Category Archives: AutoCAD LT

An email exchange with a friend about AutoCAD

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!

AutoCAD 2018.1 released, but only for some

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Autodesk has released the AutoCAD (and LT) 2018.1 Update, not to be confused with the earlier ill-fated 2018.0.1 Update. It’s only available for currently-paying subscription and maintenance customers. The “non critical” bug fixes in this Update (by Autodesk’s definition) are being withheld from Autodesk’s other customers.

Those of you who have allowed your maintenance to expire due to Autodesk’s development inaction and unjustified price increases can consider yourselves duly punished for failing to fall into line.

If you have the execrable Autodesk desktop app installed (not recommended) and it works as expected, this update will present itself to you. Otherwise, get it from your Autodesk Account page. Go to Management > AutoCAD > 2018 Downloads > Updates & Add-ons and then pick the appropriate AutoCAD 2018.1 Update download.

It has yet to be seen whether this update will break things, so if you’re feeling nervous you might want to hold off for a while and let others find out for you. (Edit: it broke one person’s AutoCAD, see comment from R.K. below).

Weighing in at well over 400 MB, the AutoCAD 2018.1 Update download is about twice the size of a complete BricsCAD download, even before expansion. So it must contain a pretty impressive amount of stuff, right? Or is it all bloat? Well, it includes 2018.0.1 and 2018.0.2 and adds this:

Xref Layers Override – Improvements to Xref Layers make it easier to identify overrides and restore them to their default values.
Views and Viewports – A new Named Views panel is added to the View tab to make it easy to create and restore named views from the ribbon, and to create scaled views and viewports for your layouts. The new layout viewports are automatically assigned a standard scale that can easily be changed from a new scale grip on the viewport. Viewport grips have been enhanced.
High Resolution Monitor Support – Supports additional dialog boxes. Palettes and icons are correctly adjusted to the Windows setting for the display scale.
3D Graphics Performance – Work on performance continues to optimize the speed of 3D display for the Wireframe, Realistic, and Shaded visual styles.

The user interface has been touched up to support the above changes. The Preview Guide has been prepared to the usual excellent standard.

That’s all useful stuff, and most welcome. Work has gone into providing some genuinely useful adjustments. But there’s not a lot of it. Autodesk is still just tinkering at the edges.

Overall, AutoCAD 2018.1 is a pretty minor mid-term update, falling a long way short of, say, Release 13c4. That update was shipped on CD to all customers. Free. No maintenance or subscription required.

Bricsys does much more significant and worthwhile mid-term updates than this, and doesn’t charge for them. Perpetual license owners, even those not on maintenance, get them for nothing. Along with the bug fixes. Which are properly documented.

Autodesk used to do all that too, but its customer service has since regressed to the point that the standards of the Release 13 days are something to yearn for. Long-term Autodesk customers will know just how damning that state of affairs is. Autodesk lags a long way behind not only the competition, but also its former self.

Autodesk CEO and all-rental architect Andrew Anagnost has asked Autodesk customers to give him a year to prove that his business model will provide them with better value. It’s not clear when that year was supposed to start, but the all-subscription start date of 1 August 2016 seems reasonable. However you reckon it, a big slab of that year is gone and there’s very little to show for it.

Time to get your finger out, Andrew.

New Autodesk subscription offer to perpetual license holders

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Don’t get too excited. Autodesk’s recent attempt to price-force perpetual license maintenance customers onto subscription (rental) remains in place, unchanged and just as unappealing as before. If you’re one of those customers, there’s nothing new here of interest to you.

This new offer, at 30% off the normal but extremely high subscription price, is at first sight even less appealing than the approximately 60% saving that the above offer provides. But it’s aimed at different customers, and there’s the remote possibility that such customers might find it worthwhile.

The new offer is called FY18 Q1 Autodesk – Global Field Promotion and is aimed at bringing into the rental fold those customers who hold old perpetual licenses that are not on maintenance. If you have an old AutoCAD Release 14 lying around that has never been upgraded, or an AutoCAD 2007 license where you allowed the maintenance (then called Subscription) to lapse, you can trade it in for the 30% discount on a wide range of subscription products. You need to surrender the perpetual license, and you need to pay up front for three years of subscription. Read the FAQ for details.

Three years of subscription at only 30% off is actually really expensive. Depending on what product you go for, it could work out about the same as a perpetual license cost back when Autodesk used to sell software. Despite that substantial investment, you’ll be left with nothing whatsoever at the end of the three years. You will then be expected to wear a huge increase in rental costs when the 30% discount wears off. It works out to a price jump of about 43%, plus whatever price rises there may have been in the meantime.

Excited by this offer? No? Gee, you people are hard to please!

Don’t dismiss it out of hand, though. If you meet all of the following conditions, you should still consider this offer:

You have an old non-upgraded eligible license lying around.
You’re never going to want to use that license ever again.
You have an absolute need to rent one of the Autodesk products on offer, and would otherwise be paying 100% rather than 70% of the huge subscription fees.
You can afford to pay those high fees in advance for three years.
You’re definitely going to need that rented software for more than two years (otherwise it works out cheaper to rent at 100% for 2/3 of the time).
You can budget for a huge price increase at the end of the three year period, assuming you’re going to use the software long-term.
You don’t think Autodesk is going to come up with a more attractive offer later.

Maybe the Autodesk execs think this is going to be perceived as an attractive offer, but if they do there’s a fair bit of self-delusion going on. I fully expect this campaign to fail to live up to Autodesk’s expectations, and much better offers to follow later, in order to try to tempt the remaining hold-outs. No guarantees, obviously; it’s your money and your gamble.

Having had a good look at what Autodesk execs have been telling the stock market, I’ve been expecting this move. Old perpetual license holders have been identified as a target market. However, I was expecting the move to come later than this, and I was expecting the terms of the offer to be much more attractive. Are perpetual license converts thinner on the ground than Autodesk expected? Is Autodesk getting desperate for cash to make this quarter’s numbers look better than they otherwise would? Wouldn’t surprise me.

AutoCAD 2018 – disable InfoCenter

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Here’s another AutoCAD 2018 download, just in case you haven’t had enough.

If you want to disable AutoCAD’s InfoCenter (and you should, unless have a specific reason for keeping it – here’s why), go get the updated download from uber-expert Owen Wengerd’s ManuSoft Freebies page. It works for AutoCAD and AutoCAD LT.

Script for creating AutoCAD Classic workspace

Any BricsCAD users out there? v.2016

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Back in 2010 I asked the question Any BricsCAD users out there? and there were a few of you who had tried to replace AutoCAD with BricsCAD. Most who responded had made the change successfully, others not so much.

Six years on, the situation is different. The fact that you can’t buy a permanent AutoCAD license any more has prompted some Autodesk customers to look more seriously at alternative vendors who do provide that option. Bricsys is one of those vendors, and their DWG-based AutoCAD alternative BricsCAD has improved way more rapidly than AutoCAD over the same time period. No, that isn’t a guess, I’ve been keeping an active eye on things. BricsCAD today is by no means perfect, but it’s impressive in many ways. LISP compatibility and performance are excellent, for example. BricsCAD v16 superior to the also imperfect AutoCAD 2017 in several areas, despite the total cost of ownership being significantly lower.

Here’s the question I asked back then:

I would be very interested to hear from any of you who have adopted BricsCAD (either partially or fully replacing AutoCAD or AutoCAD LT in your organisation), or at least seriously investigated using the product.

Why did you investigate changing over? How far have you gone? What are your experiences? What are the pros and cons? How is performance? Reliability? Bugs? Ease of use? Familiarity? Support and other aspects of customer service? Total cost of ownership? Are you experiencing interoperability problems when exchanging drawings with Autodesk software users? How did you go with incorporating in-house customisation and third party tools?

How would you answer that question today? Would you be interested in me providing more posts about BriscCAD, such as practical experiences with attempting a transition from AutoCAD?

When is AutoCAD not AutoCAD?

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When is AutoCAD nor AutoCAD? When it’s AutoCAD WS. But it’s not quite that simple.

I’ve been correcting people for months when they say things like “Project Butterfly is AutoCAD on the Cloud.” No, it’s not. It’s a DWG editor of sorts, but anybody who has used both will know that it’s not AutoCAD or anything like it. Although it’s useful for viewing and markup and is improving all the time, Project Butterfly is still very restricted and is likely to remain so for a long time. You wouldn’t want to spend a significant portion of your day drawing with it.

OK, so Project Butterfly isn’t AutoCAD. I’m glad we’ve cleared that up. But wait! Now it is AutoCAD! AutoCAD WS, that is. AutoCAD WS is the recently-announced free iPod/iPhone/iPad app to access Project Butterfly. But it’s not really AutoCAD either, despite being named thus. Confused yet?

AutoCAD is Autodesk’s strongest brand name, but it has been diluted a great deal in recent times. Let’s have a look at things that are called AutoCAD or somehow based on AutoCAD, and try to make some sense of it all. Here they are, in alphabetical order:

AutoCAD – the real thing
AutoCAD Architecture – AutoCAD-based vertical
AutoCAD Civil – AutoCAD-based vertical
AutoCAD Civil 3D – AutoCAD-based vertical
AutoCAD Electrical – AutoCAD-based vertical
AutoCAD for Mac – AutoCAD with a few bits missing
AutoCAD Freestyle – a cheap and simple DWG editor, not much like real AutoCAD
AutoCAD Inventor Suite – this is basically Autodesk Inventor, which is neither AutoCAD nor based on AutoCAD. But a real AutoCAD and AutoCAD Mechanical also comes in the box.
AutoCAD LT – AutoCAD with some features disabled to make it fit into a lower price bracket
AutoCAD Map 3D – AutoCAD-based vertical
AutoCAD Mechanical – AutoCAD-based vertical
AutoCAD MEP – AutoCAD-based vertical
AutoCAD OEM – development platform for using AutoCAD subsets as a basis for 3rd-party applications
AutoCAD P&ID – AutoCAD-based vertical
AutoCAD Plant 3D – AutoCAD-based vertical
AutoCAD Raster Design – not AutoCAD, but adds features to AutoCAD and various AutoCAD-based verticals
AutoCAD Revit Architecture Suite – Autodesk Revit Architecture, which is neither AutoCAD nor based on AutoCAD. But AutoCAD and AutoCAD Architecture come in the box.
AutoCAD Revit Structure Suite – Autodesk Revit Structure, which is neither AutoCAD nor based on AutoCAD. But AutoCAD Structural Detailing comes in the box.
AutoCAD Revit MEP Suite – Autodesk Revit MEP, which is neither AutoCAD nor based on AutoCAD. But AutoCAD and AutoCAD MEP come in the box.
AutoCAD Structural Detailing – AutoCAD-based vertical
AutoCAD WS – not AutoCAD, but an iPod/iPhone/iPad app to access Project Butterfly
Autodesk Design Review – not AutoCAD, but a DWF viewer & markup tool, works with DWG TrueView to allow DWG markup
DWG TrueView – a very heavily cut-down AutoCAD to provide a free DWG viewer and release converter (includes DWG TrueConvert)
Project Butterfly – not AutoCAD, but rather a cloud/browser-based DWG viewer/editor

That’s a lot of products, but I haven’t even included all the various new suites that include AutoCAD. I’m not sure this plethora is such a great thing, leading as it does to customer confusion and brand dilution. When “AutoCAD” can mean almost anything, does it still really mean something?

More Autodesk deception over LT productivity study

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Following on from the AutoCAD 2011 productivity study I critiqued earlier, there is now an LT version. Do the same credibility problems apply to this study too? Yes, and then some.

In addition to the drawings and operations being deliberately hand-picked to demonstrate new features, no direct comparison is performed at all between the two releases on the same platforms. Every single quoted “productivity improvement” figure includes, free of charge, three years of hardware and operating system progress and a more upmarket graphics card.

If you read business “news” sources that just reprint press releases, such as this Yahoo! Finance one (thanks, Carol Bartz), you won’t see this mentioned. Instead, you will see deceptive statements like these:

David S. Cohn, an independent consultant

Er, no, in this context he’s not independent, he’s an Autodesk consultant. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

overall productivity gains of 44 percent for users moving from AutoCAD LT 2008 or earlier versions to AutoCAD LT 2011

…as long as you only ever perform certain carefully selected operations and upgrade your hardware and operating system. Like the other study, the 44% figure is totally meaningless and quoting it without qualification is downright deceptive.

Most users will be able to get more work done faster by upgrading to AutoCAD LT 2011

This statement is totally unsupported. There is no analysis of what “most users” do with the software, and no attempt to quantify the portion of time such users spend on these hand-picked operations. Neither is there any analysis performed on more common operations to see if the new releases introduced any detriment to productivity in those areas.

Improvements to the graphical user interface deliver a 43 percent productivity increase.

If that’s true, why do so many users of 2009 to 2011 immediately turn off the new user interface? Are they all stupid Luddites who have a burning desire to work much less efficiently? This study, like its non-LT counterpart, contains many unqualified statements about the Ribbon improving productivity and providing other benefits. I’d really like to see a proper independent study done into that.

To sum up, Autodesk is quite prepared to say misleading stuff about its products that will be regurgitated unquestioningly by those who don’t know any better, in the hope that it will be believed by those who do, and not exposed by those who care. But it’s not prepared to answer straightforward legitimate questions about its business, offering a pile of spin instead. This, supposedly because “management in publicly trade companies are forbidden by US laws and accounting regulations to discuss some topics”.

I think I’ll borrow a phrase from Deelip here, as it seems appropriate.

Bottom line. This is bullshit.

It just so happens that right now I’m in a no-bullshit mood. I’ve been exposed to more than enough of it lately. Unfortunate timing, Autodesk.

I know this sort of marketing device is nothing new, and maybe that’s the point. This kind of thing is so 20th century. In the good old days, negative commentary about stuff like this would be seen by few, and largely confined to company-controlled environments and one-way media such as printed magazines. Things aren’t like that any more. This sort of nonsense is being increasingly noticed, criticised and derided in blogs and social media. I have hope that the point will soon come when companies’ PR consultants work out that the negatives of spewing bullshit outweigh the positives. When that point is reached, the bullshit will stop. And won’t that be great?

Any Bricscad users out there?

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I would be very interested to hear from any of you who have adopted Bricscad (either partially or fully replacing AutoCAD or AutoCAD LT in your organisation), or at least seriously investigated using the product. This post is aimed at users and CAD managers rather than third party developers, who I expect to cover in future posts.

Why did you investigate changing over? How far have you gone? What are your experiences? What are the pros and cons? How is performance? Reliability? Bugs? Ease of use? Familiarity? Support and other aspects of customer service? Total cost of ownership? Are you experiencing interoperability problems when exchanging drawings with Autodesk software users? How did you go with incorporating in-house customisation and third party tools?

Please add a comment, or if you prefer, email me using my contact form.

CAD International interview on drcauto and other subjects

1 Reply

This morning I spoke with CAD International‘s Nigel Varley. Here is a paraphrased summary of the interview.

SJ: When did CAD International buy the drcauto intellectual property rights?
NV: About two weeks ago.

SJ: You are currently helping drcauto customers with authorisation codes, is that correct?
NV: Yes, masses of them. It’s taking up a lot of our peoples’ time.

SJ: Are you charging for this service?
NV: Not at present.

SJ: Do you intend to charge for this service in the future?
NV: Maybe. We may need to, both to pay for our time and to recoup our investment. I don’t particularly like the idea of annual renewals for software, so we may do something different in future.

SJ: If somebody wanted to buy drcauto products such as LT Toolkit now, could they do so?
NV: No, we’re still processing the materials we were given when we bought the rights. It wasn’t left in a well-organised state. I’m not sure if that was done deliberately or if it was just like that.

SJ: Do you have any plans to continue development of LT Toolkit or the other drcauto products?
NV: It’s too early to say at this time. I understand it doesn’t work right now with AutoCAD LT 2010 with Update 2 applied, or on 64-bit Windows, or on Windows 7. It’s not clear at this stage how much work is involved in making it work. It should be doable, but we can’t make any commitments at this stage.

SJ: So do you have a timeframe for doing any of this stuff?
NV: No, it’s too early. We’re still processing it.

SJ: What about former drcauto employees helping people out with authorisation codes?
NV: They have no rights to do that. They don’t own the intellectual property, we do. People need to be very careful.

SJ: Are you contemplating legal action?
NV: I think I’ll keep that under my hat for now.

SJ: Do you foresee any problems with Autodesk if you go ahead with LT Toolkit?
NV: I don’t think so. Autodesk would be pretty naive, with competing products around at a lower price than LT and with LISP built in, to think that they would gain any sales by blocking LT Toolkit. They would just be shooting themselves in the foot.

SJ: Autodesk has always been strongly opposed to products like LT Toolkit. Are you concerned about legal action from Autodesk?
NV: Well, people say that Autodesk has been against it, but I haven’t seen any evidence of that. When I spoke to the late Gary D’Arcy he told me that Autodesk had never once even contacted him to try to get him to stop developing it.

On Deelip’s blog there has been some discussion about resellers and what they should be allowed to do, so I asked some questions along those lines.

SJ: What is the relationship between CAD International in the USA and Australia?
NV: We’re an Austalian company, moving into the US marketplace for those people in the USA who want to buy our products. We don’t have offices in the USA, but we do have people on the ground.

SJ: Is CAD International an authorised AutoCAD reseller?
NV: No. We’ve been selling Autodesk products for 15 years without a direct relationship. We buy from Scholastic like everybody else in the same position. It’s not worth becoming a dealer; the obligations are too great and the margins are not worthwhile. We’ve been asked on several ocasions over the years and always said no.

[Note: I’ve since read (in something written well before this issue was raised here) that Autodesk Australia intends to tighten up the reseller situation in the very near future. These things go in cycles, and have for the last 25 years.]

SJ: Does Autodesk have a problem with you promoting competing products such as Bricscad?
NV: They have never spoken to us about it in the past, but as we don’t have a direct relationship with them it’s not surprising.

SJ: I see from your web site that you are selling DWG TrueView for $195. Isn’t that a free product?
NV: That fee is for supply services; research services if you prefer. People can download it from Autodesk if they like or get it from us. We just put it on the site as a trial to see if anybody wanted to buy it. Nobody has, yet.

SJ: I can’t say I’m greatly surprised by that. Has Autodesk contacted you about this issue?
NV: No, we’ve heard nothing from Autodesk. They don’t really care about us, we’re a pretty small player in the market.

[Edit: the $195 price tag has since vanished from the site.]

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Mostly AutoCAD, BricsCAD and related subjects