Monthly Archives: January 2017

Why Autodesk’s rental won’t make big money from pirates

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One argument I’ve seen in support of the all-rental software model is that it will rake in lots of cash from those users who aren’t currently customers, i.e. pirates. Here’s an example (Carl Bass, November 2016):

We believe some of these people were previously pirating the software and now have a much more affordable option with product subscriptions. This is consistent with the fact that emerging countries are some of the fastest growing areas for product subscriptions. In other cases, these new users have been using an alternative design tool and could now afford software from Autodesk.

Putting aside the correlation-does-not-imply-causation thing, rental simply isn’t a much more affordable option than perpetual licenses. On the contrary, it’s much more expensive (except for short term use). Repeating an #AlternativeFact doesn’t make it any more true.

The idea that people who had been using non-Autodesk software have switched over to Autodesk in bulk because of rental is silly for that very reason; it’s much more expensive now than before. The fact that Autodesk’s previous attempts at rental both failed miserably will tell you all you need to know about its effectiveness at attracting new customers from the competition.

There’s an unspoken assumption that Autodesk software is the best available, therefore everybody would be paying for it if they could. Having spent some time examining AutoCAD-competing products recently, I can assure Carl that such an assumption is not remotely justified.

Back to the anti-piracy theme. The idea that rental will win significant amounts of business from pirates is unlikely for the following reasons:

  1. Pirates are largely cheapskates. They want to pay nothing at all; only a minority will be attracted by software with any  cost associated with it.
  2. The cost of Autodesk’s rental is way too high to attract pirates. It’s too high for most of us who were used to paying Autodesk’s already-high maintenance fees, let alone those who are accustomed to paying nothing at all. Adobe’s rental prices may be low enough to tempt some pirates; Autodesk’s aren’t.
  3. There’s another unspoken assumption here: that rental software won’t/can’t be pirated. The best that can be said about that is that it is charmingly optimistic. Try a Google search on, say, Adobe Cloud Cracked  for a reality check on that score.

Even if it’s impossible to pirate Autodesk’s rental software (it won’t be), it still doesn’t follow that pirates will rush cash-in-hand to Autodesk. Here’s what they would be much more likely to do:

  1. Pirate non-rental releases of Autodesk software.
  2. Pirate non-Autodesk software.
  3. Use free non-Autodesk software.
  4. Pay for low-cost non-Autodesk software.

There might be a small trickle of ex-pirates among Autodesk’s new renters. More than that? Dreaming.

33 years of AutoCAD upgrades rated – part 5 – summary

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In this final post of the series, I’ll examine the patterns that have emerged from the upgrade history I rated in parts 1 to 4. Bear in mind I’m only assessing the DOS (up to R13) and Windows (from R12 on) versions of the full version of AutoCAD. Of course, this only represents my opinion of those releases and is bound to be biased by the uses I and my users have for the software. Your experiences and opinions will almost certainly vary.

What can I say? My assessment is based on a third of a century of experience, and I’ve tried to be as objective as I can. I’m not unique in perceiving the decline of the AutoCAD upgrade; you’ll see the same said by long-standing customers and experienced independents all over the place. Ralph Grabowski, for example:

The new feature list for AutoCAD’s annual “big-R” release has become so short that I stopped producing my annual “What’s Inside? AutoCAD” ebook series in 2013.

 
Back to my own assessment, here’s a graph that shows how I rated the releases:

One thing’s obvious and that’s the permanent drop in the rate of improvement that set in with the onset of the annual release cycle. My average rating for AutoCAD Version 2.0 to 2000 is 7.7. For 2000i to 2017, it’s 3.4. Autodesk switched to doing half as much worthwhile development between releases, but charged the same upgrade fee. Value for money halved.

We entered the era of an endless stream of annual releases with fewer genuinely useful new features. Worse, the abbreviated cycle meant most of those features went into production half-baked in design, implementation or both. Some of those undercooked features (the lucky ones) got some attention in the next release. Many more of them never got fixed, or got quietly removed later, or eventually got patched up years after the user base had ignored them to death.

Have a look at the decline from 2010 downwards. The average for the last five releases is 2.0. The rate of improvement per release, starting from a low point, took a nose dive. Value for money, which was poor, is now dire.

Conclusion? AutoCAD is in maintenance mode. Autodesk’s attention (and investment) is elsewhere and it is just going through the motions of updating the software. Progress has stalled. Inspiration is AWOL.

Nevertheless, through all this, we have still paid for new releases in various ways, and in huge numbers. No wonder Autodesk is convinced we’ll be silly enough to pay over the odds to rent software; there’s a precedent.

The more Autodesk has moved away from the optional upgrade model, through optional maintenance*, then effectively compulsory maintenance**, then finally to the compulsory rental model***, the weaker the upgrades have become. Autodesk no longer feels compelled to put in the development effort that will convince customers to shell out for the advantages provided by a new release.

Autodesk wants an endless revenue stream in return for merely providing access to the software, rather than as a reward for improving it: money for nothing. That’s Autodesk’s dream, and an understandable one. For customers, it’s a nightmare: nothing for money.

Part 1 – AutoCAD Version 1.4 to Release 11.
Part 2 – AutoCAD Release 12 to AutoCAD 2002.
Part 3 – AutoCAD 2004 to AutoCAD 2010.
Part 4 – AutoCAD 2011 to AutoCAD 2017.
Part 5 – Summary.

* Maintenance was previously called VIP and then Subscription.
** Autodesk restricted the availability of upgrades, priced it out of the market, and in some cases only sold perpetual licenses bundled with maintenance, before finally eliminating upgrades altogether.
*** Autodesk’s third attempt at rental (there were failed attempts in 2001 and 2013) was first called Desktop Subscription and then just subscription. I generally call it rental to avoid confusion with The Maintenance Formerly Known as Subscription.

Another series of Autodesk statements

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Having established what happens when Autodesk claims to have no plans to do nasty anti-customer things, (it goes ahead and does them), let’s examine another nasty anti-customer thing it hasn’t got around to doing. Yet.

Will Autodesk discontinue the maintenance program that allows customers to keep their perpetual licenses up to date? Let’s see what Autodesk has been prepared to put in writing so far:

There are no announced plans to end maintenance subscriptions.

Matt DiMichele, August 2015, Autodesk Community Perpetual License Changes forum

Hmm, we all know what “no plans” means, don’t we, children?

I assure you we have no plan to discontinue maintenance subscription plans for existing perpetual license owners.

Andrew Anagnost, September 2015, Cadalyst interview with Robert Green

“We have no plan” again, eh? That’s a concern.

Our lawyers frown on me using words like “never.” Do we have any plans to end maintenance? No we don’t, and our current intent is to keep the program running as long as our customers use it. Just like we don’t have plans to force customers to adopt subscription. If a customer wants to keep using their perpetual license, then they can continue to do so. If they want that perpetual software to be upgraded with the latest and greatest from Autodesk, then I encourage them to take advantage of maintenance. Keeping maintenance for our most loyal customers is the right thing to do.

Andrew Anagnost, 11 September 2015 in a comment following the Cadalyst interview

Another “don’t have plans” and an “our current intent”, eh? Now I’m really getting worried.

…let me get straight to the point. Maintenance is not going away. Autodesk customers can continue to renew their maintenance for as long as they want. And as stated before, we will not force customers to subscription. If you want to keep using your perpetual license, you can do so, or you can get on maintenance to stay current. You are right, maintaining two different business models is costly, but retaining loyal customers is worth it to us.

Andrew Anagnost, 24 September 2015 in a further comment following the Cadalyst interview

Ah, that’s better. Totally unambiguous. Anybody else?

…any perpetual license that you currently own, can continue to be used for as long as you like. Additionally, if that perpetual license is on Maintenance Subscription, then you will continue to receive support and product updates as long as the Maintenance Subscription is active.. We are not ending the Maintenance Subscription program… you can continue to renew your Maintenance Subscription contracts for as long as you wish.

Felice S, November 2015, Autodesk Community Perpetual License Changes forum

Maintenance customers can remain on maintenance for as long as they like and continue to receive the software updates to their product/suites as they become available.

Jeff Wright, VP, Customer Engagement, May 2016, Autodesk Community Perpetual License Changes forum

And if you’re on a software maintenance plan, you can continue to receive all of the benefits of software updates and technical support for as long as you’d like.

Carl White, July 2016, In The Fold blog post

…customers of Autodesk, for one, can continue to renew their maintenance contracts for as long as they want.

Andrew Anagnost, October 2016, Redshift blog post

Well, that all seems very definite, and from so many different sources. How about what Autodesk’s web site says right now in January 2017?

If you currently have a maintenance plan, you will continue enjoying the benefits of maintenance as long as you continue to renew. Autodesk has no plans to stop offering the option to renew maintenance plans; you can renew for as long as you want.

Perpetual Licensing Changes FAQ, Autodesk Knowledge Network

Customers who have a perpetual license on a maintenance plan after July 31, 2016 will have the option to renew their maintenance plan for as long as they wish.

Autodesk Maintenance Plans, Autodesk Knowledge Network

If you currently have a maintenance plan, you will continue enjoying the benefits of maintenance as long as you continue to renew.

Perpetual License Changes Information, Autodesk Knowledge Network

So that’s three “no plans” non-statements but eight totally unequivocal and unambiguous promises, in writing, that Autodesk will not discontinue maintenance plans. If only Carl Bass hadn’t let the cat out of the bag a couple of months ago, there might have been a chance that the more trusting among us would have believed it.

I think you can probably work out what’s likely to happen next. Autodesk will price maintenance out of the market over the next two or three years and then discontinue it, disingenuously claiming that it’s in response to a drop in customer demand. None of the above statements will prevent that from happening. Somebody tell me I’m wrong.

33 years of AutoCAD upgrades rated – part 4

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In this series of posts, I am looking back on all the AutoCAD upgrades I’ve experienced over the years and rate each of them out of 10. See post 1 for information about what the ratings mean.

In part 4, I rate AutoCAD 2011 to AutoCAD 2017.

  • AutoCAD 2011 (March 2010): 5 – Object transparency was a very important enhancement for some. The X-Ray and other visual styles made 3D editing more efficient. Object visibility (independent of layers) was handy but has confused some DWG recipients ever since. Selection Cycling, Add selected and Select Similar (which had been in AutoCAD-based verticals for a while) were true productivity enhancers. Geometric constraints were improved but still confined to 2D, as they are to this day. Finally, Autodesk’s first of several failed attempts at an online Help system meant this wasn’t such a good release as it could have been.
  • AutoCAD 2012 (March 2011): 4 – Array enhancements were a good idea, reverting to the 80s for their user interface was less smart. Content Explorer was woeful in just about every way, but provided some otherwise unavailable searching features. I found the in-canvas controls of benefit. Support for ECW files was important to my users. The Auto-command entry was a good idea that worked well enough in this release (but performs increasingly poorly with each new release, to the point where I can’t tolerate it these days). There were a few 3D enhancements. Yet another (the 12th?) 3D to 2D method was added, Model Documentation, which as usual for a major new feature wasn’t nearly finished. Don’t get me started on the nudge feature. Moving CAD vector objects around by effectively random amounts based on pixel sizes was as dumb an idea as I can remember. Help still sucked.
  • AutoCAD 2013 (March 2012): 3 – This release ushered in a new API and DWG format as expected. Less expected was this DWG format lasting 5 releases, which was a bonus out here in user land. There were a bunch of Cloud features destined to be ignored by most but very useful to some. Model Documentation improved almost to the point of production usability, but has stayed stuck at the almost-there stage ever since. Help got even worse and has never recovered. Property preview and lots of minor tinkering with various features were worthwhile but didn’t add up to enough to make this a must-have release; needing compatibility with the new DWG format was more likely to do that.
  • AutoCAD 2014 (March 2013): 2 – A basic free file tabs utility was pulled into the core without improvement, a disappointment to those of us used to much better functionality from 3rd party developers. There were some security enhancements that got in the way for many people, but without addressing the main security problem (automatic loading of code from implicit paths at startup). The command line grew in functionality and got slower (again), and there was a bit more minor tinkering here and there. Creating clockwise arcs would have been impressive in the mid 80s, but here only showed how slow Autodesk had become at fixing long-standing functionality issues.
  • AutoCAD 2015 (March 2014): 2 – Lasso was a useful change, as were improved dragging and selection. Unless you’re into point clouds, there’s not much else here of practical use, though. Application Manager was the first step down the dark path leading us to the attempted automatic update doom that lay ahead, and gets no points from me. Darkening the default appearance of the interface to resemble Paint Shop Pro from 2007 was no substitute for substance. At least it was optional. The removal of the option to use textual status bar toggles wasn’t optional. It represented a particularly petty piece of Autodesk interface arrogance and a classic example of Autodesk breaking the unbroken while leaving the broken broken. The New Tab (later called Start) was terribly slow and best bypassed. It’s unfortunate that Autodesk made an API change here, breaking from the established pattern of changing both DWG and API every three years.
  • AutoCAD 2016 (March 2015): 2 – Those people who found a use for the execrable Content Explorer would have been upset by its removal. I wasn’t. Geometric osnap, improved revision clouds, dimension command changes, PDF and point cloud improvements, ability to attach Navisworks files, not much else. No API or DWG change, which was good, but nothing much to see here, move along please.
  • AutoCAD 2017 (March 2016): 1 – Graphics performance, which to Autodesk’s credit has been quietly but significantly improved in recent years, got another boost. Performance in other areas has continued to get worse. Just starting up an older AutoCAD release or a competitor’s product is like a breath of fresh air and shows how bloated, slow and inefficient AutoCAD has become. Share Design View was useful to some, within its limitations. PDF import was sometimes useful and a nice-to-have; done to a higher standard than we have come to expect, it was improved further in 2017.1. Dialog box size enhancements were welcome but at least 10 years overdue. Autodesk desktop app is notable only for its awfulness. Terrible idea, dreadful implementation. Migration was finally looked at 11 years after it was broken, and about 8 years after I permanently gave up on it. I didn’t even bother testing the new version because I’ve arranged things so I can do very nicely without it, thanks. Associative centerlines and marks were a potentially good idea but the implementation was atrocious. Deliberately removing 192,192,192 transparency from button icons was an act of sheer bastardry that was worth at least -1 just on its own. Another API change after only 2 years was an inconvenience but at least 2017 kept the 2013 DWG format for the 5th release in a row, probably the best thing Autodesk has done for AutoCAD customers in recent years. Long may that continue.

Part 1 – AutoCAD Version 1.4 to Release 11.
Part 2 – AutoCAD Release 12 to AutoCAD 2002.
Part 3 – AutoCAD 2004 to AutoCAD 2010.
Part 4 – AutoCAD 2011 to AutoCAD 2017.
Part 5 – Summary.

Do you agree or disagree with these assessments? Feel free to share your memories and experiences.

Another one bites the dust – Autodesk sheds Seek

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Following on from Autodesk’s announcement of the impending demise of 123D, the shedding of Cloudy applications and services continues. This time, it’s BIM content service Autodesk Seek. Here’s what Autodesk has to say about the reason for this change:

Autodesk… does not consider the Autodesk Seek service to be strategic to our core business at this time.

 
The timeline went something like this:

  • 16 January 2017 – Autodesk transferred the operations and customer support obligations related to the Autodesk Seek business to Swedish digital content company BIMobject.
  • 18 January 2017 – Autodesk posts a notice to that effect on its Knowledge Network.
  • 18 January 2017 – BIMobject posts a notice to that effect on its own site.
  • ~23 January 2017 – Autodesk customers attempting to use Autodesk Seek find out about the change when they are automatically redirected to the BIMobject site.
     
  • ~23 January 2017 – A well-known Autodesk personality also finds out about the change, unfortunately while presenting Autodesk Seek to a crowd. I’m sure the consummate professional in question would have handled this situation well, but it’s an uncomfortable position to be placed in.

It may well be that former Autodesk Seek users are not unduly inconvenienced by this change. This transition may be less stressful for customers than, say, Autodesk deciding to get out of the Facilities Management software business. Time will tell.

Autodesk can and will dump products and parts of its business as and when it sees fit, as it always has. Look back over Autodesk’s history and you’ll observe a long trail of corpses and weeping orphans. The difference with Cloud software and services is that very negative changes can take immediate effect. The vendor has total control; the customer has none.

Even if your Cloudy product is Autodesk’s Next Big Thing, that’s no protection. If Autodesk loses interest, the rug can be pulled at any instant, with unknown consequences. If you’re not uncomfortable with that, you should be.

When Autodesk dumped FMDesktop, customers could at least continue to use the software they had for as long as they liked. From the customer’s viewpoint, that’s the huge advantage of the desktop software perpetual license model; an advantage I can’t see customers giving up willingly.

A series of Autodesk statements

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Here are some statements from Autodesk about not having any plans to do some things. Things that the more paranoid among us suspected were always in the pipeline. Things that seemed to be just joining the dots along a predictable path Autodesk appeared to be taking. Things that later ended up happening. But nevertheless things that were, apparently, unplanned.

Simplified Upgrade Pricing FAQ, July 2009:

Autodesk does not currently have any plans to eliminate upgrades or cross-grades or make Autodesk Subscription* mandatory.

 
Callan Carpenter, May 2010:

…we are still perpetual, plus Subscription* or maintenance. I don’t see that changing. It’s hard to predict 50 years into the future, but we have no plans for that.

 
Carl Bass, August 2013:

Because we’re starting in a different place than Adobe, we don’t feel the need to force people, as they did, to go to these new license models and end perpetual licenses.

 
It is a matter of record that Autodesk subsequently eliminated upgrades and cross-grades, went to the new license model (rental only) and ended the sale of perpetual licenses.

It’s refreshing to see that Autodesk isn’t too big into that old-fashioned planning thing. It fills me with joy to see that there is still room for such spontaneity in executive decision-making.

* Subscription was the name then used for what is currently called maintenance.

BricsCAD’s LISP kicks sand in the face of AutoCAD’s

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If you’re a power user or CAD Manager transitioning from AutoCAD to BricsCAD, one of the things you’ll like is that almost all of your LISP routines will just work. That’s not an statement that can be made about various Autodesk products that bear the AutoCAD name, such as AutoCAD 360, AutoCAD LT and AutoCAD for Mac.

It’s not just simple old AutoLISP code that runs in BricsCAD, but complex dialog routines that use DCL, and Visual LISP stuff that uses ActiveX. Yes, even on the Mac and Linux platforms. Some DOSLib functions are built in and the rest can be loaded, as with AutoCAD. Even OpenDCL is supported. It’s a quite astonishingly high level of compatibility.

But it’s not 100%. There are minor incompatibilities, system variable and command-line differences that cause problems in a handful of cases. It’s often possible to work around these and still retain the same code that works in both AutoCAD and BricsCAD. Reporting LISP bugs and incompatibilities to Bricsys generally gets them fixed super-quick.

Also super-quick is the speed at which your code will run. It’s immediately noticeable when running any LISP code that needs to do a bit of processing that it just gets done faster in BricsCAD than AutoCAD. Fast enough to extract the following comment from one of my AutoCAD users trying out a linework cleanup routine in BricsCAD:

Wow.

 
User impressions are one thing, but how about measurements? Today, I had a support job to do that involved running one of my LISP routines. I ran it on both AutoCAD 2017 and BricsCAD V17 on the same PC. AutoCAD took 2970 seconds (about 49 minutes), BricsCAD 1030 seconds (about 17 minutes). Over half an hour saved on one operation. That’s 2.88 times faster, which is consistent with my previous observations with a variety of routines.

Upshot: if you’re doing work where there’s a lot of LISP processing going on, switching to BricsCAD is going to save you a shedload of time.

There is a downside to BricsCAD’s LISP, and it’s a big one; no VLIDE. No equivalent, either. There are various programming editors around that can help with editing code, but no substitute for integrated debugging. It means if you’re a power user, CAD Manager, developer or support person, you’re probably going to have to keep one working copy of AutoCAD around even after you’ve completed the transition to BricsCAD.

Because VLIDE has been in maintenance mode for over 15 years it remains virtually unchanged year after year (including ancient bugs). So it doesn’t matter that much which AutoCAD release you have hanging around. Assuming you’re a perpetual license holder, when you drop the maintenance contract on one of your AutoCAD licenses, you’re entitled to keep using the software as long as you wish, albeit only the current release at the time the contract ends. How long the software will keep working is another matter, depending as it does on factors not entirely within your control.

This is an imperfect solution. Even keeping a copy of AutoCAD around won’t help much if you’re debugging a problem caused by something specific to BricsCAD. Filling the VLIDE hole is something Bricsys needs to work on.

33 years of AutoCAD upgrades rated – part 3

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In this series of posts, I am looking back on all the AutoCAD upgrades I’ve experienced over the years and rate each of them out of 10. See post 1 for information about what the ratings mean.

In part 3, I rate AutoCAD 2004 to AutoCAD 2010.

  • AutoCAD 2004 (March 2003): 5 -The return of Express tools was a good start. Better still, Autodesk’s abortive attempt to sell Express Tools as an extra meant some effort had been put into improving them and they were much bigger and better in 2004 than they were in 2000. The death of the annoying UI stuff didn’t come a moment too soon. This upgrade had a few other useful additions and the new DWG format was more efficient, but overall nothing to get too excited about.
  • AutoCAD 2005 (March 2004): 4 – Autodesk introduced the Sheet Set Manager with this release; I guess one day they’ll get around to finishing it. Likewise, tables were useful but still imperfect today. Improved hatching. Fields. No DWG or API change. Mediocre.
  • AutoCAD 2006 (March 2005): 5 – Dynamic blocks (2D only) and in-place block editing came along with a bunch of extra palettes to make this a decent release in terms of new functionality. No DWG or API change. Big changes to customization, though, with the CUI command and format. CAD Managers had some serious rethinking to do. Migrating settings never worked properly for me in a custom environment from this release on. Losing the ability to easily customize toolbars directly on-screen was a pain; despite some advantages the CUI interface was excruciatingly slow, with a poor UI and bugs that remain to this day. No DWG or API change. This is the release where I really started to notice AutoCAD performance start to decline as a result of bloat and/or poor development, a trend that was to continue long-term and affects the value (and my rating) of each upgrade.
  • AutoCAD 2007 (March 2006): 6 – The Dashboard (later to become the Ribbon), visual styles, many 3D improvements, better rendering and new 3D to 2D methods make this a decent upgrade that 3D users in particular wouldn’t want to do without. The new DWG format and API version were inconvenient, but by now an expected part of the cycle.
  • AutoCAD 2008 (March 2007): 2 – Table enhancements were very handy for people using huge tables in their drawings, and most of the text enhancements were welcome. Annotative scaling was the big drawcard in this release, but Autodesk released it unfinished and therefore got it very wrong. The _XREF _XREF _XREF bug infested drawings and led to all kinds of apparently unrelated problems that persisted for years. Multileaders were another one of those good ideas that Autodesk insists on implementing badly, in this case by splitting off the styles from dimension styles and causing backward compatibility issues. The unreconciled layer warnings proved annoying for most and harder to turn off than they should have been. Overall, AutoCAD 2008 was a release to skip, even if you had paid for it.
  • AutoCAD 2009 (March 2008): 6 – The Ribbon release, and arrival of the Big Red A. The Ribbon was horribly slow and some people thought Autodesk should have dealt more with substance than appearance, but there were many other changes (mainly UI) that provided a genuine practical benefit. I think the ViewCube is awesome; the steering wheel, not so much. On the negative side was the mass of “idiot box” dialogs that kept popping up to interrupt your flow. You could turn them off, but not pre-emptively. The massive tooltips that repeatedly rose up to obscure everything were beyond annoying. The layer palette would have been good had it not been such a performance drag. Autodesk put a lot of effort into Action Recorder but failure to listen to what people wanted in a macro recorder meant that effort was wasted on a flop.
  • AutoCAD 2010 (March 2009): 6 – Lots of effort was put into 3D, particularly some clever work with surfaces. Geometric constraints were big news, but not as big as they could have been had they not been restricted to 2D. A downside to this release was that it removed the do-it-yourself inter-PC license transfer mechanism and introduced a web-based method that requires Autodesk’s ongoing cooperation (and existence). Better PDF support and non-rectangular viewports and xref clipping were welcome. Less welcome was Initial Setup, another of Autodesk’s many reviled attempts to get in your face at startup rather than letting you draw. This Ribbon was better than its predecessor, but still a Ribbon so most users ignored it. The new DWG format and API version were inconvenient but expected. Deserves some credit for being the last AutoCAD release with a decent Help system.

Part 1 – AutoCAD Version 1.4 to Release 11.
Part 2 – AutoCAD Release 12 to AutoCAD 2002.
Part 3 – AutoCAD 2004 to AutoCAD 2010.
Part 4 – AutoCAD 2011 to AutoCAD 2017.
Part 5 – Summary.

Do you agree or disagree with these assessments? Feel free to share your memories and experiences.

Top 20 posts of 2016

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According to Jetpack site statistics, these were the most viewed posts on this blog of 2016. Many of them are from previous years. Note that these stats began being collected in May when the blog became active again so the list doesn’t cover the entire year.

  1. AutoCAD 2012 – Putting things back to “normal” (April 2011)
  2. AutoCAD 2011 – Putting things back to “normal” (March 2010)
  3. Disaster in progress – Autodesk’s all-rental plans are failing (June 2016)
  4. Why AutoCAD for Mac is a bad idea (May 2009)
  5. AutoCAD 2017 – Putting things back to “normal” (July 2016)
  6. What is loaded at AutoCAD startup, and when? (September 2008)
  7. Olympic Fencing – Mythbusting the Shin v Heidemann Controversy (August 2012)
  8. Autodesk perpetual license owners to get screwed big-time (December 2016)
  9. Autodesk desktop app. Worst. Name. Ever. Is the product better than the name? (May 2016)
  10. AutoCAD 2010 – Putting things back to “normal” (June 2009)
  11. AutoCAD 2013 – Download the trial without Akamai (March 2012)
  12. Battle of the Bullshit part 1 – Bentley’s terminological inexactitudes (August 2016)
  13. Battle of the Bullshit part 2 – Autodesk’s sophistry (August 2016)
  14. Restoring Hatch double-click in AutoCAD 2011 (May 2010)
  15. Any Autodesk/Akamai people care to explain this? (March 2011)
  16. AutoCAD 2009 – Putting things back to “normal” (March 2008)
  17. Disaster in progress – Autodesk continues to lose heavily (September 2016)
  18. AutoCAD 2017 Service Pack 1 is out but you probably don’t want to install it (July 2016)
  19. Battle of the Bullshit part 4 – Bentley tells the truth (October 2016)
  20. BricsCAD V17 – the best AutoCAD upgrade in years? (November 2016)

I can understand why most of the items on this list are relatively popular, but I am struggling to understand why my 2009 thoughts on a then-possible future AutoCAD for Mac remain such a reader magnet. It’s not a measurement aberration; I often see the same thing in daily traffic reports and my domain-level statistics that use a different measurement method. Lots of people really do keep reading that post.

If you’re a Mac user, don’t bother; download the software and try it instead. Draw your own conclusions rather than relying on my speculation (even though it turned out to be largely correct, with a couple of exceptions). You’ll probably fall into one of these camps.

  • It’s on a Mac, therefore it’s wonderful.
  • It may not be great, but it’s on a Mac so we shouldn’t complain. Be grateful for what we have.
  • OK, it’s way short of the functionality Windows users have, but Autodesk will get round to fixing it up any year now.
  • It’s a half-baked rip-off and Autodesk is playing us for suckers.
  • I’m using BricsCAD for Mac, it’s way better than this, more fully compatible with real AutoCAD than Autodesk’s effort, yet a fraction of the cost.

Similar story with the post about downloading AutoCAD 2013 without Akamai. Given that we’re talking about software 5 releases old, downloading without Autodesk’s awful Akamai-infested download manager is obviously still really important to quite a few people. Several thousand every year, in fact. For downloading more recent software without having to battle against a mechanism that sucks donkey balls, those people should refer to this post instead.

33 years of AutoCAD upgrades rated – part 2

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In this series of posts, I am looking back on all the AutoCAD upgrades I’ve experienced over the years and rate each of them out of 10. See post 1 for information about what the ratings mean.

In part 2, I rate AutoCAD Release 12 to AutoCAD 2002.

  • AutoCAD Release 12 (June 1992): 9 – Big, big changes. A mass of UI and other improvements. Lots of new dialog boxes. The first release that retained its predecessor’s DWG format, which was very handy. DCL gave LISP and C programmers the ability to create dialog box commands. The first usable Windows version (the R11 extension version was a shocker). Came with a Bonus CD full of extra stuff; a big deal in those days of limited connectivity. Autodesk’s upgrade amnesty (upgrade from any earlier release for $500 in the USA) made this extremely strong value for money, too.

    • AutoCAD Release 13 (November 1994): 6 – Many of you will remember this most infamous of all AutoCAD releases. Too ambitious, long overdue yet released too early, full of bugs, terribly unreliable, markedly slower than its predecessor. Why have I still given it 6? Because of all the many highly useful UI improvements and drafting features it introduced; there were such a huge mass of them I won’t even attempt a summary. Because when running on NT and decent hardware it wasn’t actually that unreliable; running on 16-bit Windows was to blame for a lot of crashes. Because by the time of the final version (R13c4a – the twelfth!), it was not that bad at all, and because Autodesk provided excellent customer service by sending R13c4 out on CD to every registered customer. Because it introduced ARX, allowing C++ developers to do things with AutoCAD that had been impossible before. Because it came with a huge slab of printed documentation (sorry, rainforests). With lots to like as well as dislike, Release 13 was the ultimate curate’s egg release.
    • AutoCAD Release 14 (February 1997): 9 – A big performance effort, masses of bug fixes and many other practical improvements (e.g. hatching, draw order, fully functional object properties toolbar) mark this out as the sort of release that people remember for all the right reasons. The new stuff in this release was added because it would be useful to customers, not because it looked good in an advertisement. Bonus (later Express) Tools gave us a lot of handy stuff, even if it wasn’t officially supported. R14 was an upgrade done right.
    • AutoCAD 2000 (March 1999): 8 – A CAD application being able to open more than one drawing at a time might seem an obvious requirement, but it took until this release for us to get it, and very glad of it we were too. The property palette, layer dialog and lots of right-click options represented worthwhile UI improvements. The integration of Visual LISP (acquired during the R14 cycle as Vital LISP) and access to ActiveX functionality represented a revolution for LISP programmers. Very good upgrade.
    • AutoCAD 2000i (July 2000): -2 – What a difference a year makes! Yes, a that’s minus two for this initial attempt at an annual release (Autodesk didn’t make the timing work for another couple of releases). An emphasis on largely irrelevant-to-users Internet features intended to make Autodesk look all hip and now (anyone tried to access the Point A site lately?), a tie-in to Internet Explorer, annoyingly intrusive UI changes and the removal of the Express Tools, together with a dearth of genuinely useful new features (double-click editing being a noble exception) made this an upgrade only in name. The new Autodesk logo failed to wow customers, who stayed away in droves (at the time we still had that option, and exercised it when we failed to see value for money in an upgrade). A joke at the time was that the ‘i’ stood for ‘ignore’. Worst. Upgrade. Ever.
    • AutoCAD 2002 (June 2001): 3 – The bad things in 2000i were still there in 2002, so that’s a net 0. At least it retained the AutoCAD 2000/2000i DWG format in what was to become a regular 3-year DWG/API cycle, useful for customers and developers. The handful of useful additions (e.g. more associative dimension stuff) didn’t add up to much of an upgrade. At least it was an upgrade, in contrast to the downgrade its immediate predecessor represented.

    Part 1 – AutoCAD Version 1.4 to Release 11.
    Part 2 – AutoCAD Release 12 to AutoCAD 2002.
    Part 3 – AutoCAD 2004 to AutoCAD 2010.
    Part 4 – AutoCAD 2011 to AutoCAD 2017.
    Part 5 – Summary.

    Do you agree or disagree with these assessments? Feel free to share your memories and experiences.

    • Randall Newton’s survey

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    If you’re a small CAD vendor, please consider helping out CAD journalism legend Randall Newton with his homework.

    Randall is doing a university survey project on the marketing communications issues in Small CAD vendors. He has a survey with 5 questions about marketing communications; if you think you can help, please email randall dot newton at gmail dot com and he’ll send you the survey and explain its uses. He needs the responses by 20 January.

    33 years of AutoCAD upgrades rated – part 1

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    In this series of posts I will look back on all the AutoCAD upgrades I’ve experienced over the years and rate each of them out of 10.

    This is not a rating of the software in absolute terms, it’s a relative rating of the upgrade. That is, the improvement the software made on its predecessor. AutoCAD 2000i is a much better piece of software than AutoCAD Release 2.5, and given the choice I would rather use the former, no contest. But as an upgrade, 2000i sucked and 2.5 rocked. The biggest improving upgrade is the benchmark and gets 10; the others are rated in comparison. If a release is worse overall than its predecessor, it goes into minus territory.

    In part 1, I rate AutoCAD Version 1.4 to Release 11. This is not quite a full assessment of all AutoCAD upgrades because my AutoCAD experience started with AutoCAD Version 1.4 and there were releases before that, even if they only sold in tiny numbers.

    • AutoCAD Version 1.4 (October 1983): No rating because I didn’t use its predecessor, but if you consider that before this you couldn’t even remove a section of a line, this upgrade ushered in probably the first realistically usable version of AutoCAD.
    • AutoCAD Version 2.0 (October 1984): 8 – Very significant improvements including osnaps, linetypes, rubber banding for a bunch of commands, relative coordinate display, attributes, etc.
    • AutoCAD Version 2.1 (May 1985): 10 – AutoLISP, arguably the most significant new feature in AutoCAD history, came along during the 2.1 era (complete implementation took until 2.18). AutoCAD was the PC CAD leader because of its open architecture; AutoLISP opened that up a lot further and took AutoCAD from leader to winner. The beginnings of 3D, along with a host of other great improvements, made this, for me, the ultimate upgrade in AutoCAD history.
    • AutoCAD Version 2.5 (June 1986): 10 – Large numbers of important new drafting features especially editing and much better undo, along with a maturing of AutoLISP and significant performance improvements, made this a fantastic upgrade too.
    • AutoCAD Version 2.6 (April 1987): 4 – A bit of a stopgap release pending some UI changes to come, but some worthwhile additions such as transparent zoom, point filters and associative dimensions. Not in the same league as the previous few upgrades, though.
    • AutoCAD Release 9 (September 1987): 6 – The UI got a big and useful overhaul including the introduction of pull-down menus. Some very handy things were added to help menu macros work better. Limited in scope by the short timeframe from the previous release, this upgrade was good but not great.
    • AutoCAD Release 10 (October 1988): 8 – Lots of 3D enhancements including UCS and meshes are the highlight here. Viewports helped make 3D drafting more practical and a few AutoLISP enhancements helped make this a worthwhile upgrade. Decent working extended memory functions helped DOS users, particularly as more complex drawings were becoming increasingly common.
    • AutoCAD Release 11 (October 1990): 7 – Superficially identical to its predecessor, this upgrade gave us many improvements that weren’t immediately obvious, particularly two revolutionary (for AutoCAD) features: paper space and xrefs. ADS gave developers a C-based API (actually introduced in R10 OS/2, but DOS was the important one then).

    Part 1 – AutoCAD Version 1.4 to Release 11.
    Part 2 – AutoCAD Release 12 to AutoCAD 2002.
    Part 3 – AutoCAD 2004 to AutoCAD 2010.
    Part 4 – AutoCAD 2011 to AutoCAD 2017.
    Part 5 – Summary.

    Do you agree or disagree with these assessments? Feel free to share your memories and experiences.

    I snigger at your pronouncements of technological inevitability

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    It always amuses me when people proclaim a rising technology as not just promising, but the way of the future that will inevitably take over. Anybody can see that’s the way things are heading, they say. No use fighting it. Don’t question the certainty of the forthcoming tech revolution, you Luddite! It’s a sea change, resistance is futile, get on board now or be swept away on the flood waters of progress.

    What a load of bollocks.

    What really surprises me is when people who are old enough to know better join in with this sort of thing. Those of us who have been around a while have seen many “inevitable” technological revolutions dry up and fizzle out, some more than once. It gets old.

    Remember a few short years ago when touchscreens were going to be part of everybody’s desktop setup as ubiquitous as the mouse? I do, but I also remembered touchscreens on desktop computers failing in the 80s for the exact same ergonomic reasons they went nowhere this time around (thanks for the lesson, HP). That’s why none of the monitors I bought in the last few years have had touchscreens, and I’ve yet to see a single desktop touchscreen in active use.

    Next off the rank is VR. Some of the people who were around when virtual reality failed the first time are somehow now convinced it’s now The Next Big Thing, despite the reasons it failed originally remaining stubbornly in place. No, in three years’ time you’re not going to be holding site meetings in your office wearing a silly pair of goggles and bumping into the coffee machine. Really, you’re not. It didn’t happen in 1990 and it won’t happen in 2020 either.

    Here are a couple of things I enjoyed reading recently.

    1. Music Content – Giant 200-CD ‘Mozart 225’ Box Set is a Surprisingly Hot Seller
    2. Music Technology – Value of vinyl sales overtakes digital downloads in the UK

    To celebrate, I went out and bought a gramophone, I mean, turntable. I’m happy to report that I still haven’t parted with a single cent for online music. That’s so  yesterday.

    Next time somebody tries to tell you something like, “The whole software industry is moving to the rental model, all software will be sold that way soon, there will be no avoiding it,” please refer them to paragraph two above.

    Video lulz with AutoCAD 360

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    Thanks to Hans Lammerts on Twitter for pointing out this amusingly cringeworthy AutoCAD 360 YouTube ad:

    The guy spilling his coffee and falling over reminds me of the people in those infomercials that can never get the simplest things right:

    https://youtu.be/3eMCURWpNAg

    OK, so the ad’s bad, but how’s the product? I had a look for myself at the browser version of AutoCAD 360, which is the current name for what has been Visual Tau, Project Butterfly and AutoCAD WS in previous iterations dating back before Autodesk’s acquisition of the Israeli technology in 2009.

    It’s a while since I tried it, so I was interested to see the progress that had been made. After all, CAD in the Cloud has been Autodesk’s focus for a long time now, and as this is likely the first product people try out, you’d expect it to be pretty dazzlingly good after all those years of development, right?

    Interestingly, it’s still called a Beta, which hardly inspires confidence. Nevertheless, it didn’t misbehave for me, at least to begin with. It didn’t do very much at all for me, though.

    On opening a very simple small 2D drawing, the first thing I noticed was the white background. As the drawing contained yellow text, that was no good so I looked for the settings to change the background to black. Couldn’t find any settings. I guess I didn’t really want to read that text anyway.

    Nevertheless, I could zoom and pan around OK with tolerable performance. When I tried to select some objects to edit them, nothing happened. I looked around for buttons to press to do things. There was very little to see, and nothing I could find for doing anything much other than redlining over the top of what’s already there.

    The second time I tried to open the same drawing, it just hung there, displaying a blue propeller thingy:

    I gave up and tried again. This time, things were different! It locked slightly differently:

    Now I see why it’s still called Beta.

    To be fair, it hasn’t locked like this for me in the past so maybe it’s a one-off. Assuming it’s working, it’s a useful enough viewer. It has some limited markup functionality. That’s it. It’s free, and you get what you pay for.

    Calling it AutoCAD 360 is highly dubious. It’s not AutoCAD or anything remotely close to it. It’s not even CAD. It’s a simple online product with capabilities that fall well short of the weakest CAD application back in the bad old days, when people could only dream of something as advanced as the dumb guy’s Nokia in the embarrassing Autodesk 360 ad.

    There are also mobile versions of the software for iOS and Android. Haven’t tried them recently, but when I did they were acceptable viewers. Apparently you can pay for versions that actually let you do things. Go for it if you feel confident in Autodesk’s ability to provide a quality product. Me, I’m out.

    CAD on the Cloud – available anytime, anywhere except when it isn’t

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    One of the multiple reasons Autodesk has failed to win over the masses to its Cloudy CAD vision is fear of unreliability. Anything that relies on using somebody else’s computer over the Internet adds potential points of failure to those already there on a standalone desktop system. These additional vulnerabilities include:

    • Your browser or thin client software fails
    • Your modem, cabling or other Internet connectivity hardware fails
    • Your Internet service provider has an outage
    • Malware or DDOS attacks on your domain or service
    • Governmental Internet service interference
    • Internet connectivity infrastructure failure
    • Malware or DDOS attacks on vendor domain or service
    • Cloud vendor infrastructure disaster
    • Cloud-based CAD software down for maintenance

    I voiced my concerns about this in 2011, but technology has moved on since then and surely things are running as smooth as can be these days, right? Most computer users use Cloud services for backing up, sharing files, etc. and that seems pretty reliable, surely? How’s it going for Autodesk? Let’s ignore potential failures at your end and in the middle and confine ourselves to service reliability at the vendor end.

    Autodesk kindly provides a health check site with a History option that allows you to look back in time in fortnightly steps to see how things have been going. At the time of writing, there are 25 full 14-day pages you can examine. Want to take a guess at how many of those pages show no problems?

    Two.

    That’s right, 92% of the last 25 fortnights have had at least one time where at least one Autodesk CAD Cloud service has been down or degraded. The most recent clean fortnight was in June last year. Most of the pages show multiple failures, such as this:
     

    Some of those failures have exceeded an entire working day. How do you fancy that when you have a tight deadline to meet?

    Let’s see how this compares with the service availability record of my old-fashioned standalone desktop CAD products over the same time period:
     

    Hmm. Difficult decision.

    Script for creating AutoCAD Classic workspace

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    Edwin Prakaso at the excellent CAD Notes blog has done something that, in hindsight, is blindingly obvious but nevertheless very useful to a multitude of people. He’s written a simple script file that sets up the Classic workspace (or something close to it). It works in any recent AutoCAD or AutoCAD LT. Here’s the blog post:

    AutoCAD Script to Create Classic Workspace Automatically

    Edwin uses Microsoft OneDrive to store the script file, so if your workplace restricts access to Cloud storage you might need to download it at home.

    I’ve added a reference to this script to my post AutoCAD 2017 – Putting things back to “normal”.

    Huge PDFs? AutoCAD 2017.1.1 could be to blame

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    Autodesk has yet again demonstrated why continuous automatic updating is no panacea for avoiding CAD update disruption. On the contrary…

    If you have noticed some of your PDFs exported from AutoCAD getting huge and unwieldy lately, AutoCAD 2017.1.1 could be to blame. Try uninstalling it using Programs and Features > View Installed Updates and see if the problem goes away. It may also be possible to work around this by going into PDF options and turning on Include Hyperlinks. Source: The Swamp.

    Here’s one possible* install history:

    • You install AutoCAD 2017. This defaults to also installing Autodesk desktop app. If this works on your system and you leave it on there doing its thing and consuming your resources, it will attempt to automatically keep your Autodesk software up to date.
    • Autodesk desktop app installed AutoCAD 2017.1. You like this because it has added a couple of nice features. In apparently unrelated news, you seem to be getting more fatal errors and several of your add-ins have stopped working. You decide to do without them.
    • Autodesk desktop app installed AutoCAD 2017.1.1. Your add-ins have magically started working again and there seem to be fewer fatal errors.
    • You get some huge PDFs from AutoCAD but read this post and uninstall AutoCAD 2017.1.1. The PDFs you create are no longer huge, but your add-ins have stopped working again and there seem to be more fatal errors.
    • You read this other post and manually install the AutoCAD 2017.1 Hotfix. Your add-ins start working again. The fatal errors remain.
    • Autodesk desktop app continually and perpetually nags you to install AutoCAD 2017.1.1.**
    • You uninstall Autodesk desktop app. Your system speeds up and the nags go away.

    Moral of the story? Autodesk isn’t competent enough to trust with automatic updates. Uninstall Autodesk desktop app. Relax.

    * YMMV
    ** I don’t know if this actually happens (Autodesk desktop app is not going to be installed on any of my systems to find out) but it wouldn’t surprise me.

    Reset an apparently dead Samsung Galaxy Tab S 8.4″

    4 Replies

    …with this one simple trick!

    I had my Samsung Galaxy Tab S 8.4″ Android tablet spontaneously die last night, and it refused to respond to any button pressing, cable connecting or threats. Holding down the power button for 10 seconds (or more) did nothing, as did Dr. Google’s top tip of holding down Power, Volume Up and Home for 10 seconds.

    What worked for me was holding down Power, Volume Up and Volume Down for 10 seconds. It restarted without anything being lost and is now back to normal.

    Return of the bullshit – baked beans edition

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    In an October 2015 post I’ve only just noticed, snappily titled No More Software Like a Can of Baked Beans: Why Software Subscription Serves It Up Fresh, Autodesk VP (edit – now CEO) Andrew Anagnost bravely attempts to sell Autodesk’s move to all-rental software. This is a rather belated response, but fortunately there is no statute of limitations on skewering spin so let’s get started.

    How does he go? On a positive note, top marks for creative writing! The general theme is a strained and somewhat Californian analogy in which perpetual licenses are like canned goods (bad), and rental is like fresh produce (good). However, it’s presented well and professionally written. Among the highlights are:

    • Perpetual software licenses are like high-fructose corn syrup – no, I’m not making this up. Stop laughing at the back there!
    • This is a change that is simply a better experience for everyone – everyone who likes the experience of paying more for less, that is.
    • It’s to create a better product, something tailored to customers – creating a better product seems beyond Autodesk, at least where AutoCAD is concerned. Actually, it’s to create a more expensive product. Tailoring is something we customers been doing for over 30 years without the use of rental software, thanks.
    • There will be less disruption – except a) how we pay for the product is independent of how/when the product is updated and the disruptions inherent in that, and b) even ignoring the erroneous conflation, it’s a mistake to assume that continuous updates are less disruptive. Recent history proves otherwise.
    • Companies (e.g. Autodesk) will work even harder to keep you happy as a rental customer – history gives the lie to this one, too; the closer Autodesk has got to this model and the more people have been locked into annual subscription/maintenance payments, the worse the value for money has become. It also ignores the various alternative ways Autodesk will use to try to keep you tied in. What do you think all that Cloud investment has been for?
    • Autodesk is focusing on helping customers succeed with its products and services – I don’t think so. Autodesk is focusing on trying to keep its shareholders happy.
    • Serial numbers are a terrible dehumanizing thing, rental will make them go away and relying on Autodesk’s internet expertise for Cloud-based licensing is a much more attractive proposition – serial numbers are fine, that’s just silly. There are a host of unnecessary problems introduced by Cloud-based licensing, even when dealing with companies that aren’t as crap at the Internet as Autodesk (e.g. the Redshift site won’t even let me scroll back up once I’ve scrolled past the end of the post). The idea of Autodesk disposing of serial numbers and implementing a phone-home scheme instead is pretty terrifying, and I can only hope that technical issues prevent it from ever reaching production. Mind you, the fact that some new thing is clearly unfinished to the point of uselessness doesn’t seem to prevent Autodesk releasing it these days, so who knows? Hmm, I feel another post coming on about this…
    • Autodesk will make all your customization work for you on all computers and other devices wherever you go – let’s put aside for a moment Autodesk’s total failure to even provide a usable vanilla AutoCAD on the Cloud so far. CAD Managers, would any of you care to hop in and let Andrew know what’s wrong with this picture?
    • Constant automatic incremental updates are like reading news articles daily and much more convenient than larger upgrades which are like getting a whole year’s worth of news at once – again, this makes the fatal error of conflating payment and upgrade delivery methods. Putting that aside, if we’re talking about virus definitions and OS or browser security hole fixes, then yes, automatic updates are the way to go. CAD software, not so much. Particularly software from Autodesk, given the incompetence shown to date in its attempts to make this model work. Even putting aside the practicalities, I could do a whole long post on why this concept is all wrong. Maybe I will later. Meantime, Andrew needs to talk to some CAD Managers to get some idea of how the real world works.
    • “OK, so there’s still the major elephant in the room: What about the cost?” – good of you to mention that elephant, tell me more.
    • For customers, there is real financial advantage by eliminating that huge upfront payment. – For some customers, yes. Not so many, though. Short-term customers are the minority. What about the millions of long-term users who would have their annual costs blown sky-high by falling into your rental trap? Andrew, I see you mentioned the elephant in the room and then tried to avoid meaningful discussion of it, giving the impression you had addressed the issue without actually doing so. Sorry, but I noticed. Care to try again? Tell me more about how you expect either a) customers to be better off by paying more, or b) Autodesk to be better off despite customers paying less. Pick either one of those and run with it, I’m sure it will be entertaining.
    • “And if you don’t need a product for months at a time, switch it off, and then switch it back on. It will be there ready and waiting for you” – strange, that kind of flexibility seems to work for perpetual licenses too, at a fraction of the long-term cost of rental. No guarantee that flexibility is a reality for rental products, though, because the vendor may not provide that product when I need it, or may have racked up the prices to exorbitant levels, or may have introduced new incompatibilities or other technical problems. Oh dear, the boot is very much on the other foot with that argument.
    • “After three years, software becomes obsolete…” – er, no. Many people (myself included) are happily productive using at least some software more than three years old. Some of it works better than the newer stuff. Hands up all those people who couldn’t possibly live without the latest version of Word or Excel, for example. Anyone? Didn’t think so.
    • “…and the pace of obsolescence is rapidly increasing” – if we’re talking Autodesk software, then the pace of obsolescence is doing the opposite. AutoCAD improvement has slowed almost to a halt, for example. There is little in any of the last few releases that gives an AutoCAD 2017 user a significant productivity advantage over an AutoCAD 2013 user, say. And anyone using AutoCAD 2010 or earlier has a much more efficient Help system than that provided in any of the last 7 releases. I guess that’s the kind of anti-progress that happens when you sack a bunch of knowledgeable people every few years and divert too many of the remaining resources to trendier projects that you end up junking anyway.
    • Customers of Autodesk can continue to renew their maintenance contracts for as long as they want – except that Carl Bass has now indicated otherwise. Andrew, maybe have a word with your boss and get back to me on that one?
    • “The company is always listening to how to improve the transition and setting out for the long road, not the short win” – except rental is all about the opposite: short term savings that cost big in the long term. And don’t get me started on the irony of claiming Autodesk is “always listening” while promoting an all-rental scheme that goes against the very clearly expressed wishes of customers.
    • “It’s this beautiful kind of world where things are connected and work together better” – does it have rainbows and unicorns, too? Strewth. Come off it, Autodesk is rubbish at CAD interoperability, even among the AutoCAD-based products. Why should anyone who’s been struggling with poxy proxy objects for a couple of decades believe that paying differently is going to act as some kind of magic spell to make everything exquisite in CAD Connectivity Kingdom?

    Here’s the TL;DR version of my response to Andrew’s arguments if you can’t be bothered reading all that:

    Bullshit.

     
    What are the real reasons Autodesk is going all-rental?

    • Autodesk wants to charge us long-term users three times as much money for the same thing and leave us with nothing at the end of it.
    • Autodesk thinks we’re all stupid and don’t own calculators.
    • Adobe did this and made it work, and Autodesk thinks it can do likewise despite significant business differences, much higher prices and an untrusting customer base.
    • Autodesk has run out of motivation and/or ideas to improve its traditional cash-cow flagship products, to the extent that customers increasingly no longer see value in upgrades or maintenance.
    • Increasing income by product improvement is way too difficult; price gouging and spin is much cheaper.

    I’ll conclude with my own strained analogy:

    Autodesk spin is like a tin of baked beans. No matter how attractive the packaging, the end result is just a bad smell.

    Undo, U, Redo, Erase, Oops differences explained

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    It’s been a while since I posted any beginners’ tips, so here goes.

    There are several commands in AutoCAD to do with reversing things you’ve done. They are in some cases subtly different and this can confuse newcomers. Here’s what they do:

    • U – reverses the last command you used.
    • Redo – reverses the last U or Undo operation you performed, if that’s the last thing you did.
    • Undo – displays a set of command options that allow greater control over undoing things. (This is rarely used directly by a user, and is more of a programmer’s tool, so I won’t be going into any detail).
    • Erase – removes from the drawing an object or set of objects as selected by the user.
    • Oops – reverses the last Erase command, even if you have done other things in the meantime. (It also reverses erasures performed by the Wblock command, but such reversal is rarely needed these days).

    Note that many commands also have an Undo subcommand  which is different again from all of the above. For example, start the Line command, pick a few points, then enter Undo while still in the command. Just the last segment will be removed, and you can carry on picking more points. Most subcommands can be abbreviated, and this is true of the Undo subcommand within the Line command. While still in the Line command, enter U and this will have the same effect as entering Undo in full (or the other possible abbreviations Un and Und).

    This is not the case when entering full command names; entering U and Undo at the command prompt will do different things, although command line auto-complete can confuse matters further depending on your settings. I’ll ignore that for the sake of brevity.

    Let’s go through a command sequence that uses all of these things.

    • Enter the Line command (type LINE and hit [Enter]). Pick 6 points to create 5 lines but don’t hit [Enter] yet. While still in the Line command, enter Undo (UNDO [Enter]). This will use the Undo subcommand of Line to undo the last drawn line segment, leaving 4 lines. Pick another 2 points, leaving a total of 6 lines. While still in the Line command, enter U. This will undo the last drawn line segment, leaving 5 lines. Hit [Enter] to finish the Line command.
    • Enter the Line command, pick 4 points to draw 3 lines and hit Enter to finish the command.
    • Enter the U command. The effects of the last command (Line) will be undone, removing all 3 of the lines created by it.
    • Enter the Redo command. The U command is reversed, restoring the 3 lines.
    • Enter the Undo command. This will give you a few options, but the default is the number of steps to undo. Type 2 [Enter] and the last 2 commands will be undone (ignoring the U/Redo), removing the set of 3 lines and the set of 5 lines.
    • Enter the Redo command. The Undo command is reversed, restoring both the 5 lines and the 3 lines.*
    • Enter the Erase command. Select one line from the first group and two from the second, then hit [Enter] to finish the command and those 3 lines go away.
    • Enter the Move command. Select the remaining 2 lines from the first group, hit [Enter] to finish the selection process and pick two points slightly apart to move the lines a short distance.
    • Enter the Oops command. The 3 lines removed by the Erase command are restored, but note that the effects of the Move command are unaffected. If you had used the U command twice to restore the erased lines, the Move command would also have been reversed.

    Clear as mud? There are other possible complications depending on various settings, and there are various user interface options for invoking the commands that I haven’t discussed, but this will do to explain the basics.

    * The information in this post applies to any AutoCAD from the last 30 years, but as the command set in BricsCAD is almost identical, it can be used for BricsCAD too. Mostly. There is one exception; if you use Undo to perform several undo steps at once, then follow that with a Redo, only one undo step at a time will be reversed. If you want to redo everything, you will need to hold your finger on the Enter key to repeat the Redo command until it runs out of things to redo. Depending on what you want to do, this can either be very handy or rather inconvenient.