Yearly Archives: 2018

An email exchange with a friend about AutoCAD

7 Replies

Here’s an email exchange I just had with a friend. He’s a local person who I don’t normally discuss CAD with. He works for an architect. He has given me permission to use this discussion here.

Hi Steve,

We are looking to update from 2007 and 2010 versions in the office to more recent versions of Autodesk’s AutoCAD.

We don’t need full version but if that’s what is available ok then. Lite version is ok as we use for 2D architectural only. We use other packages when 3D work required.

We also have call to open consultants drawings which may be prepared on full versions or other packages.

Can you let me know what the last version that didn’t require the annual subscription and is available and likely cost?

Much appreciated if you could help.

Cheers

Here’s my reply:

You’re out of luck. Regardless of the release, you can now only pay for AutoCAD by annual subscription (which now means rental and used to mean pre-paid upgrades). Cost is currently AUD $2605 a year. Autodesk occasionally does an “upgrade” promotion for old releases but it’s really just a rental discount (15% at the moment) and means throwing away your perpetual license. If you stop paying, you have nothing, not even your old release. Here’s the link:

https://www.autodesk.com.au/products/autocad/subscribe

There’s currently a 20% off deal for AutoCAD LT rental at AUD $460 a year, which ends in a couple of days:

https://www.autodesk.com.au/products/autocad-lt/subscribe

If you just want to convert back to AutoCAD 2007 or 2010 DWG format and work in that, you have a few options. One is Autodesk’s DWG TrueView, which is a free very cut-down AutoCAD that will allow you to open new DWG and save in earlier releases.

https://www.autodesk.com.au/products/dwg/viewers

Another free option is BricsCAD Shape, which actually gives you more open/save options for drawings than AutoCAD itself, as well as being a 3D architectural modelling application.

https://www.bricsys.com/en-intl/shape/

There’s another free 2D application called DraftSight but that’s not keeping up to date with the DWG versions (it’s still on 2013 format):

https://www.draftsight2018.com/

If you want an AutoCAD-like perpetual license product for 2D drafting that will work directly with the current DWG format, you can’t go past BricsCAD. Works just like AutoCAD, uses the same files, up to date with current versions.

Full perpetual license is AUD $765 for the Classic version or AUD $1010 including a year’s maintenance. After that, keeping up to date at AUD $320 per year is cheaper than any option Autodesk has, even for renting LT. You can alternatively just pay your $765 once and do the buy-upgrades-whenever-you-want thing that Autodesk stopped doing years ago. It also gives you an upgrade path to full 3D and even BIM if you want to do that further down the track.

https://www.bricsys.com/en-intl/bricscad/

It’s a quick download and install which won’t harm your AutoCAD installation. You’ll probably find BricsCAD will work noticeably faster than any recent AutoCAD, which has got very bloated in recent years. This is particularly obvious if you’re running older hardware.

No, I’m not on commission!

Why every AutoCAD CAD Manager should have a copy of BricsCAD – part 4, efficiency

2 Replies

This is the fourth post in this series where I explain why this statement holds true:

As a CAD Manager looking after AutoCAD users, or a power user looking after yourself, it’s worth your while to have a copy of BricsCAD handy.

This post is about BricsCAD being more efficient than AutoCAD for some of the things a CAD Manager might need to do. What do I mean?

  • BricsCAD starts up and closes down faster than AutoCAD, much faster in some environments. If your AutoCAD starts up slow (e.g. in some secure proxy server environments), pretty much any job you need to do to a user’s drawing that involves getting in, doing something quick, saving and getting out again is likely to be finished in BricsCAD before AutoCAD is even open.
  • If you perform a more complex operation on behalf of a user that is likely to take a while, there’s a better-than-even chance that BricsCAD will do it quicker than AutoCAD. In some cases it will do it much quicker (e.g. drawing compare).
  • BricsCAD tends to be able to cope with large drawings while using less memory than AutoCAD. If you have a user with a huge drawing who can’t work with it any more in AutoCAD and you need to split, purge or simplify it before it is usable, the very process of doing that in AutoCAD can itself be unworkably slow. Try the same thing in BricsCAD and there’s a good chance you’ll get the job done in a fraction of the time and without the same level of frustration.
  • If you perform a batch process that operaties on a set of drawings, under most circumstances it will be finished in BricsCAD well before the same thing is done in AutoCAD. Maybe this means you can process a set of drawings over lunch rather than wasting all afternoon on them or waiting until home time before setting the batch going. Plus you’re occupying a cheap BricsCAD license rather than an expensive AutoCAD one. Also, because BricsCAD uses much less RAM than AutoCAD while running, you can run your batch processes on that old PC sitting in the corner rather than having your top user sitting around watching your top spec PC grind away.
  • Certain user interface structures in BricsCAD are much more logically arranged and efficient to use than the AutoCAD equivalents. For example, if you have a drawing with an obscure setting that needs changing, unless you have an impeccable memory, you’ll find that setting much more quickly using the BricsCAD Settings command.

As I mentioned in my last post, this series is all based on stuff I’ve done in real life as a CAD Manager for a primarily AutoCAD-using company. Feel free to add your comments with your own experiences, even if they differ from mine.

It will cost you a few minutes to download and install of an evaluation BricsCAD and check out the performance and efficiency for yourself.

Is anyone going to Autodesk University this year?

8 Replies

No, I don’t mean, “Hey, I’m going to Autodesk University this year, let’s hang out!” I mean, is anyone going to Autodesk University this year?

Edit: in this post I am referring to AU2018 in Las Vegas, not any other event.

Because I’m seeing lots of people saying they’re not going. People who haven’t missed it for many years. When Robert Green announced his forthcoming non-attendance on Facebook, I was amazed to see so many prominent long-term Autodesk loyalists do likewise. Here are a few comments:

OUCH! With all the people I know who won’t be there, AU is going to be a lonely place this year.

Especially with half of Autodesk gone!

Whilst certainly not a long standing attendee as Robert, I also won’t be at AU this year. Gonna miss you guys

This is getting REALLY sucky now.

Now you’re making me wonder how many more won’t be there and if I should reevaluate my plan to go.

I probably won’t be there either. I’m pretty pissed at Autodesk for letting go of so many people (Heidi Hewett & Lynn Allen). My boss said he will not send me again because he’s just now feeling the pain of the rental plan. I might want to check out the Bricsys conference or start blogging about BricsCAD.

FWIW, if none of my classes get accepted I’ll be taking a pass as well.

At this point I expect the same.

In light of post AU2017 fallout, wondering how many more will not be going.

Man! Maybe I don’t want to go!

Given what has happened since, really glad I got to AU last year.

Clearly a lot of the Autodesk people I looked forward to seeing won’t be there this year.

The most obvious absence will undoubtedly be Lynn Allen:

Well…I will certainly miss my friends…but I don’t think I could possibly bear attending AU this year.

This wasn’t news to me, because a couple of weeks ago I had already asked Lynn on Twitter:

Her reply came as a shock to some:

As Lynn taught the most popular class there for over 15 years with over 800 people crammed in a room and more wanting to get in, that’s a sizeable hole to fill.

Looking at the AU class proposals, there are a bunch of people attempting to fill the hole. There are no less than five “60 tips in 60 minutes” class proposals. One of them in particular used Lynn’s name in perhaps the not most sensitive way, given that we’re talking about somebody who recently lost their job. That didn’t go down too well:

Don’t get me wrong. Despite my opening paragraph, and despite many significant absences (including the excellent Joseph Wurcher and his 14 years of experience running the show), I expect AU 2018 to still be a big, spectacular, successful, fun event. It will still be attended by thousands and will have many useful classes. Even if the networking won’t be what it was, it may still be well worth your while to attend.

But if you want to hang out with the cool people (and me!) and learn about CAD software that’s actually moving forward, maybe you should visit London for the Bricsys 2018 conference instead.

Why every AutoCAD CAD Manager should have a copy of BricsCAD – part 3, parts on demand

1 Reply

This is the third post in this series where I explain why this statement holds true:

As a CAD Manager looking after AutoCAD users, or a power user looking after yourself, it’s worth your while to have a copy of BricsCAD handy.

This post is about using BricsCAD as a mechanical and structural parts library for your AutoCAD users. As I mentioned in my last post in this series, I was writing a client-specific AutoCAD 3D training course recently. To demonstrate the concept of revolving profiles, and also to compare and contrast different styles of solid creation, I wanted to use a ball bearing as an example. The easiest way for me to get hold of an accurate example ball bearing model was to fire up BricsCAD (a few seconds) and select the part from the Standard Parts panel (a few more seconds).

It gets inserted as a block. After explosion to reduce it to 3D solids, I could then slice it in either BricsCAD or AutoCAD to form the basis for my example. I could save it at any stage in BricsCAD and open it in AutoCAD to continue to work on it seamlessly. What I can’t do is simply copy and paste from one application to another; you do need to save the DWG. You can then open it in AutoCAD or access the blocks using AutoCAD’s DesignCenter palette; if you’re doing this a lot you might want to point DesignCenter to a scratch DWG you keep handy for this sort of parts exchange.

There are currently 13 sets of standards:

Although you may already have your own parts library, having access to a wider range of international standards may prove useful. Aussie steel sections? Go for your life, mate.

Just how much stuff is available? A lot. Each of the sets of standards has multiple sections, each section has many parts, and many of the parts have many sizes. Depending on the part, other parameters (such as bolt length) may also be available for a given size.

Here’s the full Standard Parts panel in action, in this case selecting a nut.

BricsCAD Pro and Platinum have 3D parametrics built in (and given the minor extra cost I’d suggest going for Platinum), so it’s quite feasible to use it as the basis for your own 3D parts library. If you’ve built up a few 2D dynamic blocks in AutoCAD, you’ll be quite capable of doing the same thing in 3D in BricsCAD. The methods are different but straightforward enough to teach yourself.

As pointed out in a comment by James Maeding, you can set up a network license or two and install BricsCAD on everybody’s PC, giving everybody access to the goodies without excessive cost. Bear in mind that like Autodesk, Bricsys charges a premium for a network license over a standalone one. Unlike rent-or-go-forth Autodesk, Bricsys allows you to have a perpetual license and the total cost of ownership is substantially lower.

By the way, this series isn’t theoretical, it’s all based on stuff I’ve tried out in the real world. For example, the network license software will happily coexist with Autodesk’s network license software on the same license server. The services ignore each other; no clash, no problem. My experience is that it works just fine on a virtual server.

It will cost you a few minutes to download and install of an evaluation BricsCAD and check out the included parts content for yourself.

IPoC interview – Lynn Allen – part 3

Leave a reply

This is the third in a series of interviews of Interesting People of CAD (IPoC).

Lynn Allen is a legendary figure in the CAD world and really needs no introduction. I’m very happy that she agreed to be interviewed for this series. Here is the third and final part of Lynn’s interview. Learn about Lynn’s departure from Autodesk, people’s reactions to the news, and what Lynn thinks about Heidi Hewett going to Bricsys. Also, Miss Tiffany.

Steve: So after all these years, you’re no longer with Autodesk. Was that a shock to the system?

Lynn: After 24 years, it is so hard to train myself to say “they” instead of “we”… I’m still working on that. People who know the inside scoop know that I’m much happier now that I’m on my own. And I’m looking forward to possibly taking my skills, expertise and followers to another company, especially if I can find one that is truly focused on the customer. Or perhaps I’ll continue doing what I’m doing, working as a consultant.

Steve: Many of your long-time colleagues and friends also parted ways with Autodesk at the same time. Do you have any idea why so many highly experienced people were chosen this time round?

Lynn: I think that Autodesk Management would need to answer that question.

Steve: In my career I’ve been through several work experiences where people were being made redundant around me, and it was never pleasant. What was the atmosphere like at Autodesk while the redundancies were being processed?

Lynn: It’s not unlike other companies – it is always a painful process. I’ve been through it close to a dozen times at Autodesk – it’s always sad. And it’s just as hard, in many ways, for the people who are left behind. That survivor’s remorse. It can take a long time for a company to course-correct.

Steve: Even before this latest reduction in force, I have had people expressing their opinion to me that Autodesk has an ageist hiring and firing policy, and that once people get to about 50 they’re marked for deletion. Do you have a view on that?

Lynn: I can’t really respond to that either. I think you know my views on that, Steve.

Steve: What has the reaction been like from people outside to the news of you no longer being with Autodesk? Have people been supportive?

Lynn: People were shocked – plain and simple. And I spent so much time consoling customers and employees I didn’t have much time to process it myself. I literally had people calling me up and sobbing on the phone – what am I supposed to do with that? I felt just horrible that so many people were upset. I had to talk many people off the ledge. I had people swearing to get rid of their Autodesk products… it was insane. People have been amazingly supportive otherwise – I just can’t emphasize that enough. So many have reached out to me… it gets to me just thinking about it. I feel very fortunate that way (and I can’t thank everyone enough)

Steve: The way I see it, Autodesk stands a good chance of losing out twice in removing experienced, skilled and well-liked people. Not only does it lose those attributes, but there’s a good chance that a competitor will gain them! We’ve already seen that happen with Heidi Hewett going to Bricsys and Brenda Discher going to Siemens. Is it safe to say that Autodesk’s main competitors have all been in touch with you?

Lynn: Yes indeed! And let me say I was insanely flattered. I’m still listening and hoping to make the right decision here. We will see.

Steve: Of course you worked with Heidi for many years. She seems to have taken to her new role at Bricsys like a fish to water! Were you happy to see her land that job?

Lynn: You have no idea how happy I was for her. Heidi is brilliant and one of the most amazing people I’ve ever worked with. Bricsys is so lucky to have her on board. And Heidi is happy – and that makes me happy!

Lynn and Heidi back together again, doing their things.

Steve: It was fun seeing you turn up at Solidworks World before your departure had been made public and getting people guessing! You’ve just returned from Gent in Belgium, I see. Did you enjoy that visit?

Lynn: I have enjoyed all opportunities to spend time with companies in the software design industry. They each have their unique offerings for the design customer and I’ve enjoyed getting to know the various companies better. I have also greatly appreciated those companies who have approached me and their amazing “hospitality” if you will.

Steve: I love Belgium. Great people, wonderful beer. Some pretty impressive software, too! Anyway, I see you have been keeping an active presenting schedule going, mostly attending independent Autodesk software-based events. At one of them you got to share the stage with Sophia the creepy robot torso woman. How was that?

Lynn: She is indeed creepy Steve! It was a unique experience I’m not likely to forget in quite some time. I can tell you that I’m certainly not worried about robots taking over the world any time soon – she kept stepping on my lines!

Steve: It’s good to see you’re keeping up the Cadalyst videos. Is it just me or are you getting a little more, er, carefree lately? Or is that just the cold medicine?

Lynn: I’ve definitely been getting a little more carefree (I must admit the cold medicine sent me over the edge though). Even in my live presentations I’ve noticed I’m more carefree and personally I think I’m a better presenter now – because I can just be me.

Steve: Do you expect to expand your presenting repertoire to cover non-Autodesk software in future?

Lynn: Anything is possible!

Steve: Last question. What question do you wish I’d asked you?

Lynn: Wow, what a question! How is my dog Tiffany? She’s doing great, thank you for asking!

Miss Tiffany doing her thing.

IPoC interview – Lynn Allen – part 1
IPoC interview – Lynn Allen – part 2

Why every AutoCAD CAD Manager should have a copy of BricsCAD – part 2, 3D operations

2 Replies

This is the second post in this series where I explain why this statement holds true:

As a CAD Manager looking after AutoCAD users, or a power user looking after yourself, it’s worth your while to have a copy of BricsCAD handy.

This post is about using BricsCAD to do things to help out your AutoCAD users who are having problems with 3D operations. Why would you bother using BricsCAD to mess with AutoCAD 3D models? Because sometimes AutoCAD can’t do stuff with them, and BricsCAD can.

If you have a user who finally asks for help after fighting AutoCAD for ages trying to get an operation to work such as an awkward fillet, a self-intersecting extrusion or a direct edit that doesn’t want to move, you have a couple of options:

  1. fight the same fight yourself in AutoCAD, eventually discover that the user was right, and then construct an excruciatingly awkward workaround; or
  2. fire up BricsCAD and see if you can do it there. There’s a good chance it will. If it does, hand the DWG back to the user with a smug look on your face. If it doesn’t, construct an awkward workaround in BricsCAD, because it will almost certainly be faster than doing the same thing in AutoCAD. Direct editing of 3D solids is more flexible and easier in BricsCAD; the Quad Cursor helps a lot.

I’ve been writing a client-specific AutoCAD 3D training course recently, and going through the exercises I’ve developed has been instructive. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve thought, “Man, this would have been so much easier in BricsCAD.” That’s before we get to the 3D parametrics that BricsCAD has had for a while and which AutoCAD never will.

Why is BricsCAD so much better than AutoCAD at making 3D work well? Because it has to be. When you base your entire product line (including BIM, parametric 3D, sheet metal and a host of other uses covered by 3rd party developers) on a single DWG-based 3D engine, that engine has to be robust, powerful, efficient and fast.

It’s not as if Bricsys can say to somebody struggling with performing 3D operations in BricsCAD that they should be using Inventor or Revit instead. That cop-out is unavailable. It has to just work.

Fortunately, Bricsys has acquired a small group of genius-level experts in this area, and holds on to them rather than dumping them when they get too experienced. It shows. Overwhelmingly, it just works.

It will cost you a few minutes to download and install of an evaluation BricsCAD and confirm this for yourself. It’s well worth it.

There are exceptions, of course. Nothing is perfect, and you will come across the occasional glitch. But those exceptions are definitely rarer than in AutoCAD. My experience also tells me that if you report those exceptions, there’s an extremely good chance that they will be fixed, and quickly. Bricsys ain’t Autodesk.

IPoC interview – Lynn Allen – part 2

Leave a reply

This is the third in a series of interviews of Interesting People of CAD (IPoC).

Lynn Allen is a legendary figure in the CAD world and really needs no introduction. I’m very happy that she agreed to be interviewed for this series. Here is the second part of Lynn’s interview, which includes discussion of travel, gender issues and a nasty poster.

Steve: As Technology Evangelist for Autodesk for over 20 years, presentation was a big part of your job. You have a comedic, apparently casual approach to your presentations that is very popular. How much preparation do you have to put in to make it appear so casual?

Lynn: You have no idea how much planning and preparation I put into my presentations! Those on the inside think I’m a little insane I rehearse so much – but I need to in order to feel confident about my presentations. If I’m not confident – I can’t be myself. All that comedy comes from relaxing and just treating the audience like family.

Steve: Your job involved a vast amount of travel, and I see you haven’t stopped. I once remarked that I didn’t know if you had the best or worst job in the world! Which is it?

Lynn: It’s a little of both, Steve! I love spending time with users all over the world… but the travel can really get to me. It always sounds so much more glamourous than it really is. I really do love being home!

Steve: What are some of the travel difficulties you have had to face?

Lynn: Again, oh boy! How long do you have? I’ve had some real travel nightmares. Missed connection nightmares that turned into very painful sagas. I’ve lost my luggage more times than I can count. And I’ve had food poisoning too many times – ended up in the hospital once as a result. Definitely not very glam.

Steve: Are there any countries you still have left on your bucket list?

Lynn: Absolutely! Greece and Iceland. I’ve been to over 75 countries but would really like to add these two countries to my list.

Lynn, smart as ever, enjoying a well-earned vacation

Steve: One of the things I’ve always admired about you, and I think one of the reasons you’re so popular, is how much of a straight-shooter you are. Of course there are limits to how critical you can be about your company’s products. But you never seemed to shy away from saying things like, “That’s a bit annoying” or, “I don’t know why they did it that way, that doesn’t make much sense to me.” Did you ever get into trouble for being too honest?

Lynn: Good question. While I may have been a straight shooter, I wasn’t saying anything the users weren’t thinking! And I also praised the products like crazy so there was certainly more positive than negative. I don’t remember getting into trouble… the teams I worked with were very willing to take my feedback and try to do something about the issues and concerns. No software product is perfect.

Steve: As a female in a male-heavy field, I know you didn’t have to line up for the toilets at AU too often. But you must have faced some difficulties over the years because of your gender. Can you share some of those, and how you dealt with them?

Lynn: You know – I have always been pretty easy going about the gender issue and have actually been treated with a great deal of respect since joining Autodesk. Let’s remember that Autodesk had one of the first female CEOs and I think Carol Bartz’s presence permeated throughout the company. And it was difficult for someone to challenge my AutoCAD knowledge… just since I’d been doing it for so long and was one of the industry leaders so that usually shut people down as well.

Now before Autodesk – well that was another issue! I once had an ATC professional student insist I go get him some coffee (before class began on the first day), treat me clearly as a subordinate, complain that the instructor was late – only to be shocked to find out I was actually the instructor and was going to be so for the next 4 days. He wasn’t very happy about that!

Steve: You once had a “Win a date with Lynn Allen” thing sprung upon you without your knowledge or consent. I must say that horrified me when I heard about it! How did it go down with you?

Lynn: Well, I’d say they probably thought it was amusing in the grand scheme of things but of course it was totally inappropriate! I didn’t have to deal with it as others came to my aid and put an end to it before I had much of a chance to react. I can’t even remember how we fixed it. I believe whoever won was invited to join a big group of us to dinner. It is funny now!

Steve: Were there any other unpleasant surprises like that?

Lynn: Well the biggest horror by far was the poster size version of my face that was put out by Autodesk Marketing! I freaked out when I saw it – especially when the marketer told me it went out to 250,000 customers! I cried in my office for hours. They didn’t even bother to touch it up – it was awful! My boss was so very sweet – he went straight to the top to complain about it and eventually the person who put out the poster “went on to pursue other opportunities” (it wasn’t his first major marketing mistake). I was traumatized for ages. I’m still traumatized when someone tells me they still have one or they ask me to sign it. Burn your Lynn Allen posters… please!

IPoC interview – Lynn Allen – part 1
IPoC interview – Lynn Allen – part 3

Why every AutoCAD CAD Manager should have a copy of BricsCAD – part 1, fixing drawings

2 Replies

Here’s a mega-tip with a lot of experience behind it:

As a CAD Manager looking after AutoCAD users, or a power user looking after yourself, it’s worth your while to have a copy of BricsCAD handy.

Why? There are too many reasons to fit in one blog post, so I’m going to do a mini-series. The first post is about using BricsCAD to fix up drawings that are giving your AutoCAD users problems.

One of the things that surprised me most when evaluating BricsCAD as a potential replacement for AutoCAD was that my expectations were wrong when it came to the reliability of opening DWGs. Over the years, I collected a variety of DWGs that gave various releases of AutoCAD some problems. Some of those problems occurred while performing some kind of editing or processing, while others prevented AutoCAD from opening the drawing at all. I was expecting BricsCAD to have all those problems, plus perhaps some additional incompatibilities of its own.

What happened was the opposite. I don’t think I came across a single drawing that AutoCAD could open but BricsCAD couldn’t. On the contrary, BricsCAD was much more forgiving than AutoCAD, breezing through the process of opening drawings that had problems that originated in AutoCAD. Maybe 80-90% of my “problem” drawings were problems for AutoCAD alone. In many cases an AUDIT in BricsCAD and a re-save was enough to make the problem go away in AutoCAD. In other cases I could use BricsCAD to recover the unrecoverable using the traditional methods of WBLOCK, saving as an earlier release, saving as DXF, binary search (I may do a later post on exactly what that means), and so on.

Note that you may be able to obtain similar results using other DWG-based products such as DraftSight, ZWCAD or even the free BricsCAD Shape. However, I don’t have the experience with those products to be able to confirm that. Autodesk’s DWG TrueView, being a cut-down AutoCAD, tends to have the same problems as AutoCAD.

One thing that was particularly pleasant about using BricsCAD to fix problem drawings was the speed at which it could be done, because of BricsCAD’s generally superior performance. Closing and opening AutoCAD is painfully slow these days as the bloat gets worse, so having a product that fires up quickly is very handy.

Also handy is the availability of tools within the product that make it easier to locate and fix problems. Of particular importance is the Drawing Explorer, which provides a consistent and efficient interface that provides access to over 20 different types of aspects of a drawing (e.g. layers, linetypes, text styles, etc.):

One example arose showing how useful this is, when my users were having an intermittent problem with some drawings locking up AutoCAD 2015 on open. Some trial and error made it possible to discover that the trigger for this was the existence of a text style (any text style) with a bigfont attached, where the bigfont SHX file did not exist. It was possible to fix this in an earlier or later AutoCAD release, which the users may or may not have available to them, by opening the drawing, using the STYLE command, then using that dialog box to go through each text style one at a time, looking for bigfonts.

It was much easier to quickly fire up BricsCAD, use the STYLE command which opens the Drawing Explorer in the Text Style section, and see all of the text styles laid out at once (see above). It was very efficient to quickly look for recalcitrant bigfonts and make them go away, or to see instantly that bigfonts weren’t the problem.

Similarly, the consistent, searchable and efficient interface of the BricsCAD Settings dialog makes it easy to check the values of any settings that you suspect may be triggering the problem in AutoCAD:

As a CAD Manager, it’s definitely worth your while to do the quick download and install of an evaluation BricsCAD. My experience in dealing with Bricsys is that requests for extensions for evaluation purposes are usually accepted, so you probably won’t have to give up your valuable tool as soon as your 30 days are up.

Once you’ve determined that it really is an invaluable tool to have around, the cost of entry is low enough to make it relatively easy to justify the investment. You won’t need to recover many drawings to get your money back.

IPoC interview – Lynn Allen – part 1

Leave a reply

This is the third in a series of interviews of Interesting People of CAD (IPoC).

Lynn Allen is a legendary figure in the CAD world and really needs no introduction. I’m very happy that she agreed to be interviewed for this series. Here is the first part of Lynn’s interview. Topics include life before Autodesk, that AU wig and user groups, especially AUGI.

Steve: Can you tell me a little about your background before you started with Autodesk? Have you always been involved in teaching and training?

Lynn: I started using AutoCAD with Version 1.4 at American Honda. I then went to one of the first AutoCAD resellers in North Hollywood where I did a little bit of everything, but primarily training. I moved to yet another Autodesk Training Center (ATC) where I became the manager of three ATCs. I also taught AutoCAD at the local Junior College along the way.

Steve: When did you start at Autodesk and what did you do initially?

Lynn: I joined Autodesk in 1994, working in their training dept. Shortly thereafter I became the Training Department Manager.

Steve: I first saw you at AU in 1995 and you were well known and liked then. How did you manage to build up such a following?

Lynn: Well, I like to believe people liked me because I genuinely tried to help the AutoCAD/Autodesk community out. I was involved in AutoCAD since the early days, had a column in Cadence/Cadalyst magazine for over 20 years (before the internet when people used to read for information). I had written several books on AutoCAD and thanks to my job as Autodesk User Group Manager I had a chance to present to Autodesk product users all over the world. I am friendly, I mean well, and I think that shows through in my presentations. I made it a point to never be too busy to stop and listen – I really want to help. I don’t think can’t fake that – people can see you for who you really are on stage.

Steve: What was the story behind the wigs?

Lynn: Well, there was only one wig… a blonde one. At one point I dyed my hair brown and boy did people complain! It was such a sticking point with everyone (it was really unbelievable how upset people were about it). So I walked into one AU and put a blonde wig on the monitor and said “Here you go people, here is your blonde hair!” It got a big laugh, but I do believe it got my point across.

Steve: You were the Worldwide User Group Manager for a while, what did that involve?

Lynn: That was the best job ever! I had the opportunity to work with local user groups all over the world as well as AUGI. My job (as well as my team) was to help them all be successful – support them – be there for them. I had a wonderful team, we all loved our jobs.

Steve: I know Autodesk put a lot of support behind AUGI. What forms did that support take?

Lynn: They provided monetary support, physical support (we helped them with their newsletter as well as other promotional marketing), various events, their website, and made sure they had a big presence at AU since they were instrumental in getting AU off the ground.

Steve: What do you think Autodesk gained, and still gains, from supporting AUGI?

Lynn: Who wouldn’t want to promote an organization full of passionate users? That said – Autodesk has really dropped off of AUGI support (and local user groups) in the past decade or so…it’s really made me sad. For years I stepped in as a volunteer Autodesk rep because they had no one to work with… it was rough.

Steve: I know there were some real characters among the people running those early NAAUG/AUGI boards. Do you have any fun stories you can share about them?

Lynn: Oh boy! Too many to tell… Although I do love the time when AUGI president David Harrington ordered vanilla ice cream (at a very nice restaurant) and they accidentally brought him the one from the dessert tray which was actually Crisco… the look on his face when he took the first bite was priceless! We still laugh about it today.

We had a president we had to impeach because he took the Autodesk software we gave him for User Group door prizes and sold it. That wasn’t cool… We had our fair share of trials and tribulations but it was all worth it in the end. I still have a massive soft spot for user groups!

Steve: I’ve heard from David Kingsley about one side of the controversy over whether AUGI should have been run using a professional management group. Do you have any insights on what went on there?

Lynn: Well, there are pros and cons with that story. AUGI did get some amazing benefits when SolidVapor was working with them as they did so much of the legwork and heavy lifting. They couldn’t do it all for free – they had quite a staff supporting all of their efforts. I also understand how AUGI felt about the situation. I can totally see both sides of the situation.

Steve: I’ve run an Autodesk user group myself, and I know it’s very difficult when volunteers have different ideas about how things should happen. What lessons could be taken from that whole experience?

Lynn: While working with a passionate group of volunteers can be challenging – they are all in it for the better good of the organization. Trying to keep that in mind definitely helps.

Steve: So if you had any advice for somebody starting up a big user group from scratch, what would it be?

Lynn: Find passionate individuals who have the time to dedicate to getting the organization off the ground (a Board if you will). These individuals need to put in a fair amount of time to do the job right. Meeting face to face at least once a year is also essential in my mind – filled with head-down brainstorming and detailed planning. Plus people get to know each other better and become more tolerant of each other. And as a corporation – definitely treat these Board members well! Spoil them a little – they’ve earned it! I have to give SolidWorks (and Richard Doyle) some kudos here – they really understand the value of user groups and have dedicated resources to help them be successful. I love that!

IPoC interview – Lynn Allen – part 2
IPoC interview – Lynn Allen – part 3

More details of Bricsys 2018 in London

1 Reply

As I mentioned in March, this year’s Bricsys conference will be held in London (yes, the British one) on 23 and 24 October.

More details have now been revealed on the Bricsys Conference page and tickets are now on sale. We now know:

    • Venue: The Brewery, 52 Chiswell Street, London EC1Y 4SD, UK.
    • Cost: €150, which is about US$180 (plus taxes in the EU, which you may be able to deduct). This is the early bird rate until 30 June.
    • Speakers: Ten have been named so far, including big-name signing Heidi Hewett.

My attendance at the 2016 and 2017 conferences was well worthwhile, even coming from Australia. With the user/customer event now extending to two days rather than one, I expect this year’s event will be a step up from that. I’m hoping to attend this one too, in which case I will be happy to meet up with any of you.

bricsys,gent,london

Disclosure: Bricsys covered my travel expenses for the 2016 and 2017 conferences.

IPoC interview – David Kingsley – part 3

2 Replies

Welcome to the second in this series of interviews of Interesting People of CAD (IPoC).

David Kingsley has had a long and interesting career, was present in the early days of CAD adoption, and served as an AUGI board member for years. Here is the third and final part of David’s interview. This was the most interesting part of the interview for me, but unfortunately much of the more hilarious anecdotes and other discussions were off the record so I can’t share them. I hope you enjoy what’s left!

Steve: What are you most proud of achieving with AUGI?

David: I have to say AUGIWorld magazine and the website. That’s where the group really took off and looked professional.

Steve: If you could go back in time, what would you do differently with the benefit of hindsight?

David: As you get older you learn a few things. I’d probably be a bit more diplomatic about the changes that they went through, and try to resolve things in another way. I don’t know that it would have done much good. I got pretty arrogant about their turnover. I tried to stick to the facts without getting personal; I would always try to do that. I would try to convey factual information but I went a little over the edge with the campaign against what they were trying to do.

I really have no regrets about anything to do with getting the magazine and website started, and how we set up that agreement with SolidVapor. I think that really put a professional face on AUGI at that point.

Steve: What value do you think Autodesk has received from AUGI? Is it a marketing tool…?

David: Yes and no. Having worked directly with the engineering people, I felt they genuinely wanted to know what the users wanted, at least at that point in time. They used us as a filter, so to speak. We were out there gathering information and we were supposed to put it into a filtered and cohesive form for them to use. That’s what I remember as the mission of the group, which is to be the mouthpiece of the user community to Autodesk.

[Some discussion on Robert Green’s AUGI involvement]

I message with Robert often on Facebook and he’s been to visit my house.

Steve: I finally got to meet Robert after all these years, about six months ago in Paris when we both got invited to the Bricsys Conference. It means I’ve finally got to meet some people I haven’t managed to meet on my travels in the past.

[Some discussion about user group names]

David: The original name of the group was NAAUG (North American AutoCAD User Group) and we switched over to AUGI when we went international. Looking for the new name, we came up with a number of variations and one of them I remember was DAUGP (pronounced Dog Pee)!

Steve: [Spits coffee] That’s a good one!

David: I didn’t think that was a good one.

[Some discussion of user groups in general, Bricsys and BricsCAD]

David: I always like to stay on top of these things, you know? I read Ralph Grabowski’s newsletter all the time and he’s been talking about it [BricsCAD] a lot lately.

[Some discussion of the then-forthcoming bundling of AutoCAD and most verticals and Autodesk’s move to subscription only]

David: I know they’re trying to emulate Adobe’s subscription model. It’s going to be painful for a while but I think they’ll eventually get there. It’s just got to be affordable. But you know, people scream about the price and when I looked into it the cost was about $1.00 to $1.50 an hour based on 2000 hours a year. If you can’t afford $1.50 or $2.00 an hour overhead, you’re in the wrong business!

Steve: Yeah, but every business likes to reduce its overheads and doesn’t like to pay extra overheads. Autodesk is doing what it can to reduce its costs; it’s just sliced its workforce by about 23% in two stages. Nobody likes paying more money than they have to.

[More discussion about perpetual licenses, subscription, maintenance and ADN]

Steve: Do you have any fun stories to tell about your AUGI days?

David: I remember checking in to the MGM Grand for AU and being there for nine days, never even leaving the hotel. We would go in and start setting up AU and we would man the booth and teach classes and then break it down and do a debriefing. I remember one time all of us in a conference room and we all just fell asleep. We folded our arms on the desk, put our heads down, a couple of people got tired and a couple of people kept talking, a couple of people dozed off and sooner or later it was everybody. We were all just flat exhausted. We all woke up and said, “What are we doing here?”

I lived in Denver for many years, a ten hour drive to Las Vegas. It was worth taking the car for a nine-day stay. I think I did that 5 or 6 years running. I remember a few of us had to find a laundromat midweek, and I was the only one with a car. One year I arrived at the MGM about seven one night after this long drive, and it was just jammed to the hilt. I couldn’t even get off the street. I had a lot of stuff and decided to get a valet, because Autodesk would expense stuff like that for us, but I couldn’t get one. It took me an hour to check in. Turned out the Rolling Stones were playing the MGM Grand that night! I was there about two hours before show time.

On the way to my room there were people walking around the arena trying to sell tickets for $350 a seat! I like the Stones but I wasn’t ready to pay that and I’m sure my wife wouldn’t have been happy either.

Another time, I went to a hospitality party with the executives. The suite there had all this dark wood and it looked like a cabin in the Rocky Mountains somewhere, up on the 15th floor of the MGM Grand. All sorts of hors d’oeuvre and wine, I’m sure they paid a bundle for that!

Steve: Yeah, the parties were always fun.

I have a falling asleep story too. I was at AU 2006. I was with Owen Wengerd and we were hanging out at a bar until 1 AM and we were just about to head off to bed when we saw Tony Peach walk past. He was a great guy, passed on a few years ago, but Owen and I both knew him from earlier times. We ended up at a bar talking and it was about 4 AM before we called it a night. The next morning I had a class, I was hoping to learn .NET programming for AutoCAD. I got there and sat down and my eyes glazed over and it was the old dropping off and neck-jerking wake-up thing. That’s the reason I never became a .NET programmer in AutoCAD! I just slept through the class. It was too hard. I gave up.

[We swap a bunch of really funny off-the-record stories – I wish I could share them!]

David: [About Lynn Allen] How can you axe a person like that? She’s kind of the face of the corporation.

Steve: Yup. I don’t understand it. Maybe it’s personal.

David: Yeah. Also there was this thing about age discrimination. A lot of the older folks are wondering whether this had something to do with age. Who knows? Inevitably as you’ve been there a long time your salary climbs and you get expensive after a while, but they probably generate a lot more revenue than they cost.

Steve: I’m sure Lynn generated a lot more revenue than she cost.

David: Yeah. I can imagine next year when some guy in a suit shows up, they’re not going to be happy!

Steve: Well, she’s a drawcard, that’s for sure. And I guess she’s likely to be somebody else’s drawcard soon.

David: That’s true. I understand she’s got offers or at least approaches from all the competitors. Solidworks in particular.

Steve: I wonder if she comes as a package with Heidi Hewett? I understand Heidi wrote a lot of the material.

[Note: this interview took place before Heidi’s move to Bricsys]

David: Yeah, That would be a real coup. Hiedi was her cohort there. I remember watching Heidi teach a class and the software was acting up. I blurted out that a number of mathematicians throughout history have had numbers associated with them like Avagadro, Reynolds and so on. I want to create a Kingsley Factor, as follows: “The efficiency of a piece of software is inversely proportional to the number of eyes looking at the screen.” It always screws up when 50 people are looking at it.

Steve: The curve will show a dip at two people observing, based on my experience in support. I would get a call out about a certain problem and the two words that were guaranteed to fix it were “Show me.”

David: Heidi and her husband Nate lived close to us. We would catch up with them at the local pub from time to time.

Steve: I remember Nate got the shaft [from Autodesk] in about 2009 in an earlier “culling of the unwanted”.

David: Earlier than that, there was another big reduction-in-force and we were there [at Autodesk] and we knew it was going to happen.

Immediately after our board meeting, we left San Rafael and relocated in San Francisco for AU. As I recall that was the year of four AUs. One young Autodesk employee was with us and said, “Well, I got laid off. But! I have a job to finish off through Autodesk University and they didn’t take away my American Express card. So we’re gonna party this week!”

IPoC interview – David Kingsley – part 1
IPoC interview – David Kingsley – part 2

IPoC interview – David Kingsley – part 2

Leave a reply

Welcome to the second in this series of interviews of Interesting People of CAD (IPoC).

David Kingsley has had a long and interesting career, was present in the early days of CAD adoption, and served as an AUGI board member for years. Here is the second part of David’s interview which covers his involvement in AUGI, the controversy over how it was managed, and how that ended his involvement.

Steve: What was your first involvement with AUGI or NAAUG? At what stage did you get involved?

David: I think it was NAAUG in Philadelphia. Paul Jackson came up to me and said, “We would like you to get involved with the board. He asked me to attend the board meeting right there. So I started hanging out. That may have been the first time I met Lynn Allen. David Harrington was there, Dave Espinosa-Aguilar, Donnia Tabor-Hanson… that was kind of the formation of a very early AUGI Board. They had a board, but they were looking for different people.

I first ran for the AUGI board and was elected in 1996. I was on the Board from 1996 to 2002. We didn’t have a web site in 96, not many small organizations did yet, so I was involved in the first AUGI website ever. It was pretty crude! I remember we just kind of talked about it, Carol Bartz waved her hands, and we had money! She would sit in for a couple of hours every time we met in San Rafael. We would spend three or four days at Autodesk and that’s when we would develop our annual plan and funding requirements.

They were throwing a lot of money at us – $150,000, $200,000 a year just to support the user community. So we had a pretty healthy budget. A lot of people bungled it though. I remember one year we had budgeted $80,000 for something. It was what became the Exchange, where everybody traded their apps. We were supposed to develop that and we completely failed. We directly experienced the wrath of Carol Bartz for that.

The AUGI Board was a really difficult thing to make work because everyone was a volunteer, and they were all over the country, and there were no consequences for failure. People would sometimes just blow stuff off and wouldn’t do things. We were unable to accomplish things. They lacked the skills, or desire, or didn’t have the time, so there were some really rough years there where we were supposed to get things done and we didn’t. We had a couple people who openly stated they were just there to get NFR software.

That was when Rich Uphus and SolidVapor became involved. I believe Carol Bartz set us up with them to give us some kind of essential management. That was when AUGIWorld magazine came out. When we got involved with them, Uphus rebranded his “A” magazine as AUGIWorld and started to plan all of the CAD Camps. At that point, Autodesk ceased funding AUGI directly.

Steve: Is this the quarterly CAD Camps?

David: Yes, but I think there were 40 of them one year. Yoshi Honda and I were kind of the key AUGI people who negotiated that with Rich Uphus. We did most of the conceptual development and business arrangement between AUGI and Uphus. SV put together the first workable AUGI website with our input. All of that happened because of SolidVapor.

The plan was that AUGI provided the technical content and SV built and maintained the infrastructure – the website, the magazine, the organization behind the CAD Camps. When you start to think about the expense of that – If you went up to some hotel and said, “I’d like to have five breakout rooms, I’d like to serve lunch to 200 people, for a day and a half,” they would say, “Well, put down $200,000 and we’ll reserve a spot for you.”

For one or more years, CAD Camps had more attendees per year than Autodesk University. So SolidVapor had to come up with a lot of capital – millions of dollars. SV was going through $2.5 to $3 million a year. I’m sure they were making a profit; that’s what businesses are about. But they were pretty much backed by Autodesk.

AUGI generated no revenue at all. They were actually an expense. Autodesk flew us out to San Rafael for a week twice a year and we just partied! They took us out to nice restaurants. But we also provided a lot of good information from the user community, so we were the mouthpiece of the user community to Autodesk.

Later on there was a faction within the AUGI board that didn’t like the arrangement that we had with SolidVapor. They felt that AUGI was no longer in control – that SolidVapor was doing all the stuff that AUGI should be doing. There was a real split. My position was that it became that way because the model we had earlier didn’t work. Autodesk was giving us money and we were failing, so they put a real organization, an experienced business, in place to accomplish what they wanted. We were in a position where we drove that organization but we didn’t manage the money, we didn’t really manage the projects.

AUGI chose to terminate the contract with SolidVapor. Some may say otherwise, but the fact is they offered SV a deal they could not accept. I tried and tried to make sense with them, tried to tell them early on that… first of all, where is your money going to come from? Autodesk has told us they will not fund AUGI like they did before, they will only be another ad buying customer. All of this cash flow is going to go away when you end this relationship. Don’t tell me that you’re going to come up with $2.5 to $3 million a year, it’s just not going to happen. You guys don’t know how to do it, you’re working full time jobs, and you’re already unable to fulfill many of your responsibilities to AUGI. You expect to, all of a sudden, on a part-time basis, raise $2.5 to $3 million a year and put together a dozen CAD Camps, publish a magazine and keep a website running. It’s just isn’t going to happen.

But they went ahead and did it anyways. That’s when I left AUGI. I didn’t want to be involved with what was going to happen. I don’t have any personal grudges against people but there were a couple of people I really bumped heads with. Let’s just say we didn’t talk to one another after that.

I remember going to Autodesk University after they had terminated the relationship with SolidVapor and I knew they were in serious financial trouble. They had relatively no financial backing or sales, they had no viable plan. That’s when CAD Camps ended, AUGI World magazine ended, and the website stumbled really badly for a couple of years. It was in pretty bad shape. AUGI has pretty much gotten themselves back on track now, but at a much smaller scale than it could have been.

Steve: Wasn’t there some legal wrangle over who had rights to the forums and the contents?

David: Yeah. AUGI didn’t have any direct revenue. They had not invested anything. SolidVapor managed all the money, and the agreement was that SolidVapor would provide the infrastructure. So SV built the website, invested all the time, they were paying for the servers, paying the programmers, all that stuff. I tried to tell the AUGI board that they had no power whatsoever. Sorry, but power is money. You don’t control any money. You haven’t invested in this so you really don’t have a right to it. You provided the content for the forums, yes. The position of SolidVapor was, if you sue us for the forums and win, you’ll take responsibility for the whole thing. You’ll be totally responsible for funding and operating the website, the servers, the programmers.

AUGI was never restricted about what we could publish or what we could do, other than technical limitations. They would do pretty much whatever we wanted to, within reason. But we never paid for anything so we never had any power there.

I was pretty much against the whole AUGI position at that point, I thought they were unrealistic. They all had full time jobs, some of them were highly placed in engineering departments, but no one really had any business experience.

A lot of the things they wanted to do were just not practical or cost-effective. So we had some real head-butting with SolidVapor about what AUGI wanted to do. SV said, “We can’t do that, we can’t afford it,” or “Come up with a budget for it.” AUGI was just kind of waving their hands around and asking for things and they didn’t think about how much it was going to cost or how it was going to get paid for.

So they struggled for a while. I’ve been out of touch – I’ve really not been involved with AUGI since 2008 when they terminated the SV relationship. That’s when I said adios.

Steve: I still have the document that you produced with all your record of that I can now refer to. It’s still on my blog!

David: Oh really? I think it would pretty much corroborate what I just said.

Steve: If you remember, you published that on the AUGI forums and that was removed and so I published it on my blog for people that wanted to read what you had to say. I don’t know if you remember that or not but it’s still there!

David: Yeah, yeah!

Steve: I just downloaded it for my own blog to read it!

David: I think there are a few people who can remember those days. I had very few supporters. I actually got some hate mail. I was amazed at the lack of understanding in the community at what was going on. Nobody got it. I had a few communications with people shortly afterward but not many. It was surprising.

AUGI survived, it just went to a much smaller scale. You’re probably pretty familiar with that whole scenario then?

Steve: Yeah, I came on it fairly late and I didn’t really understand what was going on either, except that there was there was a bit of a constitutional crisis with the board and who was supposed to be on the board, and who gets to say who’s on the board. There was an election and the election was cancelled or postponed or moved and people weren’t allowed to put themselves up for election and all sorts of stuff happened.

David: Yeah. I kind of went over the edge a little bit with some stuff at that point. I did have a really serious discussion with the board, because I’d been off the board for a number of years and I decided to go back and put myself up as a candidate. They wouldn’t even allow me to run as a candidate. It might have been ’08 or ’09. I said I’d like to run and they said no. That didn’t really get any press. That was kind of a private thing between me and…

Mark Kiker and Richard Binning were the two people I really butted heads with. They were the two that really spearheaded this transition, so they told me flat out, you’re not running. You’re not going to get on the board. That was where the noise about who gets to be on the board came from. They were pretty dictatorial. It was pretty interesting to watch.

Steve: Within AUGI, when you were actively involved in it, who are you dealing with at Autodesk? I know you mentioned Carol came to the meetings. Were there other people that you were interacting with?

David: We dealt directly with a lot of the engineering department there. I dealt with Buzz Kross a lot. During the weeks that we spent at Autodesk, we would work directly with the engineering people. It was timed such that they could talk to us directly about what was coming up and we were tasked with thinking about how to introduce that to the user community. We were tasked to provide feedback to them, that’s where the wish list originated. We were tasked to become the mouthpiece of the user community.

Carl Bass was still in engineering management, so we dealt with him a lot. Then there was Lynn. We worked with her a lot. Lynn was the one who worked the internal politics and made things happen for us. We gave her the official title of “AUGI Sweetheart”.

I just thought about this a couple of days ago. I lived in Denver, very close to Columbine High School where there was that big mass shooting where two kids shot up the High School and killed 19 people. A couple of kids on my street went to that school, but we didn’t have any children there. I remember sitting down in Carol Bartz’ office; I’d asked for a private meeting with her. I talked to her about the effects of violent video games and what influence Autodesk might have on that. We actually came to know one another at a more personal level at that point. It was an interesting relationship after that.

We used to sit down with all of the top management people. There would be a formal meeting every time the AUGI board met. All of the big kids would show up and all of the AUGI kids were round the other side of the table. We’d sit there for two, three or four hours and have a really nice long discussion about the product and the future. They’d tell us about future developments, what was coming up and we all had NDAs so we couldn’t talk about anything outside.

IPoC interview – David Kingsley – part 1
IPoC interview – David Kingsley – part 3

IPoC interview – David Kingsley – part 1

1 Reply

Welcome to the second in this series of interviews of Interesting People of CAD (IPoC).

David Kingsley has had a long and interesting career, was present in the early days of CAD adoption, and served as an AUGI board member for years. Here is the first part of David’s interview, which covers his career.

It’s a long career, so this is a loooong post! Strap in tight for a candid discussion of solar plants, a couple of US Presidents, primeval Autodesk University, Autodesk before and after Lynn Allen, a personal opinion of the current CEO, sailing on an America’s Cup yacht, the Hubble telescope and an inappropriate discussion of hard nipples.

Steve: You’re retired now, right?

David: I’m 67 soon and pretty much retired, but I’m still keeping up with AutoCAD and Inventor, my two primary things. I use Inventor pretty regularly. We’re going to build an addition on the house and I’m still up to speed on it. I’ve been on ADN (Autodesk Developer Network) for years and years; I’m still doing that. But yeah, I’m retired. I say I’ve become unemployable!

Steve: Can you give me a brief outline of the main things you’ve done during your long career?

David: I started out on a drafting board in 1970 and had 10 or 11 years of experience with that. I grew up West of Detroit; the whole southern part of Michigan is automotive industry. You know, Detroit iron. I worked a lot in automotive tooling, all on paper and pencil.

Then in ’78 I moved from Detroit to Denver, Colorado and was there for 40 years until just last month. In 1976, then-President Carter commissioned a Solar Energy Research Institute and I went around and visited all of the candidate cities for this new Institute and it ended up in Denver. I had visited and interviewed with the company there, and this was even before the Institute had been officially commissioned and opened. So this company called me back and moved me all the way across the country and I went to work for them. They built equipment, so the Institute is like a think-tank and they contracted out to manufacturers around the area. We built a lot of hardware. So I was building solar energy R&D stuff back in 1980/81.

Then Regan got elected and he was anti-solar and he cut all of those programs so I ended up being out of a job after a couple of years. So I ended up in aerospace. There were two or three big aerospace companies in Denver. Long story short, I ended up working on the Hubble telescope. That was still working on paper and pencil!

In ’81 we got CAD training, they brought in a big CAD system. I got pretty adept at that. It was about ’84 or ’85, AutoCAD started to pop up and PCs were just starting to appear. Literally showing up on people’s desks. I immediately took off on that; I could see that was where everything was headed.

I hooked up with my first Autodesk University in, was it 92? One of the really very first AUs, and I remember it was in the parking lot, there on McInnis Street. They had a little tent; there were only a couple of hundred people there.

Steve: Sorry David, which city was this?

David: This is in San Rafael, right at the Autodesk headquarters, there on McInnis Street [Parkway]. Ever been out there?

Steve: Yes.

David: And everybody stays at that Embassy…?

Steve: Embassy Suites, yes. Good breakfasts!

David: Yes, and this was in that parking lot. They had a tent and grilled hamburgers and hot dogs and ten classes. I don’t think Lynn Allen worked there yet. I can’t remember her being there.

Steve: Wow!

David: I remember Autodesk before Lynn Allen! Now we’re in a world with an Autodesk without Lynn Allen.

Steve: Yes, it’s bizarre, isn’t it?

David: Yes. It’s like the company’s got a whole different… have you spoken with Lynn? Chatted with Lynn about any of this?

Steve: I’ve been in touch. I haven’t spoken to her personally but we’ve sent messages back and forth.

David: It’s pretty ugly. There are a bunch of people who are pretty pissed off. This Anagnost, the new CEO, a lot of people think there’s a vendetta going on. There’s a lot of people he… I don’t know if you know anything about this Anagnost or have met him before, but I worked with him over the years. He was an OK guy but he was just a real cold… you know, I don’t know how to describe him. But a lot of people think there was a lot of animosity, that he’s kind of venting, getting rid of people he didn’t like. Because he came up through the ranks, he’s been there many years.

So anyway, back about me!

Steve: So you went to the first AU at San Rafael?

David: The very first or one of the first. I also remember going to the one in San Francisco, and Phil Kreiker was the President. I remember him making a bunch of rude remarks: an inappropriate monologue! I guess you had to be there. It was the kind of stuff you wouldn’t have expected to hear from somebody…

Steve: I may have actually been there. I went to the ‘95 one in San Francisco at the Moscone Center.

David: I remember one being at the Bill Graham Center. The one where he said he was so excited his nipples were hard! I always remember that.
Was that the one where they brought him in, in a straitjacket?

Steve: Ah, great. No, I didn’t see that, that sounds fun!

David: So you’ve been around this stuff for a long time too?

Steve: Yeah, Version 1.4 was my first AutoCAD. I worked for an AutoCAD dealer, the first AutoCAD dealer, here in Western Australia as the demo jock and sales support and specialist and so on. Yeah, that was ’85.

David: I bought AutoCAD 11. I’d been working on a big mainframe system. Computervision was the big player at the beginning, and they had a model space/paper space paradigm and that was the first thing I worked on in 3D, and it was model space/paper space and AutoCAD was just a flat 2D tool. When they came out with 11, that was when they first came out with paper space. That was a paradigm I was comfortable with, so I ended up buying 11 and left my cushy aerospace job.

I had been there ten years and I had the same job the day I left as the day I got there. It was a big company and it was really difficult to move forward. At that time the IT guys were managing the CAD system. Because it was a computer, you know? And they weren’t figuring out that a CAD Manager and an IT Manager were not the same thing. There were no CAD Managers, they didn’t understand the whole business yet.

So I proposed that I become the first CAD Manager in the place because I saw the job and everybody else kind of saw it, too. So I had to politic for that job for about three years. We were really struggling, we had these IT guys who didn’t know… they just couldn’t support us. We were just floating around, trying to figure out our methods and operations and the IT guys weren’t any help at all.

So finally after three years, my boss got a promotion and I got a new boss and he immediately said, “I know what you’re talking about and I’m going to go to Human Resources and fight for this position.” So they posted it, interviewed three people and gave the job to somebody else!

So I just threw up my hands, went and bought AutoCAD 11 and struck out on my own. We had some guys who spun off from the company earlier and one of them at the time was… the company I worked for, their speciality was optical sensing. They built a lot of Earth observation satellites. They built (and still) some of the most advanced satellite on the planet. As a matter of fact, right now every instrument on the Hubble telescope was built by this company. So the last four or five contracts they have won every contract to replace every instrument. Ball Aerospace.

Anyway, a couple of people had spun off that company and I went to work for them. Half a dozen consultants, you know, a small company. This one guy won a contract with the Italian America’s Cup sailing team. His specialty was wind shear detection. He developed a system where the vector and velocity of the wind could be mapped up to 2 km ahead of the craft, and he sold it to the Italians. We were trying to build this thing and put it on the Italian boat. This was in San Diego in ’92 or ’93.

Shortly before the race, the sanctioning body ruled it out. We spent all this money and they said, “Nah, you can’t do that.” Apparently the rule was, you couldn’t communicate with the boat. So they couldn’t communicate ship to shore. What I remember is that we were gathering our own data autonomously. But they said, “Nah, you still have such an advantage.” I actually got on the boat for a short time. I learned very quickly that if you’re not part of the racing team you’re just in the way. There’s no place for you to be.

So after that I ended up hooking up with the dealer network in Denver, the Rocky Mountain region. This is in the 90s. I would go around and do training with the dealer network. On several occasions I would go in on a long term contract. They would have a big sale, a big installation of a dozen or so seats, and I would go in and be an employee on a contract basis. I would go in and be there like everybody else for three or four months. I’d get them up to speed.

That was always bizarre. There would be a political nightmare. There would be people who didn’t want to be on CAD, or didn’t like this software, they would rather have SolidWorks or something else, and they fought tooth and nail, and it was crazy. There were people who really didn’t like me, just because I represented, I was trying to teach them this software. I told them, “This is not about me! Your management made this decision. If you want to work here you’re going to have to live with it! I’m not the cause of your problems.”

That’s pretty much how I ended my career. I just got tired of that, I didn’t need to work any more and my wife’s career bloomed later in her life, about 45 or 50 and she had a great career from 45 on, so for about 20 years she was really the breadwinner, so I was really the playboy.

Steve: You were a “kept man”!

David: Yeah, I really said that. But I was still working.

I had a couple of really bad experiences at the end. Just a bad employer. We had a solar company that established their North American engineering center in Denver. They built the world’s biggest solar power plant in Arizona. A Spanish company with a North American engineering office. They built several really big solar power plants, but that was a really horrible place to work. We were micromanaged from Spain and they had some of the worst CAD implementations I’ve ever seen. I tried to turn them around, and it was just unbelievable what they were doing. You’re familiar with the technology. Are you civil, or electrical, or…

Steve: Mostly mechanical. I have worked for an architect but my background is in mechanical engineering. I actually started my career at a drop forging company that made a lot of automotive parts, so fairly similar to your start.

David: In my really early days, I worked in a General Motors plant. It had been a bomber plant during World War II, making bomber aircraft. Right underneath my office was a drop forge. It just sat there all day, just WHAM! WHAM! WHAM! My cup of coffee was always wiggling! It was never still, it always had a wave in it.

Back to this company, they were managing Inventor files like AutoCAD files, with the revision letter changing the file name. That broke the assembly in Inventor, but they couldn’t get that concept. There was this confrontation thing and they quietly walked me out the door. They gave me a really nice letter that basically said, “Just go away.”

I said, “I really don’t want to do this any more” so I stopped working. That was about 2011.

There was one more job I had after that. I worked in a company that was using Inventor and made ambulance helicopters. They would take a standard helicopter, fully fitted, with every component certified, and tear it apart, strip it out. We would build new panels and fit all this medical equipment. That was probably the best paying job I ever had! But that’s when I got tired of it. That was a young man’s job and I was 62 or 63. They wanted me to work 60, 70, 80 hours a week and I just couldn’t do it.

So I gave it up!

IPoC interview – David Kingsley – part 2
IPoC interview – David Kingsley – part 3

Steve’s BLADE presentation at the BricsCAD New Zealand and Australia Roadshow

3 Replies

Sofoco (Australia) and CAD Concepts (New Zealand) recently ran a series of seminars throughout Australasia demonstrating BricsCAD. I attended the last of these in Brisbane on April 19 and gave a presentation about BricsCAD’s LISP, with reference to AutoCAD compatibility and the tools available to CAD Managers and developers, including BLADE. The talk was aimed at anybody who is writing or maintaining LISP code for AutoCAD or BricsCAD.

I had the just-before-lunch slot, which is never desirable for a presenter. People are dozing off and/or bursting to go to the toilet, and time adjustments have to be made if earlier presentations run over. I started 10 minutes late and therefore had to remove the demonstration part of the presentation on the fly, but I had planned to allow for that eventuality. It’s been a while since I have presented like this before an audience so I was a bit rusty and it wasn’t as free-flowing as I would have liked. Too many ‘erms’!

Steve’s invisible accordion is impressively large

I did manage to keep the whole audience in their seats until the end, though, so that’s something. Maybe the fact that I was waving a sword around had something to do with it.

Here’s my video, which is 21 minutes long. The sound is a bit muffled and my accent is Australian, so you might want to turn on subtitles using the CC option in the YouTube player.

Disclosure: the organisers covered part of my expenses.

Autodesk remotely killswitches AutoCAD licenses – again

6 Replies

Following the AutoCAD 2019 rollout disaster, where subscription users found their AutoCAD 2018s were broken by an Autodesk licensing system meltdown, Autodesk CEO Andrew Anagnost issued an apology. He also assured customers on Twitter that it wouldn’t happen again:

While I welcomed that, I did have this to say at the time:

I don’t think such a guarantee is realistic, given that the nature of subscription software is to only work when it knows you’ve paid up. At least it demonstrates that the desire is there right at the top to try to prevent such debacles from occurring in future.

Autodesk watchers know that words mean little and actions are everything. I look forward to Andrew sharing news of the actions he’ll be taking to make good on his promise.

Back to the present. Does it come as a surprise to anybody to discover that less than a month later, Autodesk has again accidentally remotely killswitched people’s licenses? Again, not just the new release, but 2018 too. As reported on Twitter and www.asti.com:

After a couple of exchanges, the always-responsive people on the @AutodeskHelp Twitter feed came back with this:

So it’s fixed, but CAD Managers now have a bunch of work to do at their end to deal with a problem created at the Autodesk end. Somebody screwed up, they fixed it, another apology is issued, stuff happens, life goes on.  That’s it for this month, probably. But it doesn’t address a very fundamental problem.

Let’s go back to basics.

The primary function of a licensing system is to allow use of the product by legitimate users.

Everything else is secondary. If a system relies on phoning home and getting the required response from a remote system before you’re permitted to use the software you paid for, not just after installation but on an ongoing basis, then it’s fundamentally flawed from the user’s point of view. Yet that is the system that Autodesk has chosen to base its business on.

No amount of sincere, deeply felt apologies or it’ll-never-happen-again promises will alter the fact that Autodesk has put its own convenience ahead of the ability of paying customers to use what they have paid for. Will Autodesk change that state of affairs? I very much doubt it, in which case it’s inevitable that this kind of thing will happen again, whatever anyone might promise.

The game has changed – Robert Green migrates to BricsCAD

10 Replies

Is anybody left who still thinks BricsCAD isn’t a serious replacement for AutoCAD? If that’s you, perhaps the latest news might make you take it seriously. No, not the Heidi Hewett news. Even more recent news than that!

Robert Green, CAD Management guru, Cadalyst writer and consultant (not to mention a rather good guitarist) has been announced as the first Bricsys Certified Migration Consultant.

Image courtesy of Bricsys

Read all about what Robert has to say on this Bricsys blog post.

Anybody who has been reading this blog for the last few years will be surprised by none of what Robert has to say in that blog post. It’s not merely a repeat of what I’ve been saying for some time now, it’s all factually correct and easily verifiable by any competent CAD Manager.

I’ve been there and done that. I’ve gone through the process of taking a very complex custom AutoCAD environment, applying it to BricsCAD and giving it to my users. They loved it. No training was required to work as usual. Most things happened quicker, more conveniently, or both, starting right from the speedy installation. Once the product is in place and established, training can then be applied to take advantage of the places where BricsCAD is ahead of AutoCAD.

If you’re a CAD Manager where AutoCAD is used and you haven’t checked out BricsCAD yet, it’s about time you did.

This might come as a shock to those who see Autodesk domination of DWG CAD as a permanent fact of life, but the game has changed. AutoCAD’s stagnation and comments by senior figures show that the former flagship is clearly unloved by the powers within Autodesk. AutoCAD LT, even more so. An unimpressive AutoCAD 2019 shows that major improvements can no longer be expected in exchange for your ever-increasing annual payments, and with large numbers of people having been offloaded from the research and development teams, who would do it anyway? Meanwhile, BricsCAD development shoots ahead.

Thanks to decades of hostility towards customers that has only accelerated in recent years, Autodesk can’t even rely on customer loyalty for survival. When there’s a serious competitor that offers an easy migration path, the inertia that has kept Autodesk alive so far in the DWG space is no longer enough. The feeling among industry observers I meet is that Autodesk is in a decline of its own making. The only debate is whether that decline is temporary or terminal.

Back to Robert et al. Autodesk has lost many good people, and Bricsys is gaining them. The momentum is clearly with the Belgian company. Anybody want to run bets on who the next big name defector will be?

BricsCAD Shape for Mac

Leave a reply

BricsCAD Shape, the free DWG-based 3D direct modeling application from Bricsys, has now been released for macOS (formerly OS X). See my previous post on Shape for details of what it’s all about.

This is the same, just on a different OS. That’s because unlike Autodesk’s versions of its DWG products, the Bricsys versions are not cynically watered down for Apple users. Those users can now do full 3D conceptual modeling as part of a workflow that leads to full BIM (or simply view and edit DWG files if you’re not that ambitious), and without paying for the privilege.

It’s a proper free perpetual licence without usage restrictions, not a demo. You can’t get a perpetual license of DWG-editing software from Autodesk for any money, so by any measure Shape is a bargain.

The Bricsys blog post can be found here. The download page is here.

A Linux version of Shape is expected later.

IPoC interview – Heidi Hewett – part 3

2 Replies

Welcome to the first in this new series of interviews of Interesting People of CAD (IPoC).

First up, Heidi Hewett. Heidi has a long CAD history and is well known for being outstandingly good at her job. She made big news recently by shifting camps from Autodesk to Bricsys. Here is the third and final part of Heidi’s interview.

Steve: Did you go to Gent? What were your impressions of the people at Bricsys?

Heidi: Yes. After my initial discussion with Don Strimbu, he invited me to Gent to visit Bricsys headquarters and meet the team. While I wasn’t yet ready to give up my newly earned real estate license, who can turn down a trip to Europe? Don met me at Heathrow airport and accompanied me to Gent from there.

As soon as we arrived at the office, Don introduced me to Erik, Bricsys CEO, and other executive staff including Patrick, Mark, and Sander. I went into the office with Don every day that week as he arranged for me to meet and get product demonstrations from people across the organization. They were all incredibly welcoming and treated me as if I was already part of their team.

Several things about the office environment got my attention. The first was that nearly all the conference rooms were empty. And it was very quiet. People were sitting at their computers working, not sitting in meetings! They’re a team of dedicated people that know what they need to do and how to get it done. But they also know how to have fun.

A chiming sound ringing through the quiet office indicates an important event. One afternoon it signalled everyone to meet in the kitchen for Portuguese wine and cheese tasting hosted by Carlos, who was visiting from his office in Portugal. Each Friday at lunch the chime reminds everyone to head to Pinocchio’s for weekly pizza and wine. And I heard rumor that company hardware policy enables employees to keep their old computers when it’s time to upgrade. In exchange, the employee leaves a few bottles of wine in the community kitchen, which, coincidentally is right next to the rec room with ping pong table.

Steve: How about Gent itself?

Heidi: When I wasn’t in the office, I was exploring Gent and nearby Bruges, with my gracious hosts from Bricsys. It’s a beautiful city with so much to see. I look forward to the opportunity to return!

Steve: How have your former colleagues reacted to your move? Have they been supportive? How about the reaction form the CAD community in general?

When I decided to join Bricsys after all my years of working on and promoting AutoCAD, I was a little concerned about the reaction I’d get from the AutoCAD community, whether internal or external to Autodesk. But my concerns were unfounded. Immediately following the announcement that I joined Bricsys and for at least a week following it, I was bombarded with responses through social media and direct messaging. Names were scrolling by so fast that I couldn’t keep up. Former colleagues and customers that I haven’t talked to in decades as well as those I worked with just a few months ago. Many names I’ve never seen but suspect they belong to AutoCAD users somewhere around the world that have attended my presentations or read my posts.

I was truly touched by the kind words of respect for my past achievements and the enthusiastic support for my new endeavors. It made me realize this global CAD community is incredibly small and tight. And, even if we’re developing or using different CAD software, we have the same goal… to design amazing things. I’m proud to be part of it.

Steve: I’m sure you’re deeply immersed in learning everything you can about BricsCAD and related products. What has surprised you most so far about the software?

Heidi: It’s a little surprising how much there is to learn about a product that feels so familiar to me. I’m confident that I can jump in and immediately start using BricsCAD the same way I use AutoCAD. That’s reassuring but it’s not enough. The challenge for me, as it is for most CAD users, is to push beyond the old and familiar ways of doing things to take advantage of the software’s most powerful functionality. What I found most surprising about BricsCAD, is that it allows me to create 3D solid models in a way that’s intuitive and familiar yet with more intelligence than I thought possible in a DWG-based drawing.

Steve: What are you most looking forward to in your new role?

Heidi: When I met with Erik and team at the end of my week in Gent, he asked if/how I wanted to work with Bricsys. He knew that my career had been headed in a different direction, away from CAD, so he left it up to me to decide if I wanted to work part-time, full-time, consulting, whatever. After what I’d seen and experienced at Bricsys, I knew I couldn’t be any less than fully committed! There’s just too much to show and talk about and demo and teach.

I can’t come up with a single thing that I’m most looking forward to. That’s what attracted me to this role. What I’m most looking forward to are the Endless Possibilities.

IPoC interview – Heidi Hewett – part 1
IPoC interview – Heidi Hewett – part 2

IPoC interview – Heidi Hewett – part 2

Leave a reply

Welcome to the first in this new series of interviews of Interesting People of CAD (IPoC).

First up, Heidi Hewett. Heidi has a long CAD history and is well known for being outstandingly good at her job. She made big news recently by shifting camps from Autodesk to Bricsys. Here is the second part of Heidi’s interview.

Steve: Did you have much involvement with AUGI?

Heidi: I haven’t had a lot of involvement with AUGI aside from presenting at CAD Camps they hosted almost a decade ago. I thought they were great events and was sorry to see them fade away.

Steve: What do you think the benefits have been for Autodesk in helping to support AUGI over the years?

Heidi: While I haven’t had a lot of experience working with AUGI, I think any opportunity a company has to get closer to their customers is worth pursuing.

Steve: How much presenting did you do at events like AU and others? Did you enjoy that?

Heidi: During the first half of my career at Autodesk I did a lot presenting at AU, CAD Camps and many other events. My kids were young then. As they got older, I didn’t want to miss all the big things in their lives. So, while I was always willing to travel to events, I didn’t seek them out. Instead, I did more webcasts and limited most of my travel to train-the-trainer events. I especially enjoyed the train-the-trainer events because I felt like I was sharing my knowledge globally without spending all my time on airplanes. Instead, I traveled to a few Autodesk sites in Europe or Asia to train a group of employees and partners from various countries in that region. Then, they would take what they learned, and the materials I provided, back to their countries where they could present it to customers in their local languages.

Steve: You and Lynn Allen worked closely together for many years, right?

Heidi: Yes, I met Lynn soon after she started at Autodesk. She was in the Training department and I wanted to join their team. That’s where we first worked together and became friends almost a quarter of a century ago. I think she’ll back me up when I say we were both 5 years old at the time!

Since then our paths have crossed many times. Each year when I was ready to present the newest AutoCAD functionality, first to employees, I reached out to Lynn so that I could schedule my training session around her busy travel schedule. And, as she was traveling the world, receiving more presentation requests than she could schedule, she referred the AutoCAD ones she couldn’t cover to me. On more than one occasion I’d be at some international event and a customer would bring Lynn’s Tips and Tricks book to me for an autograph, thinking I was her. Or they’d insist that they met me at that same event several years before even though I’d never been there before. Being mistaken as Lynn Allen is certainly flattering!
 
Steve: It’s kind of bizarre that such a successful team was thought to be no longer required. Do you have any idea what was behind that?

Heidi: I don’t have any insight on the thinking behind it. But, I try to believe things happen for a reason. I wasn’t sure what that reason was, until now… and I’m thrilled!

Steve: You’ve now joined Autodesk competitor Bricsys, which is something of a coup for them. Who contacted you initially? Was it Erik [De Keyser, Bricsys CEO]?

Heidi: Ironically, the first contact I had about Bricsys was from Lynn Allen. Not because she was working for them. But because Vince Aman (formerly from Autodesk, now working for Bricsys) had been trying to reach me through LinkedIn. I was attending a real estate class at the time, in preparation for what I thought was my next career. I received a text from Lynn telling me to check my LinkedIn messages. After speaking to Vince, briefly, I reached out to Don Strimbu, VP of Communications at Bricsys. I’ve known Don since my first years at Autodesk and wanted to hear about his experience at Bricsys.

IPoC interview – Heidi Hewett – part 1
IPoC interview – Heidi Hewett – part 3