How to obtain a digital signature to sign your LISP files

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In an earlier post, I explained why you might want to digitally sign your LISP files. If you decide to go ahead with that, then this post explains how you can obtain and install the digital signature you will need to sign your files. This is the most difficult part of the process and it involves spending money.

Getting a digital signature

Although you can make your own digital signature (there’s an Autodesk Knowledgebase article describing the process), there’s little point in doing this. You can sign your files, sure, but that signature won’t be seen as trusted by software that checks for it. Anybody can create a signature like that, including one that impersonates you, and it doesn’t prove anything. The only purpose for such a home-made signature would be to test the methods you’ll be using to apply a proper trusted signature later.

Edit: if you do want to make your own signature, BlackBox informs me that the MakeCert tool in the Windows SDK mentioned in the Knowledgebase article is deprecated. He suggests using this PowerShell Cmdlet instead.

You’re going to need a signature that is trusted. That means you’re going to have to pay somebody trustworthy to trust you. There are a set of certifying authorities, trusted by Microsoft, Autodesk, etc. who can issue code signing certificates to companies and people. You need to prove who you are to one of those authorities and pay them to certify that you are who you say you are. So before you start, make sure you or your business are visible in terms of directory listings, publicly visible phone numbers, etc. If you are representing a company asking for a certificate, you can expect to be asked to produce evidence that you really represent that company. You can expect to confirm that your email and phone number are really under your control.

You only need to do this once a year, or even once every several years if you pay in advance. You might find that the evidence you need to provide changes at renewal time; for example a Yellow Pages listing that was OK in 2015 was no longer accepted when I renewed in 2017, so I had to register my business with another listing.

In my search for a certifying authority, I found that K Software, a reseller for Comodo, was the cheapest source for a code signing certificate, see here. An OV certificate will be fine for signing LISP.

K Software takes your money (USD $67 to $84 a year depending on the length of time you need), gets Comodo to provide the certificate, and provides a handy tool (KSign) that allows you to simply apply the certificate to various files without some of the messing about that’s otherwise required. It’s not useful for LISP files, though. Comodo also provides the support, and I’m happy to report that in my experience their customer service is excellent.

Note: it’s important that you pay close attention to the instructions when applying for your certificate. For example, the browser you use to apply for the certificate is vital. Choose one that’s suggested (e.g. Firefox) and which you expect to use later to obtain the certificate.

Installing a digital signature

Once your evidence is accepted and your payment has gone through, you will be sent an email with a special code, allowing you to obtain the certificate. It’s important that you’re using the same browser on the same computer that you used when applying for the certificate.

Once you click the link and obtain the certificate, you’ll want to export it. In Firefox 58.0, use Options > Privacy & Security and scroll to the bottom to see View Certificates. Select the certificate and pick Export. This will create a .P12 file that you can back up and install on this or another computer. To install the certificate, double-click the .P12 file and follow the prompts to assign it to the current user in the default location (Personal).

That’s it. You should now have a certificate installed that you will be able to use to sign LISP and other files. To check this, start the Windows Certificate Manager (C:\Windows\System32\certmgr.msc). Have a look in Current User > Personal > Certificates and you should find your newly installed certificate.

The next post in this series will explain how to apply this digital signature to your LISP files. That’s the easy bit.

Autodesk subscription offer – the first cracks appear in the all-rental wall

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Thanks to a comment by Fabien, I recently learned of a new offer from Autodesk to convert perpetual licenses to subscription (rental). It turns out that this is a global offer from 7 February to 20 April 2018.

Such offers come and go from time to time and most are not particularly interesting. This one is. Not because you’ll want to take it up (you probably won’t), but because of what it represents.

Here’s how it appears on Autodesk’s site:

What’s really interesting about this offer is this sentence:

If you are not satisfied, you can switch back to your perpetual license.

With that, we see the first solid acknowledgement from Autodesk of the reason so many existing customers are stubbornly refusing to put themselves in rental chains, despite the cracking of price whips. Customers like their perpetual licenses and are unwilling to give them away. This offer holds out the promise that they can be returned. There’s a lot of fine print that severely restricts the utility of the offer and I can’t see many savvy customers falling for it, but at least an attempt (however weak) is being made to placate perpetual license holders.

The offer is explained in the FAQs and more detail is available in the Terms & Conditions page. Here’s an overview of how it works.

You trade in your perpetual license of AutoCAD, LT, Suites or several other products using this link. These can be out of maintenance and could date back to Release 14 from 20 years ago*.
You sign up for subscription of an Industry Collection for 1 or 3 years. Of course, the subscription cost of an Industry Collection is pretty substantial and way more than the maintenance costs of, say, AutoCAD – even with Autodesk’s promised price hikes. For example, the AEC Collection is USD $2,018 a year under this offer, down from $2,690.
The subscription cost is 25% less than it is without this offer. It’s still pretty expensive, particularly as you can’t use more than two applications in the Collection at once, but it is a bit less than is would be,
You are given the option of backing out of the deal (“switch back” is the Autodesk term) within a specific 30-day window if not satisfied. That window is at the end of the full 3-year period, or after 2 years if you sign up for 1-year increments. You get your perpetual license back. You don’t get your money back.
If you switch back, it’s up to you to make sure you have the media and necessary details to reinstall the old release.
If you switch back, you don’t get to resume maintenance if you had it. If you didn’t already have your product under maintenance, this is fair enough.
If you switch back, your perpetual license is reverted to its original release. Oh, except if you started at 2017 or 2018. In that case, you are reverted to 2016.

That last part is a nasty, petty detail. Somebody at Autodesk actually thought that up, presented it at a meeting and had it accepted as a good idea. That’s the mentality we’re dealing with here. It’s not so much “How can we better serve customers so they want to give us more money?”, it’s more “How can we hurt customers who don’t do what we want?”

If you take up this offer, the idea is to get you using the new software because there’s a bit less finality about the decision. You might be so impressed by it that you forget you’ve discarded your escape plan and signed yourself up for perpetual payment of large amounts. You might also find that you’ve saved all your files in new formats and can’t go back without losing data, particularly if you’ve used the vertical products that really, really don’t like having their drawings saved back to earlier releases, even within the same nominal DWG format. So maybe there’s a bit more finality than first appears, but by the time you’ve got to that stage it will be too late.

Is this an attractive offer? Only if you were going to subscribe to an Industry Collection anyway and have an old dormant license hanging around. In that case, go for it, save 25% of a large amount. Other than that, it’s really not an offer that will have widespread appeal and I suspect most customers will give it a miss.

Autodesk is getting increasingly desperate to get its long-term customers on the rental gravy train, and the cracks have started to appear in the subscription-only facade. This offer’s not great but I suspect the offers are only going to get better as the “Another great quarter!” patter wears thinner and thinner. The offers will have to get much better than this effort to persuade your average perpetual license owner to get on board.

* Pedantic historical point: in multiple places, this promotion associates Release 14 with the year 1998, implying this is the earliest year you could have bought an eligible product. This is incorrect. Release 14 was released in February 1997 and was replaced by AutoCAD 2000 in March 1999.

Gallery – Gent visit 2017 – People

Why digitally sign your LISP files?

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After I mentioned in an earlier post that I had digitally signed the sample LISP file I had provided, this generated some interest. In this post, I’ll explain why you might want to sign your LISP files. In a later post, I’ll explain how to do it.

These days it is standard practice for developers to digitally sign their code. Operating systems and applications are displaying increasingly scary warnings when coming across unsigned code. Here is an example of the sort of message you get when you load an unsigned LISP file into AutoCAD from a location that has not been explicitly configured as a trusted location:

If you’re a CAD Manager dealing with your own internal code, it’s not too onerous to configure AutoCAD in Options > Files such that a folder is trusted by AutoCAD and place your code in there. The folder should be read-only; if it isn’t, AutoCAD warns you when you try to configure it. If you do this, the scary warnings don’t appear to bother and confuse your users, even if your code is unsigned.

Another way a CAD Manager can avoid the warnings is to set the SECURELOAD system variable to 0. That’s generally not recommended because it turns off AutoCAD’s security features. While you’ll probably get away with this, there’s always a chance that a user will load some malware and then you’ll have to explain yourself to management.

If you’re not just using your code internally and it’s going to be used by other parties, then you’re not going to have that level of control over the user environment. In recent AutoCADs it’s possible to set up the installation deployment such that users can’t turn off the security settings. If the CAD Manager at the location using your code has done this, your potential users are going to be presented with unprofessional-looking scary warnings.

If you sign your code, users might still get a warning, but it’s less scary. It identifies you as the verified source of the code so they will have more confidence in picking the Always Load button. Once they’ve done this, other signed code of yours will be automatically trusted.

There’s another important reason you might want to sign your code, and that’s protection against other people’s modification of your code. If somebody edits your LSP file and then gives it to someone who tries to load it, the user is presented with an even scarier warning:

Note that this warning no longer has your name on it. This means it’s possible to protect yourself from people (internal or external) who well-meaningly hack about with your code and then try to blame you when it goes wrong. It also gives a level of protection against your code being infected by malware.

Note that all of the above only applies to AutoCAD 2016 and later. AutoCAD 2014 introduced some LISP loading security measures, but the signature stuff came a couple of releases later. Earlier AutoCAD releases, along with compatibles such as BricsCAD and ZWCAD, will just ignore the digital signature. It’s just a comment in the code as far as they’re concerned.

LISP files with the LSP, MNL, FAS, or VLX file extensions can be digitally signed. There’s a bug in the original iterations of AutoCAD 2016 and AutoCAD 2018 that prevents signed VLX files from working. This was patched later in both releases (2016 SP1 and 2018.0.2), but if you’re distributing your code externally there’s always a chance that your VLX might end up in the hands of somebody using a broken release. Also, VLX files that are digitally signed cannot be loaded into AutoCAD 2015 and earlier, broken or not. You should bear that in mind before distributing signed VLX files. I don’t do it and would advise against it. Thanks, Autodesk.

Given this information, if you decide that signing your LISP is a good idea, watch this space for information on how to do it.

Setting your application or document window size using LISP

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I intend to produce a few videos containing tips, tutorials, product comparisons and the like. I’ve set up a cad nauseam YouTube channel, but don’t bother visiting it yet because it’s empty.

One of the things I need to do for these videos make sure I’m capturing the screen at an appropriate resolution. I knocked up a bit of Visual LISP to take care of this task quickly and accurately, and you might as well have it. It’s a simple routine that allows you to accurately size either the main AutoCAD application window or the current document window (drawing area) within the main window.

The file is WindowSize.lsp. It should work in all full AutoCAD releases (not counting LT and AutoCAD for Mac) and AutoCAD-based verticals from 2000 on.

It works in recent BricsCAD releases (except the free and LISPless BricsCAD Shape). I’ve only tested it in Windows, but it should also work in the Mac and Linux versions due to the high degree of LISP compatibility provided even across platforms. It also works in ZWCAD 2018 for the main application window, but don’t use it on the document window because that doesn’t work.

Download it, put it in a location of your choice and load it into your CAD application (for example by dragging and dropping it from Explorer onto the drawing window).

Note: In AutoCAD 2014 and later, loading any LISP or other executable file may result in a warning depending on the release, the security settings, whether the file is located in one of AutoCAD’s trusted locations, and whether the file is digitally signed. I’ve digitally signed the file to reduce the incidence of warnings, but you could still see something like this:

The verified publisher should be cad nauseam as shown above. If you pick Always Load then you shouldn’t see the warning again for this file or any others signed by cad nauseam. Feel free to edit the file for your own needs, but if you do the signature will become invalid and you’ll be warned again when loading the file.

Once it’s loaded, enter the command WindowSize. The prompt sequence goes like this:

Command: WINDOWSIZE Window to size [Application/Document] : Width in pixels <1280>: Height in pixels <720>:

Now, back to work on the first of those videos.

Autodesk kills ArtCAM, proves subscription is terrible for customers

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This story goes back over 50 years. A British company called Delcam was founded in 1965 and developed many products. These included ArtCAM, an application for producing 3D parts using 2D artwork as a base. It won a Queen’s Award for Innovation in 2003. In 2014, Autodesk acquired Delcam for approximately USD$286 Million and ArtCAM (among others) became an Autodesk product.

As with all Autodesk products, sales of perpetual licenses ceased a couple of years ago. Owners of perpetual licenses were encouraged to ditch them and switch to subscription instead. Financially encouraged, with “discounts” and promises of price rises for uncooperative customers. You’ll be familiar with this part of the story.

Now, Autodesk has killed ArtCAM. The FAQ is here, but as of right now you can’t buy a new ArtCAM subscription. You can renew an existing subscription until 7 July 2018. Support ends on 1 November 2018. Support will be of limited value because bugs are highly unlikely to be fixed, especially if what I hear about the development team being fired last November is true.

Are you an ArtCAM customer wondering what this means for the future? Here’s what happens if you followed Autodesk’s advice and switched to subscription:

You stop using the software as soon as your subscription runs out. Immediately. No negotiation will be entered into.

Here’s what happens if you didn’t follow Autodesk’s advice and kept your perpetual license:

You get use the software for as long as it still works.

Which of these scenarios would you say is preferable from a customer point of view? Yes, it’s a rhetorical question similar to, “Would you prefer to: a) cut your own head off with a blunt rusty saw; or b) not do that?”

Remember when I said subscription was a trap and you shouldn’t fall for it? Was I wrong?

OK, hands up all those customers who still think Autodesk subscription is a good idea. Anyone?

I’ve added ArtCAM to the Autodesk Graveyard. Anybody who thinks this can’t happen to their product should read that page and ponder how many Autodesk customers thought their product would permanently persist.

Autodesk has lost some of its best people

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If you follow certain people on social media this may not be news to you, but Autodesk has just suffered a shocking loss. People at SOLIDWORKS World were amazed to see Lynn Allen, probably the most famous person in CAD, and for decades the face of Autodesk, in attendance.

Image credit: Craig Black via Facebook

No, she wasn’t spying on the competition; she’s praised aspects of what Dassault is doing and has described the event as “pretty amazing”. In her own words, she’s now a free agent. Lynn, a highly professional and entertaining presenter, was undoubtedly Autodesk’s biggest drawcard. No more.

This story is much bigger than one person,though. Other highly competent long-term Adeskers to move on include docs and tips wiz Heidi Hewett, highly professional AU manager Joseph Wurcher, Inventor guru Jay Tedeschi, marketing manager Justin Hoey and PR director Noah Cole. Just the people I’ve mentioned here have well over a hundred years of experience and knowledge, but they are just a handful of the 13% of employees Autodesk is losing this time round. This cull is following on from another 10%, not that long ago.

The entire Neuchatel office in Switzerland has been closed, although Kean Walmsley survived (thankfully). I guess if you’re just holding station on improving your products and moving into rent-the-same-thing-every-year-and-jack-the-prices-up mode then there’s not much call for research and development.

I’m not going to speculate on whether any of the people I’ve mentioned were pushed out, took advantage of an attractive redundancy offer, or just decided it was an opportune moment to jump from a ship of questionable soundness. That’s a private matter between those people and their former employer. I will say that if Autodesk really wanted to retain these people it could probably have made that happen.

Why would Autodesk allow this much knowledge and skill to walk away? Same answer with everything Autodesk does these days that has people scratching their heads: money. Long-termers cost more money, so lopping them looks like an easy way to cut costs. If they’re competent and knowledgeable they’re worth every penny, though. Top people can be many times more productive and valuable than not-so-top people. Given Autodesk’s not-yet-successful attempt to be Adobe, the beancounters are desperate to make it look like the bottom line is about to improve.

While it’s true that the graveyard is full of indispensable people, my experience tells me that losing top people is almost always a false economy. Because the financial penalties of lost institutional knowledge often aren’t directly attributable and don’t show up on a spreadsheet in a handy “losing X cost us $Y” format, it’s easy to pretend those penalties don’t exist. They do, they’re real, and they’re coming Autodesk’s way.

I wish all of the people affected by these events all the best with their future. Onwards and upwards!

Edit: Principal User Experience Designer Bill Glennie, familiar to many pre-release testers of Autodesk products, has also gone.

Why Bricsys makes the best AutoCAD for Mac

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Bricsys has just released BricsCAD V18 for Mac. Here’s the download link and here are the release notes.

BricsCAD V18 is an excellent DWG 2018-based CAD application, and the Mac version lacks little in comparison to the Windows version. It’s so much more capable than the perpetually half-baked AutoCAD for Mac that I struggle to comprehend why anybody with the choice would even contemplate the notably inferior and seriously overpriced Autodesk offering.

That’s not just opinion, it can be supported objectively.

Price first. US prices are shown here for a single standalone license over five years, inclusive of the cost of upgrades. The BricsCAD prices therefore include maintenance (it’s optional); the Autodesk prices are for subscription (not optional). No temporary discounts have been included. I have excluded bargain-basement BricsCAD Classic because it lacks the full set of programming and 3D modeling tools. I have assumed that there will be no price increases over the next five years. Given recent history, that’s probably close to the truth for Bricsys prices. Autodesk, not so much.

Year	BricsCAD Pro	BricsCAD Platinum	AutoCAD
1	970	1330	1470
2	240	240	1470
3	240	240	1470
4	240	240	1470
5	240	240	1470
Total	1930	2290	7350

It’s worth noting that if you want to stop paying Bricsys, you’re left with the latest version to use indefinitely. You can change your mind and get back on the upgrade train later, if you like. That sort of flexibility is long gone at Autodesk, where subscription means no pay, no play. If you stop paying, despite having paid 3.2 times as much for your software over the five year period, you’re left with nothing.

Now, features. You may have noticed that Autodesk is now too embarrassed to list the differences between the Windows and Mac versions of AutoCAD on its web site. The Compare AutoCAD vs. AutoCAD for Mac page is now a shadow of its former useful self, devoid of all detail. If you want to get a reasonable idea of what’s going on with AutoCAD for Mac’s deficiencies, you can check out my post about the 2017 release that lists the missing features.

Alternatively, you can have a look at the equivalent Bricsys comparison page, which you should probably do anyway before spending any money. It’s strange that you now need to visit a competitor’s page to get detailed information about an Autodesk product, but in the CAD world these are strange days indeed.

It’s important to note that the Bricsys comparison page has issues; while the BricsCAD columns are up to date, the AutoCAD columns are a year behind. That page definitely needs an update in order to provide a fair comparison. Don’t rely on it completely (e.g. all of the listed products except BricsCAD V17 for Linux use DWG 2018 as the native format, not DWG 2013), but it will give you an approximate idea. Look at the little red X marks in the rightmost column and you’ll see that a whole bunch of the missing AutoCAD for Mac features, even after all these years, are very significant and their absence could rule out the product for you. Don’t expect much in the way of future improvement. either. AutoCAD for Mac is in maintenance mode, just like the full product.

BricsCAD for Mac is not just more fully-featured, it’s ironically also more AutoCAD-compatible than Autodesk’s effort. For example, try to run a selection of LISP routines in both products. Almost all of it will run just fine in BricsCAD. Anything that uses ActiveX or DCL (dialog box) calls simply won’t work in AutoCAD. You might be all right with some simple routines (if it was written for AutoCAD for DOS then it will probably be fine) but any LISP even moderately sophisticated is going to fail.

BricsCAD for Mac doesn’t just provide capabilities that AutoCAD for Mac doesn’t have and never will, it offers something more than that. It offers a path beyond basic drafting. You can abandon all hope of Revit for Mac – that won’t be happening. AutoCAD-based vertical products? Nope. Inventor OS X? Forget it. But the availability of a product like Bricsys BIM for Mac (not priced above – it’s US$770 extra if purchased seperately) is an obvious drawcard for Mac-happy architects. You can create 3D parametric models on your Mac if you use BricsCAD Platinum, and you can create them without straying far from a familiar AutoCAD-like environment. Sheet metal? Sure (at extra cost).

If you’re a Mac-only person and you’re wedded to Autodesk, you’re not only being ripped off, you’re following a dead-end path. Time to check out the alternatives.

The great Autodesk Collections rip-off

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Autodesk not only wants to move its customers from perpetual licenses to subscription (rental), it wants to move them from individual products to Industry Collections. Why? Because the rental cost of Collections is higher and more money can be extracted from each customer.

There’s nothing conspiracy-theorist about the above statement, it has been explicitly laid out by now-CEO Andrew Anagnost at an Investor Day, and the cunning plan has been placed on the public record. Have a good read of that document, it’s very revealing. AutoCAD LT users are going to be “encouraged” into full AutoCAD, AutoCAD users are are going to be “encouraged” into AutoCAD-based verticals, and so on, into Collections. Onwards and upwards.

Collections, you may remember, are groups of applications sold together. They’re just like Suites used to be, only bigger and rental-only. They’re expensive, but they contain a lot of products. For example, the AEC Collection rents at $2,690 PA (single-user US price). It contains the following products (individual product US annual rental cost shown in [brackets]):

Advance Steel [not stated]
AutoCAD [$1,176]
AutoCAD Architecture [$1,575]
AutoCAD Civil 3D [$2,100]
AutoCAD Electrical [$1,575]
AutoCAD Map 3D [$1,575]
AutoCAD MEP [$1,575]
AutoCAD Plant 3D [$1,575]
AutoCAD Raster Design [$840]
AutoCAD mobile app [free]
Cloud storage (25 GB) [free]
Dynamo Studio [$300]
Fabrication CADmep [$900]
FormIt Pro [not stated – Collection only]
InfraWorks [$1,575]
Insight [not stated – cloud credits]
Navisworks Manage [$2,070]
ReCap Pro [$300]
Autodesk Rendering [not stated – cloud credits]
Revit [$2,200]
Revit Live [$250]
Robot Structural Analysis Professional [not stated – Collection only]
3ds Max [$1,470]
Structural Analysis for Revit [not stated – cloud credits]
Structural Bridge Design [not stated – Collection only]
Vehicle Tracking [not stated – Collection only]

Note that Autodesk doesn’t make it easy to work out the equivalent total cost, but you can see there’s an impressively large number of products listed. For those products where prices are listed, adding together the above comes to $21,056 PA. So $2,690 PA is a huge bargain, right?

Not really.

First, some of those costs are counted multiple times. For example, AutoCAD Civil 3D also includes AutoCAD Map 3D and AutoCAD, so that’s $2,100 worth, not $4,851. AutoCAD gets counted about five times if you just add up the numbers.

Next, it’s highly unlikely that anybody uses all of the products in a Suite or Collection. How many do get used? On average, two, according to Autodesk. That corresponds with my own experience. But let’s say you do have a need to use more than two? That leads us to…

The way Autodesk Collection licensing works, you can’t use more than two of the products in a Collection at once.

You won’t find that prominently displayed among all the marketing blurb that promotes the value for money of Collections. Instead, you’ll find words like these:

Download and install what you want, whenever you like—whether it’s for occasional use, to meet requirements of a particular project or client, or to explore new workflows.

That’s not actually false; you can indeed download and install all of those products (only one at a time, but that’s a different complaint). You’re just not allowed to use them. Not at once.

Where does it say that? Well, If you know what links to click, you can eventually find this KnowledeBase page that tells you about the restriction and which products it applies to. Which is pretty much all of them:

Individual users of an industry collection may access no more than two (2) of the following desktop titles at any one time.

Architecture, Engineering & Construction Collection
Autodesk® Advance Steel
Autodesk® AutoCAD®
Autodesk® AutoCAD® Architecture
Autodesk® AutoCAD® Civil 3d
Autodesk® AutoCAD® Electrical
Autodesk® AutoCAD® Map 3d
Autodesk® AutoCAD® MEP
Autodesk® AutoCAD® P&ID
Autodesk® AutoCAD® Plant 3d
Autodesk® AutoCAD® Utility Design
Autodesk® Dynamo Studio
Autodesk® Fabrication CADmep
Autodesk® Navisworks Manage
Autodesk® Revit:
Autodesk® Revit Architecture
Autodesk® Revit MEP
Autodesk® Revit Structure
Autodesk® Revit Live
Autodesk® Robot Structural Analysis Professional
Autodesk® Structural Bridge Design
Autodesk® 3ds Max

This is a ludicrous restriction. Imagine not being allowed to have three Office applications open at once. Clippy: “It looks like you’re trying to open a spreadsheet! Sorry, you’re already reading an email and you have a Word document open. Go away.”

Why is Autodesk doing this? To make sure you don’t get good value out of your subscription dollars. Remember, good value for you is less revenue for them. Want to do more stuff? Buy more licenses.

This restriction does not apply to Suites. There is no technical reason it has to apply to Collections, either. It’s just a stealthy cash grab.

This is how it goes with Autodesk subscription. You’ll get sucked in by promising-sounding marketing, then once you’re trapped you’ll get screwed over.

BricsCAD Shape – can a free DWG product be a BIM game-changer?

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At the Bricsys 2017 Conference in Paris, one of the biggest surprises was the announcement of BricsCAD Shape. This product was demonstrated live, very impressively, in pre-release form. As I live-tweeted at the time, the demo jock was able to create a pretty decent architectural model in minutes, from scratch, very easily. That product has now been released.

What is BricsCAD Shape?

Shape is a 3D direct modeling application. At the core, it’s a simplified BricsCAD BIM. That means it’s small, fast, stable and it uses 2018 DWG as its native format. These are all good things. It’s obviously aimed at the AEC market, but there’s nothing to stop anyone using it for anything. Use it as a lightweight DWG viewer/editor if you like.

As you can see, it has a very simple, clean, cut-down interface. That dude is French Architect Jean Nouvel, by the way. He’s a block; you can erase him. He doesn’t appear in DWG files from other sources you open in Shape.

The idea is to do most of your work with the 18 buttons in this mini-ribbon/monster toolbar thing:

For less common operations, there is a set of pull-down menus. Although it’s hidden by default, you can even turn on a command line (Shift+F2) that will be very familiar to AutoCAD and BricsCAD users. Try to do without it; you will then discover how the excellent Quad Cursor interface (inherited from BricsCAD) uses AI technology to save you time and clicks.

How do I get it?

Click this link, enter your email address (no, they won’t sell it to spammers), and download away. Unlike Autodesk downloads, there are no nasty Akamai download managers to contend with, no multi-stage install processes, no massively bloated files, just a straightforward download of a 212 MB MSI installer. Time to download for me on ADSL2 was 2m 56s. The install time, including user interactions was 36s. Time for the first startup, including online registration, was 15s. That got me to the startup screen. The time for the first drawing startup was another 10s.

You can be using Shape in under 4 minutes. That is, you could be using it yourself in less time than it takes to read what I have to say about it.

How is it licensed? How much is it?

It’s a perpetual license, and it’s free. Bricsys has stated that it will always be free. Not much to complain about there.

So what’s in it for Bricsys?

The problem Bricsys faces in churning over large numbers of Autodesk’s disgruntled customer base is not the products. The products are fine. BricsCAD is notably superior to AutoCAD in a bunch of significant ways (while remaining inferior in a handful of less important ways), and costs a fraction as much.

No, the problem Bricsys faces is in persuading large numbers of people to try its products. Shape is an attempt to make that happen. It’s an ice-breaker in a way that goes beyond the usual 30-day free trial product.

There’s hardly any bar to entry; anybody with an email address can own it with zero investment. The interface has been kept very simple and there are a whole bunch of bite-size tutorial videos that demonstrate how to do things. If this product can create a buzz and get people to use a Bricsys product, half the battle is won. The models it creates are ready to be easily taken to the next stage using the full, paid product, BricsCAD BIM.

It’s not SketchUp
There are superficial similarities between Shape and the discarded-by-Google product, Trimble SketchUp.

However, there are very significant differences. SketchUp Free is a cloud-based product that works inside your browser (the paid product is currently a desktop product). Shape is a standalone application that does not require the Internet. SketchUp has its own file formats; getting those models into CAD or BIM is fraught. Shape is not just using industry-standard DWG file format, it’s a proper, efficient, accurate CAD application. Because it’s a cut-down version of what Bricsys is hoping you will use to fully develop the models later, there is no translation. The model you build in Shape opens directly in BricsCAD BIM where automatic classification of building elements can take place.

BricsCAD Shape. It’s free, it’s easy, it’s DWG, it’s CAD, it’s 3D, and it’s a pathway to BIM. It could change the game. I have no way of predicting whether that will happen. But if it does, it’ll be another kick in the guts for a dormant Autodesk that has largely given up on improving its products.

ADSK bubble trouble

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Autodesk has now recorded ten successive quarters of losses totaling $1.289 billion.

Autodesk’s share price had been rapidly rising during the previous nine lossy quarters. If last quarter’s $119.8 million loss was business as usual, why did the ADSK share price plummet? At the time of writing, it’s $23.65 down on its pre-Q3-results high.

Alongside the usual we’re-doing-great stuff in the Q3 announcement, Autodesk announced big layoffs, with another 13% of the workforce to go. Merry Christmas, employees. This follows on from another 10% who were axed last year. Don’t think I’m gloating about this. I’m not; these are real people with real jobs, many of them undoubtedly very good people, and they have my sympathy.

But doesn’t the market love companies cutting jobs? Maybe not when the bill is going to be $135 to $149 million when the CEO states it’s not going to cut costs anyway:

Every penny generated reinvested back in the company – just in different areas: digital infrastructure and construction products. We’ll hire at least that number back. Not cost cutting. Rebalancing.

It may not have helped if traders noticed the Autodesk CFO selling stock on 24 November, a few days before the 2018 Q3 financials were out? This was smart, because he made about $113,000 more on that transaction than he would have if he had sold on 29 November. I’m not suggesting there was anything improper about this, but it was hardly a confidence-inspiring move.

Edit: From R. Scott Herren via Twitter: “…that sale was a 10b5-1 planned sale setup more than 6 months ago. You can find that info on the SEC filing.”

But I suspect it’s just Autodesk’s ongoing failure to pull itself out of the loss trough and desperate-looking need to shed workers that has started to erode confidence in the veracity of its repetitive “Another Great Quarter!” narrative. Maybe the market has started to look a bit deeper than just giving Autodesk a simplistic “it’s OK, revenue always dips when moving to subscription” free kick? Maybe the oft-quoted “new subscriptions” metric has lost its shine as it becomes apparent that subscription numbers aren’t directly proportional to income?

I’ve said it before, but ADSK ain’t ADBE. Different products, different customers, different history, different pricing strategies, different results.

Autodesk’s high-price strategy with poor customer acceptance and big losses differs markedly from Adobe’s low-price strategy with reasonable customer acceptance and merely reduced profits during the transition. Here is Adobe’s record, before and after giving up selling perpetual software licenses. Note the lack of red ink.

All is not well with Autodesk’s subscribe-or-GTFO plan, and it looks like people other than customers have started to notice. Autodesk’s bubble has been pricked and some rapid deflation has occurred. Time will tell whether this is a blip or a trend.

Disclaimer: I am not a financial analyst. This is not financial advice. Make your own decisions.

Autodesk founder outraged by Amazon snatch of cloudy purchases

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Autodesk co-founder John Walker (it’s not his fault, he relinquished control of the company many years ago) recently posted this on Twitter:

In a move reminiscent of the infamous removal of Orwell’s 1984 from Kindle devices (which Amazon promised a court it would never repeat), John’s Audible.com (owned by Amazon) audio books, purchased in 2009-2010, simply went away.

John’s reaction was to post a video of harmless inanimate objects being blown away by a powerful firearm, so I think it’s safe to say he was not overly pleased about this turn of events. Can’t say I blame him.

This is a variant of the old joke on those cheesy pre-show anti-piracy ads that have annoyed owners of legitimately purchased videos for many years:

“You wouldn’t steal a car.”
– I would if I could download it.

Amazon’s version goes:

“You wouldn’t steal a book.”
– I would if I could delete it from my server.

OK, Amazon is obviously doing evil here, but what can John do about it? Maybe nothing. As pointed out in a series of responses to John’s post, Amazon considers itself fully entitled to do this. Amazon also allows itself permission to change the rules as and when it sees fit.

Does this sound familiar? It should. “What’s yours isn’t really yours, even if you paid for it. It can go away when we feel like it. We can change the rules when we feel like it. No guarantees. Just keep paying and hope for the best.”

This is why we don’t CAD in the cloud. Or subscription CAD, for that matter. Owning stuff is still important.

AutoCAD 2018 for Mac – welcome to twenty years ago

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In the past, I’ve described how AutoCAD for Mac was released half-baked (as I predicted) and has remained half-baked ever since.

But wait! Autodesk has proudly announced AutoCAD 2018 for Mac. Skimming through that blog post, I must admit my jaw dropped when I saw some of the new features. This one, for example:

This “new feature” was first provided to AutoCAD users in the 20th century. It was an Express Tool in AutoCAD 2000 (released 1999) and was absorbed into mainstream AutoCAD a few years later. The alias editor goes back even further, to the Release 14 Bonus Tools (1997). That one was absorbed into AutoCAD in 1999. Some of the other new features are also old. Migrating your settings was new back in the century that started without powered flight. Now, not so much.

These features are new to AutoCAD for Mac, of course, and that’s kind of the point. Autodesk is advertising, as new, features that were born before some of the adults who are now using their products.

There are other very important features (e.g. DCL support, essential for LISP compatibility) that date back even longer (Release 12, 1992) and which are still missing from AutoCAD for Mac. That’s right, in some areas AutoCAD for Mac is a quarter of a century behind. And counting.

On the bright side, you do now get access to the pointlessly-changed 2018 DWG format. A couple of features are reasonably new additions, but they represent a small subset of the small number of minor improvements in AutoCAD 2017 and 2018 for Windows. If anything, the rate of improvement of AutoCAD for Mac is lagging behind even the glacial progress of AutoCAD for Windows, despite starting from a much lower base point.

I note with interest that Autodesk’s comparison page is now hiding the detail of the differences between the full product and AutoCAD for Mac. I guess if you have two identically-priced products and one’s missing a bunch of stuff, you might be tempted to hide the fact from your potential customers. This post of mine from last year will give you some idea of what Autodesk’s not telling you about what’s missing from AutoCAD for Mac. Clue: it’s a lot.

Mac users pay full price for their product and deserve much better than this. If you want information on a full-featured “AutoCAD for Mac”, don’t bother looking for it from Autodesk. Try Bricsys instead.

Tip: what to do when your text becomes empty rectangles

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Dear person who used the search terms “writing has become empty rectangle in cad” and “autocad text has become an empty rectangle” on this blog, I suspect you probably have a drawing where QTEXT has been turned on. To fix this, enter QTEXT at the command prompt, set it to OFF, and if the problem doesn’t go away by itself then issue the REGENALL command.

Pedantic note: the command name is QTEXT, but this controls a system variable called QTEXTMODE. QTEXT OFF is equivalent to both SETVAR QTEXTMODE 0 and just QTEXTMODE 0. In LISP it would be (setvar “QTEXTMODE” 0).

This tip applies to all AutoCAD releases and variants you’re likely to run. Because BricsCAD has a high degree of command-line compatibility with AutoCAD, it applies to BricsCAD too. The same may apply to other AutoCAD-compatible applications.

Cloudy and/or subscription CAD still adds vulnerabilities

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Remember when I skewered the myth of CAD on the Cloud being available anytime, anywhere? Back then, I pointed out that Autodesk’s infinitely powerful cloud services had managed a grand total of 2 problem-free fortnights out of the preceding 25.

But maybe Autodesk just had a bad year or something. How are things in 2017? Thanks to Autodesk’s health check site with its History option, I can see that so far this year, the grand total of 14-day pages that show no problems is…

Zero.

That’s right, there have been no clean 100%-uptime fortnights at all this year. None. Most of the pages show multiple failures in multiple products. To be fair, the number of problems shown on each page is rather lower than this extreme example from 2016:

Even when there are no technical problems preventing the use of cloud or subscription software, there is always the possibility that it will simply go away. For example, NVIDIA has announced End of Life for its formerly Autodesk-integrated, once-best-thing-ever Mental Ray renderer. As of today, you can’t buy a subscription to Mental Ray standalone or the plug-ins for Autodesk products 3DS Max and Maya. As of today, the NVIDIA site still states apparently unironically that Mental Ray…

…remains the rendering solution you’ve come to count on within Autodesk Maya and Autodesk 3ds Max

Maybe you shouldn’t count on it too much.

Rendering, with its potential for massively parallel remote processing on multiple other people’s computers, is a relatively attractive cloudy CAD-related function. But if that function becomes temporarily or permanently unavailable, that can make life a little difficult.

Aren’t standalone perpetual licenses a thing of beauty?

The cull continues – yet more Autodesk products are bumped off

While you’re enjoying yourselves at Autodesk University (not that there’s anything wrong with that), spare a thought for a few products that didn’t make it through the year. Their unfortunate ends are unlikely to be announced at AU with flashy videos and gung-ho words, but should still not go unnoticed.

More than just a few products, actually. Autodesk killing off its wares is not new, but 2017 is surely the year where the scythe has been wielded with most gusto. I’ve updated the Autodesk Graveyard again to include a few more ex-products. Thanks to JM and others who have pointed out products that have ceased to be.

While you’re getting excited about subscribing to the latest and greatest new thing, bear in mind that each of the 91 items on the list of demised Autodesk products was once similarly a latest and greatest thing. Also bear in mind that if you’re relying on software that’s cloud-based and/or subscription-only, if the vendor loses interest you could be up a creek without a paddle. You may have to deal with the consequences sooner than you might hope. For example, browser-based renderer Lagoa has been ignoreware since being acquired in 2014 (sound familiar?):

It was only a matter of time, and Lagoa had its pending ending announced on 2 November 2017. It will be put out of its misery on 22 December 2017. That’s not very long for customers to make adjustments.

A reminder: what’s listed on the Autodesk Graveyard is probably incomplete and may not be 100% accurate. Additions and corrections can be made by letting me know in the comments on the post Autodesk products are falling like parrots. If you could provide references that show the birth and death dates of the products you know about, that would be ideal, but all feedback is welcome.

Logitech demonstrates the power of the cloud and cops a bloody nose

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I’ve been a pretty satisfied customer of Logitech products for some years. The mice, keyboards, webcams and 3D controllers (branded as 3DConnexion) I’ve used have generally been well designed, well built and long-term software support has usually been very good (with an exception or two). So it’s with some regret that I have to report them as an example of what not to do in customer service.

Logitech recently sent this email to customers of its Harmony Link universal remote control:

This is an important update regarding your Harmony Link. On March 16, 2018,

Logitech will discontinue service and support for Harmony Link. Your Harmony Link will no longer function after this date.

Although your Harmony Link is no longer under warranty, we are offering you a 35% discount on a new Harmony Hub. Harmony Hub offers app-based remote control features similar to Harmony Link, but with the added benefit of the ability to control many popular connected home devices. To receive your discounted Harmony Hub, go to logitech.com, add Harmony Hub to your cart, and use your personal one-time promotional code […] during checkout.

Thank you for being a Logitech customer and we hope you will take advantage of this offer to upgrade to a new Harmony Hub. If you have any questions or concerns about Harmony Link, please email the Harmony customer care team.

Regards,

Logitech Harmony Team

This isn’t just a matter of no longer supporting an old product (and it’s not that old, anyway – it was still sold directly 2 years ago and old retail stock has been sold until a few months ago). It’s a matter of actively disabling all instances of a product from afar, world-wide.

That’s right, Logitech has demonstrated the (destructive) power of the cloud by using it to remotely kill your perfectly functional device. If it’s out of warranty, send Logitech more money for a newer one. No guarantees on how long it will be before the replacement gets the remote kill-switch treatment.

As you might expect, customers weren’t overjoyed at being treated in this way. Threads popped up on the Logitech forums (where the words “class action lawsuit” were auto-censored), Reddit, Twitter, and as comments on various IT news sites that reported on Logitech’s move.

The supposed reason for Logitech’s decision seemed to make no sense:

We made the business decision to end the support and services of the Harmony Link when the encryption certificate expires in the spring of 2018 – we would be acting irresponsibly by continuing the service knowing its potential/future vulnerability. Our system shows this product, which was last sold by Logitech in fall of 2015, had a small active user base.

Such certificates are commonly purchased and renewed by hardware and software companies for relatively tiny amounts of money. It would have cost Logitech less to renew a certificate than it would to have someone write the explanation about why they weren’t doing it. Very odd. As a business decision, it sucks. It also exposes Logitech management as utterly out of touch with the reality in which their customers live.

In a reaction that should have come as a surprise to nobody (but apparently did to Logitech), pretty much everybody gave the company a major roasting. Many people pointed out that such a move would be considered illegal in their countries (including mine), or at best (for Logitech) it would entitle the customer to a full refund from the retailer. Many people promised to never buy anything from Logitech in particular, and any device capable of being remote-bricked in general.

Once it became apparent that this was a major PR disaster, Logitech did a belated partial U-turn and extended the offer of a free replacement to customers with units that were out of warranty.

“I made a mistake,” head of Logitech Harmony Rory Dooley explains to Wired. “Mea culpa. We’re going to do right by our customers, and do the right thing.”

This reminds me of those politicians who get caught out misusing expenses who then say sorry and offer to pay back the ill-gotten gains, as if that’s enough to get them off the hook. Nope. Too little, too late.

Logitech, you just destroyed a whole bunch of customer trust. How valuable is that to you? How much is it going to cost you in sales? How much will it cost you in marketing to try to regain it? It stands to be a fair bit more than the cost of updating a certificate, I would guess. And you’re still bricking a whole bunch of perfectly functional devices. How is that environmentally responsible?

The idea of any product that can be remote-disabled or even reduced in functionality by anybody should be anathema to all of us. Any product. Not just gadgets. (How’s your internet-reliant juicer going? Oops.) Oven, garage door, fridge, car (Tesla can do this), hardware, firmware, software. Yes, software.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is why we don’t do CAD in the cloud. I’ve explained years ago how cloudy CAD adds multiple points of failure. I’m still not wrong about that. One of those additional points of failure is when the vendor decides to stop offering the service. And, of course, the same applies to subscription software, even when it’s not cloudy. The vendor loses interest and you’re left high and dry.

Don’t think it won’t happen. It happens repeatedly and will continue to happen. Don’t be a victim when it does.

Tip – making your 3D controller work sensibly in BricsCAD

BricsCAD V18 – showing Autodesk how to do DWG CAD

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For years now, Autodesk has done very little worthwhile with AutoCAD. There have been a few small but welcome improvements, but it’s really just tinkering at the edges. The product as a whole continues to stagnate and yet blimp out. It’s getting bigger and slower with each new release. The downloads get bigger. The install times get longer. The startup times drag out. The responsiveness suffers. And for what? Pretty much the same old thing, every time. Sometimes you don’t even get a new desktop icon. Don’t get me started on value for money.

It’s as if Autodesk considers DWG-based desktop CAD to be a solved problem. Many CAD users accept this. There’s not much more that can be done to improve it, right?

Wrong.

Bricsys has, yet again, proven Autodesk wrong. It is very possible to significantly improve DWG-based CAD. The improvements to the just-released BricsCAD V18 go far beyond anything Autodesk has done for many years, and that’s improving on an already-excellent and innovative product in V17. I’ll be covering some of the most important changes in future posts, but for now here are a few Bricsys links:

BricsCAD V18 release notes. Loooong – just look at all those improvements!
Blog post Announcing BricsCAD V18: faster and smarter!
Blog post BricsCAD V18: The All-in-One Solution for General Design, BIM and Mechanical (posts by the legendary Don Strimbu – failing to hold on to Don was one of Autodesk’s most spectacularly dumb moves).
Video What’s new in BricsCAD V18 (YouTube, 8:42).
Video What’s new in BricsCAD V18 Classic and Pro (YouTube, 2:58) – shorter but not hugely informative.

Don’t take my word for it. The easiest way to test the validity of what I have to say is to try it out for yourself. Unlike Autodesk products, Bricsys downloads and installs are small, fast and efficient. How efficient? This efficient (R.K. McSwain, Twitter):

It’s a 258 MB download for an entire DWG-based CAD application which is significantly more fully-featured than AutoCAD. No nasty malware-like download manager. It’s not a stub or a pre-installer that expands itself before even starting the install proper. It’s a ready-to-run installer for the entire top-of-the-range product capable of parametric 3D, sheet metal design and BIM. It installs and starts up quickly. You can have no trace of BricsCAD on your computer now and be editing your DWGs with it (yes, including your AutoCAD 2018 and Civil 3D DWGs) in a few minutes.

Here’s the download link. You can evaluate it for 30 days.

Did I mention that perpetual licenses are available? Or that it’s way cheaper than AutoCAD? Or that when you report a problem it goes to a real developer who actually cares about fixing it in a reasonable timeframe?