard as the ones that go public.

The work of our illustrious foursome and other talented writers can be found on the AutoCAD Blog and I’m sure my readers will find something of use there.

BricsCAD V17 – the best AutoCAD upgrade in years?

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I’ve been evaluating BricsCAD for a few years now, and have been looking at it pretty seriously as a DWG-based LISP-compatible AutoCAD alternative for a year or so. A couple of weeks ago, I flew to Munich for the Bricsys International Conference (at Bricsys’ expense – see the Legal page for disclosure) where I learned quite a few things I had failed to notice during my own evaluation of V17. As you may have noticed, I can be pretty hard-bitten and cynical about what CAD companies have to say about their products, but I came back impressed.

The conference and the product itself are not free of flaws, but I have to say the progress Bricsys has shown in developing the BricsCAD product is really quite astonishing. The rate at which serious, worthwhile-to-customers improvements have been made to BricsCAD over the last few releases is huge. Some of it’s just catching up with existing AutoCAD features, but most of it is going beyond what Autodesk has done. Overall, Bricsys lately has outstripped Autodesk’s efforts in improving its DWG-based flagship CAD product to such a degree that it’s frankly embarrassing for the much larger corporation.

I grabbed Bricsys CEO Erik De Keyser for a brief chat at the end of the conference. I told him that while there were still important areas that need addressing, nevertheless if Autodesk had shipped a new release with a quarter of the improvements that Bricsys managed with V17, it would still have been the best AutoCAD upgrade in fifteen years. Yes, the gap in progress from Autodesk to Bricsys really is that big.

The difference appears to be one of attitude. The Bricsys development team (many were there in Munich to speak to) is focused, motivated and enabled. For Bricsys, BricsCAD really is the flagship product. That’s where all the effort goes; everything goes into the DWG-based product. High-performance 2D drafting, user interface innovation, parametric 3D models, IFC-certified BIM, sheet metal, everything. You would think this would lead to massive bloat, but somehow it doesn’t; the product remains small and fast.

For Autodesk, the emphasis has been elsewhere for some years now. The rate per release of worthwhile AutoCAD improvements, never stellar since the 12-month release cycle was adopted, has been trending downwards since AutoCAD 2010 and has slowed to a trickle. Autodesk is happy to accept the income from AutoCAD customers and use it to develop a hundred trendier products, neglecting the foundation on which the company was built. That’s relying on inertia, and there’s a big question mark over how sustainable that is.

Here’s a 5-minute YouTube marketing video outlining some of the changes. If you have a bit longer, here’s a 37-minute YouTube video of the new features from head of development Hans de Backer. The presentation lacks sparkle (no insult to Hans, but he’s no Lynn Allen) but the substance is there. Note that Hans was demonstrating live to the full conference using a pre-release product, including opening a huge drawing, which surely deserves marks for bravery! As a bonus, you can just about see Owen Wengerd and myself in the bottom left corner.

I’ll be going into more detail on BricsCAD V17 pros and cons later (yes, there are cons), but for now here’s the press release and here’s where you can download the product for evaluation. It’s a straightforward download of a 234 MB MSI file and the install takes just over a minute. That in itself is a breath of fresh air for people who are used to hanging around, waiting for AutoCAD downloads and installs to finish.

Guest Post (Ed Martin) – The Times They Are a-Changin’

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I’d like to thank Steve for the opportunity to write this guest post. My post doesn’t necessarily represent Steve, nor does it represent any company. It’s strictly a personal point of view. The purpose of this post is to prompt discussion and debate, and get your opinion.

Recent discussion on this blog has focused on Autodesk and its many changes over the past few years (upgrade pricing, policy changes, term-only aka rental licenses, move to the cloud, etc.), and there’s been a lot of skepticism. If we stand back and look at the landscape, though, Autodesk is not alone. True, they’re moving faster and more aggressively than their competitors, but many software companies are making similar changes.

Change can be disruptive, it can have positive and negative impact, and there can be winners and losers. But … it’s inevitable, and it’s better to understand change than to fight it. To stick with the “time” theme from the title, let’s take a ride in a time machine to the year 2020 and see what all of these changes will lead to.

Thinking ahead to 2020, it’s very likely that major CAx / PLM vendors will be actively promoting cloud services and term-based access or licenses. Some of them may have eliminated perpetual licenses entirely, and some may even be “pure SaaS” companies that don’t offer traditional desktop or server installed software any longer. We may see some consolidation in the industry through mergers and acquisitions. It’s entirely possible that a company that was small in 2016 will be a significant market player in 2020. Open source solutions may gain a greater foothold in the market.

By 2020, there will be some events that impact the market more broadly. There’s a good chance that at least one or two major economies will see another business recession. On the security side, the white hat vs black hat battles will continue, and it’s very possible that we’ll see a security breach that impacts someone in the CAx / PLM world.

I want to start a debate about what 2020 will look like. I’ve provided some starter questions below to prompt the debate. Pick one or two that resonate for you and share your thoughts …

1. How will your company react to the switch to term-based licenses? Why?
2. Which industry players will win and lose? Do you see anyone being absorbed into another company? What will trigger this?
3. If there is a major recession, what will you do with your perpetual licenses, maintenance contracts, and term licenses? Which will you keep, and which if any will you cut?
4. When (if ever) will SaaS / cloud services hit the “tipping point” in your industry? What will be the catalyst that leads to this?
5. What pros and cons do you expect with wider cloud adoption? What must a company do to make the cloud work for you?
6. Do you think that one or more small players (or open source movements) will grow to become a significant force in the market? Where will they win and what will make them successful?
7. If there is a major security breach, what impact if any would it have on the market?

What do YOU think?

Ed Martin

The best thing about AutoCAD 2017.1 is…

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…the fact that one of the Express Tools finally got an update. Not just a minor maintenance tickle or mere absorption into the core code, either. A real update, resulting in not only bug fixes but genuinely useful improvements in functionality.

A little background on Express Tools might help put this into context. The history goes back to 1992 and AutoCAD Release 12. In addition to an impressively full set of paper manuals, people with Release 12 (great value at US$500 to upgrade from any earlier release) obtained a Bonus CD containing 2605 files of free add-on goodness. Fonts, LISP, DOS and Unix utilities, sample drawings, demos, all sorts of stuff. Remember that just popping on the web to grab that sort of thing wasn’t really an option at the time, so this CD was quite a big deal.

autocadrelease12bonuscdcase

Release 13 didn’t have an equivalent CD (although it had many other things – most of them bugs), but with Release 14 in 1997 there was a concerted effort to add extra value. A program was put in place to produce a set of bonus stuff, partially developed by external parties. Unlike the Release 12 material, the Release 14 Bonus Tools were (kind of) incorporated into the main product, although they remained unsupported:

Although we put a great deal of effort into making sure the Bonus Tools are free of problems, they are not officially supported by Autodesk. We do not guarantee that the results are 100% error free.
 
To use the bonus tools, choose the Full installation option or select Bonus and Batch Plotting during a custom installation. The installation program places the bonus files in the BONUS\CADTOOLS directory and puts that directory in the Support File Search Path. The installation program also appends your ACADR14.LSP and ACAD.MNL files to ensure the proper loading of the bonus support file AC_BONUS.LSP and menu file AC_BONUS.MNU.

A lot of the things we now take for granted in AutoCAD were born as a result of this initiative. With AutoCAD 2000, Bonus Tools were renamed as Express Tools and some R14 Bonus Tools were removed while others were added to the core product. Several more features were added to an already handy collection, including TXT2MTXT:

autocad2000txt2mtxthelp

The history of Express Tools has been less illustrious since that high point. Autodesk made an ill-advised attempt to make money from them by removing them from AutoCAD 2000i and 2002 and first of all making them available only to VIP/Subscription (now called maintenance) customers as a carrot, then offering them for sale as AutoCAD Express Tools, Vol 1-9. That little business venture was always doomed to fail, and you can still find many sets of instructions allowing people with AutoCAD 2000 to carry across their Express Tools to 2000i and 2002.

Since then, other than some commands being absorbed into the core, it has been “maintenance mode” for Express Tools. This means the code just gets recompiled when necessary and very little actual maintenance goes on. As a result, some 20th Century bugs live on to this day.

Enough history! So what is this best thing? As a byproduct of improvements to PDFImport, the TXT2MTXT command was redone. Not much about this gets mentioned in the readme, but a whole bunch of very good things happened to this seemingly simple command (main source AutoCAD 2017.1 Preview Guide):

  • You can select Mtext objects in addition to Text objects.
  • A Settings option on the Command line displays the Text to MText Settings dialog. In the past you had to press Enter at the start of the command to see the dialog box.
  • Character codes translate correctly between Text and Mtext (e.g. text underlining appeared as %%U when converted to Mtext).
  • The “Select objects” prompt adheres to standard error checking and messaging. For example, objects on locked layers are filtered from the selection set.
  • Justification (Top left, Top center, Top right) is inferred for the Mtext object being created based on the positioning of the text objects in the drawing instead of always using Top left justification. When no justification can be logically inferred, it defaults to top-left.
  • Numbered and lettered list formatting is inferred when the word-wrap text box is checked. If a line starts with one or two characters followed by a period and up to 10 spaces, list formatting will be applied automatically.
  • The top-down sorting order is relative to the current UCS and sorting is left-to-right when text objects are collinear. When multiple text objects are collinear, they are treated as if on the same line with a space between them.
  • A new Settings option enables you to force uniform line spacing or maintain existing line spacing.
  • Various bugs are fixed that caused unexpected results when in a non-WCS UCS.
  • An option was added to the Settings dialog box to not combine selection into a single mtext objects (converts text object to mtext without combining).

That last item alone could be a huge time-saver. If you need to convert 100 text items to mtext (e.g. for background masking reasons), you can now use the command once rather than 100 times. Sure, there are LISP routines to do this (I’ve written some myself), but incorporating it into the core product makes things easier for large numbers of people.

It would not be a bad idea for Autodesk to go through all of the Express Tools looking for similar bug fixes and improvement opportunities. Instead of occasional ad-hoc drip-by-drip adoption of an Express Tool or two into the core, I propose that a special project be undertaken to go through the whole lot, fixing and improving them all. Once done, add them all to the supported functionality of the product, along with any related functionality that makes itself apparent during the overhaul.

Such a project strikes me as something relatively easy to do that would go down very well among customers. Or how about some totally new stuff? Express Tools 2018 – The Next Generation?

Magical disappearing AutoCAD 2017.1 crash information

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In preparing to write something about the AutoCAD 2017.1 non-subscription-only update, I came across something slightly strange. Google AutoCAD 2017.1 crashes and you will probably see something like this:

autocad2017-1crashgoogle

What happens if you click that link? Nothing useful. You’re just taken to the landing page for the Autodesk Knowledge Network. The Google cached version of the link takes me to 404 land. Searching within the Autodesk Knowledge Network doesn’t produce relating to the crash in the original link, which seems to be language-pack related. The search wasn’t entirely fruitless, because I did discover that 2017.1 breaks linetype preview images for those of us who prefer a light user interface. But of information about the crashes, I see no sign.

On Twitter, I see a similar story. Some weeks ago, the @AutodeskHelp account reported:

autocad2017-1crashtwitter

Click that link (which points at a page called AutoCAD-crashes-when-you-install-AutoCAD-2017-1-English-Update-on-computers-with-installed-language-packs.html) and you will pay an unenlightening visit to Page Not Found World.

I’m baffled. It’s almost as if somebody at Autodesk has tried to hide something about this all-important first new-regime update and not done a very good job. Nah, can’t be that, there must be an innocent explanation.

If anyone has any information on this or any other 2017.1 crash or instability issues, please let me know.

How to download Autodesk software without the Akamai download manager

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Note: this post is now out of date. AVA no longer provides the facility mentioned here. Instead, it tries (and fails) to be clever.

For reasons beyond my understanding, Autodesk chooses to make life difficult for customers and prospective customers who want to download its products by imposing the use of a download manager (DLM) by Akamai. You really don’t want to let such a thing loose on your system even if it works, for reasons that have been explained in previous posts.

Until a couple of years ago, Autodesk allowed prospective customers to get at a direct download link after jumping through a few hoops and ignoring a bunch of bullshit warnings, but in recent times even that small measure of semi-decency has been removed. It became impossible for anyone who couldn’t or wouldn’t use the Akamai DLM to try out Autodesk’s products! Here’s what you get these days; there is no direct browser download option to be found, just a downloader stub you’re expected to install and give open slather on your system. Don’t.

autodeskdemodownload-2016

Yes, I know this is marketing lunacy, and several years ago I made Autodesk very aware of this via direct email contact. Still, Autodesk remains determined to hamper itself in this way and there seemed to be no prospect of a solution. The old loophole of using an unsupported browser (e.g. Opera) was closed off a while ago.

But wait! There’s an answer! While researching something unrelated, I came across a reference to the Autodesk Virtual Agent and had a look at it. Lo and behold, that contains a bunch of straightforward DLM-free links to the Autodesk product range!

autodeskvirtualagent

Click on Download Links, burrow down to find your product and direct links to the installers are right there! Use your plain browser, a DLM built into your browser, or a DLM of your choice. Easy! Straightforward! Amazing! Unfortunately, this facility only appears to be available in English.

To sum up, if you want to download an English-language Autodesk product in a straightforward manner:

Here’s the link! (link removed as it is now broken)

Congratulations to Ed Martin, who won the selfie contest with this entry:

1. This is Don Strimbu – a tricky angle on the picture, but his smile gives it away
2. He’s famous for the drawing of a nozzle – a fire hose nozzle to be precise – that he drew in 1984
3. Don used block scaling to simulate a 3D effect on the text, knurling, and fins
4. Autodesk used the drawing in its promotional material starting with an ad in the September 1984 issue of Scientific American
5. Don is now promoting products from Bricsys, notably their BricsCAD product
6. Wow, I really don’t know how long it took him, and it would be cheating to ask him … so I’ll guess. 18 hours?

Some clarifications:

1. Indeed it is Don. It was a privilege to meet him at the recent Bricsys International Conference in Munich, among other notables.

2. Correct, NOZZLE.DWG (we were all upper case 8.3 filenames at the time) which is quite possibly the most famous AutoCAD drawing of all time. It was the first complicated drawing ever done with AutoCAD, and was done in 1983 (not 1984), according to John Walker. See The Autodesk File for more information.

nozzle

3. Yes, it was block scaling. In addition to the 3D effect, the thing Don came up with that amazed John Walker was using negative scale factors to achieve the equivalent of the MIRROR command. That command didn’t exist at the time, along with object snap and a bunch of other things it would be difficult to imagine life without these days.

4. Yes, it was also on Autodesk’s Task Force Tips’ letterhead for a while…

5. Yes, Don and former Autodesk Senior Vice President Dr. Malcolm Davies (also at Munich) are important figures at Techevate, enthusiastic promoters of BricsCAD in the USA.

6. 18 hours is a bit off. How about 400 40?

I remember using NOZZLE.DWG as a benchmark for comparing AutoCAD hardware back in the 80s. Open the drawing, enter REGEN and see how long it takes to get a command prompt back again. As every single zoom or pan required a regeneration back then, regen time was very important. I remember an HP Vectra taking 17 seconds and an NEC APC III taking 19. An IBM PC without math co-processor took much longer; 2 minutes 39 rings a bell, but I’m not certain. These days, it’s so fast it’s hardly measurable.

Anyway, I look forward to seeing what Ed has to say in this blog’s first ever guest posting. Could be anything!

Autodesk Answer Day – 27 October 2016

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Autodesk is holding another Answer Day to encourage you to use the Autodesk Community (discussion forums). Hop along and get answers to your questions (hopefully), because this is a special day where Autodesk people will attend and be responsive.

Here is the announcement. When is this event, exactly?

Join us on Thursday, Oct 27th from 6:00am to 6:00pm Pacific Time.

Autodesk, if you’re promoting a “global event”, please try to remember that the globe extends beyond the West Coast of America and include UTC (GMT) times in your announcements. Most of us know where our time zones are in relation to UTC, but seeing something listed only in Pacific Time is likely to mean we have to head off to a site like timeanddate.com or thetimenow.com to work it out.

To save you all the effort, Pacific Time is currently UTC -7 hours, so for people outside North America, that means the event is from UTC 1 PM Thursday 27 October to 1 AM Friday 28 October.

There is also a German-language variant of the event on two German forums from 10 AM to 5 PM October 27 Central Europe Time (8 AM to 3 PM UTC). Here is the Autodesk announcement in German, and here is my own (probably terrible) attempt at a German version of this paragraph:

Es gibt auch eine deutschsprachige Variante der Veranstaltung an zwei deutschen Diskussionsgruppe von 10.00 bis 17.00 Uhr 27. Oktober Mitteleuropäische Zeit (08.00 Uhr bis 15.00 Uhr UTC). Hier ist die Autodesk Ankündigung auf Deutsch.

Dear Autodesk Recap 360 team…

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…your software (3.0.0.52, came with AutoCAD 2017) fails to allow sign-in (a prerequisite to connection to the cloud) in a secure proxy server environment. This happens (see picture):

autodeskrecap360cantsignin

I am online. I did try to inform you about this problem using the feedback mechanism in the product. This allowed me to type my problem report, but on hitting the send feedback button, I got this (see picture):

autodeskrecap360cantsignin2

I am connected. In fact, I’m so connected I’m typing this post online while reproducing the problem. While this is going on, I’m able to sign in to Autodesk Account, A360 Drive, AutoCAD Beta forums, the Autodesk public forums and so on. What’s happening is your software is trying to do something our firewall doesn’t like. Autodesk has an unfortunate history of doing this sort of thing. Often, things that worked in one release will stop working in the next, and vice-versa, because somebody tinkered under the hood. For example, Application Manager works, desktop app doesn’t. There have been many other examples going back over a decade.

No, please don’t direct me to the knowledgebase article that expects me to drill a bunch of holes in the firewall. That’s not happening. Instead, make your software work nicely, please. Find the bits of code that work, make them standard, and insist your developers use the standards.

Just thought I’d let you know. Other people in the same situation would probably just give up, and you would never know it was happening.

I have just returned from a very interesting trip half way around the world. In addition to learning some fascinating stuff about certain things (to be discussed later), I met some interesting people. One of these people can be seen in this photo, which I took with my phone at a party at a trendy location, just like all the cool kids do these days.
20161020_203442The person who answers all (or most) of these questions correctly (or close to correctly) in the next 72 hours (ish) gets a fun but worthless prize.

  1. Who is this man? (Not the one in the corner, that’s me).
  2. Name the drawing he’s most famous for.
  3. Name the technique he developed to help create this drawing. (It still works today, but now has a much simpler equivalent).
  4. Name the CAD company which used that drawing in its promotional material.
  5. Name the CAD company whose products this man is now promoting.
  6. (Tiebreaker question) Estimate the number of hours he says it took to produce that famous drawing.

I reserve the right to make up new rules as I go along without telling anyone. Hopefully nobody will care too much. I’ll be putting all comments on this blog into the moderation queue until the end of the contest so nobody can see anybody else’s answers, so don’t panic if your comment doesn’t appear.

The prize? The right to create a guest posting on this blog with a subject of your choice. As long as it’s probably legal and not too indecent, you can write what you like. Even if it’s “Steve is a poo poo head!”

I hope I don’t regret this. Good luck!

Edit: contest is now closed, see here for the winner.

When is a subscription-only update not a subscription-only update?

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Before I get started, I want to clarify the meaning of the word ‘subscription’. For about 15 years, the word Subscription (note the initial capital) meant something specific for Autodesk customers. It meant you had bought a perpetual license and instead of paying for periodical updates, you paid for a year’s Subscription in advance. In allowed access to any new release that appeared during that year plus various other benefits.

That thing that was once called ‘Subscription’ has now been renamed ‘maintenance’ (no initial capital) in Autodeskspeak. So what does ‘subscription’ (no initial capital) mean? Rental. You pay in advance for use of the product for a period and when you stop paying, you stop using the product. This is now the only way to obtain Autodesk software you don’t already own. In addition to access to any new release that appears during the subscription period, it provides other benefits similar to what is now called maintenance.

To confuse matters further, Autodesk briefly called rental ‘Desktop Subscription’ (note the initial capitals) and it’s still possible to find remnants of that terminology in current Autodesk documents. It’s also possible to find ‘Subscription’ and ‘subscription’ used interchangeably on the same Autodesk web page:

autodeskisitsubscriptionorsubscription

Minor quibbles aside, the important thing to note is that the term ‘subscription’ as currently used by Autodesk means something very specific. It means rental. When something is described as ‘subscription-only’ it specifically excludes ‘maintenance’ and other perpetual license customers. And that’s how the AutoCAD 2017.1 update was described:

autocad2017-1subscriptiononly

That subscription-only status of this update is what set me off. Preventing paying customers from accessing something that includes bug fixes is most unpleasant, and I felt obliged to say so. But it doesn’t appear to be the case. That subscription-only status is getting rubberier by the minute.

  • Autodesk states 2017.1 is “the first subscription-only update”. In addition to using the term ‘subscription’, being the first of something implies that it’s different to what happened before. That can’t mean that it’s available to all customers, because that’s what has happened with updates in the past. It also can’t mean maintenance customers can also access it, because that has happened for years for various enhancements, add-ins, productivity packs, etc.
  • Somebody as smart as Jimmy Bergmark (and that’s very smart indeed) is convinced that “even security enhancements and bug fixes are only available for subscription customers”.
  • There is no sign of 2017.1 on the public AutoCAD Downloads page.
  • As a maintenance customer, I didn’t receive notification of the update. However, I can see it in my Autodesk Account portal. It was apparently released quietly on 15 September 2016 for most languages, with French and German lagging behind for whatever reason.
  • The download is not restricted; anybody with the URL can download it (e.g. English 64-bit exe). I have no idea how Autodesk intends to restrict this update to certain customers.
  • I have been informed privately by an Autodesk person who should know that customers on both subscription and maintenance will get the update.

This confusion can be traced to Autodesk’s decision to call rental ‘subscription’, a name that already had a significant, long-established and totally different meaning in the Autodesk lexicon. Because I can’t think of a logical reason for Autodesk to do this, I strongly suspect the idea was to obfuscate the changes to licensing by deliberately confusing customers. If so, congratulations, it worked. I’m baffled.

Edit: Heidi Hewett has updated her post:

autocad2017-1notsubscriptiononly

Although the Preview Guide still only mentions Subscription (which shouldn’t have a capital these days, but does here), I think that’s pretty much cleared up the confusion now.

On a positive note, I’d like to point out that Heidi has done these sorts of guides for years and always does an excellent job. Based on past experience, I would say it would be likely that she was simply passing on in good faith what she had been told, rather than being the origin of the incorrect information.