Category Archives: AutoCAD

Autodesk edges towards taking money for Cloud services

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In an email to Subscription customers, Autodesk made several announcements about its Autodesk 360 Cloud services.

  1. Subscription users now get 25 GB per seat of Cloud storage, up from 3 GB. Non-Subscription users who create an Autodesk 360 account get 3 GB. The intent here, as with the trebling of upgrade costs, is to get you hooked on Subscription so you become a permanent revenue stream.
  2. More services are now available, apparently, but the list of services looks about the same to me. The table that lists which services are available for which products can be found here. If you’re an AutoCAD user, the only service available is Autodesk 360 Rendering.
  3. The services are now metered. You get a certain number of “cloud units”, and these are eaten up as you use the services. A standard AutoCAD user (with Subscription) gets 100 units. Each render costs you 5 units, so effectively you get 20 on-line renders per seat. That’s enough for a taster, but if Cloud rendering is as brilliant as Autodesk says it is, you’ll soon use that allocation up.
  4. The metering doesn’t mean anything – yet. If you use up all your units, it doesn’t matter. You can go on using more of them as long as you’re on Subscription.
  5. This free lunch will end as soon as Autodesk says so, or as soon as it puts a mechanism in place to charge you for units. No news yet on when that might be, but as parting you from your money is obviously the whole point of the exercise, I can’t imagine it will be too far in the future.

Autodesk reserves the right to change all of this without notice, and to terminate access to Autodesk 360 services at any time and for any reason.

AutoCAD 2013 – An Autodesk Help writer responds

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Following some email discussions, I am happy to present a response from a relevant Autodesk person to the posts and comments here about AutoCAD 2013’s Help.

Thanks for the opportunity to respond to your readers, Steve.

First, I want to assure you that we’re listening to your comments about AutoCAD 2013 Help. We are adding it to the valuable feedback we’ve already received from users who participated in our Beta program. I responded promptly to every comment from each Beta user and will now address a wider audience.

Here are some of the trends we’ve seen so far in the suggestions users are making about AutoCAD Help:

  • Additional navigation to supplement our Search function
  • Alphabetical listings of AutoCAD commands and system variables
  • Improved precision from the Search function
  • Access to information about new features

We are working right now on our update plans. We invite your additional comments about any other problems you’ve had so that we can have a broad view of your needs as we define the scope of our update.

I’m glad to say that Help updates will no longer have to wait until the next product release. I’d also like to emphasize that the software industry, Autodesk included, is trending toward online delivery of both software and documentation, and that these technology changes pose significant challenges to all of us.

We always appreciate your feedback and we take it seriously.

Thanks and best regards,

Dieter Schlaepfer
Principal Content Developer
Autodesk, Inc.

As Dieter suggests, please comment here with your problems and suggestions. Please be as brutally honest as you wish about Autodesk, its offerings and its future plans. However, I ask that you remain civil. I have ‘known’ Dieter on-line for about 20 years and can attest to his integrity, intelligence and intense desire to do the best job possible. He did indeed respond very fully and honestly to the comments made by myself and others during the Beta program and in our emails. He may very well be the best listener I’ve ever come across, in any context.

In short, Dieter’s one of the good guys and he’s doing a brave thing here. Let him know what you really think, but please don’t beat him up.

AutoCAD 2013 – Using Help in anger

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Trying to be fair, I decided to put aside my initial hostility to the AutoCAD 2013 Help system and use it for real. I used it in a realistic situation, to find out how to work with something new or changed (model documentation) as I was working through it with my own example drawing. Try as I might to give it a fair go, I could only get so far before I got irritated. Using it in anger might not be an entirely appropriate phrase for it, but it’s not that far off. Using it in annoyance, perhaps? Here’s how it went.

I hit F1, wait for it to finish loading itself, click in the search box (because that’s not where the focus is to start with), type ‘model documentation’ and pick Search (because Enter doesn’t work). I then wait again, for about 10 seconds, even though I’ve configured it for offline use. Eventually, there is a huge mass of results displayed, almost all of which are totally (totally!) irrelevant to model documentation. Most of them are relevant only to ARX programmers dealing with completely unrelated matters.

If I use the “phrase” option rather than “and”, the list is much shorter and has a much higher proportion of results that have some relevance, but there are still completely pointless results. For example, the 4th result is About Performance Considerations (AutoLISP), which does not contain the phrase at all. It does contain the words ModelSpace and Document, but not together. It does not contain any information remotely related to model documentation. Didn’t Autodesk buy a search technology company a while back? If that company’s technology is in use here, then Autodesk bought a dud.

At least the top two results directly relate to what I need, so I’ll move on with those. They are Commands for Working With Model Documentation Drawing Views and About Model Documentation. The content of the former page is OK; it’s just a list of commands. There is some pointlessly wasted space at the top of the page that means I have to scroll down to see the bottom of the list, but other than that it serves as a useful reference. The latter page is also fine. It’s an executive summary of the feature with a few relevant pictures, followed by a decent set of links pointing to relevant pages that expand on the subject and explain how to do various tasks associated with it. Now I have overcome the inadequacies of Search and determined that useful Help content is all there, that’s all good then, isn’t it? Not really, I’m afraid.

If Help was being run from a real browser, I’d be able to keep both of those starting pages open with their useful links, then middle-click on each of them as needed to open each useful page in a new tab. However, Help isn’t being run like that. It’s being run from inside Autodesk’s pseudo-browser thing, which only allows one page at a time to be displayed. To be fair, this restriction also applies to the old CHM-based Help to some extent. However, the old CHM Help is split into multiple sections, and it is possible to have multiple CHMs each open in their own windows. For example, I can have the AutoCAD 2010 main Help and Developer Documentation open at the same time, something that’s very important for my productivity and which I would find extremely difficult to give up.

To work around the tabless nature of 2013 Help, I need to choose one particular page and stick to it. When I need another page, I need to navigate back up to one of the original links pages and then back down again. That would be bad enough if navigation within the pseudo-browser was good, but unfortunately it isn’t. Despite what looks like a breadcrumb feature at the top of the page, this is non-functional because of the lack of a hierarchical structure to the content. It just keeps taunting me by saying ‘Home’ and nothing else, pointlessly wasting a swathe of vertical space. There are back and forward buttons in that space, but the back and forward mouse buttons I can use everywhere else do nothing in this browser. You can use Alt+Left and Alt+Right to back and forward. Don’t go too far back, though! If you do, the Search panel goes blank and can’t be restored by going forward again, or by switching between Favorites and Search. To fix this, you can close and restart Help , or pick the Home button and wait about 6 seconds for it to get its act together and restore the Search panel. Then you’ll be at the home page, which may not be where you wanted to go back to.

All right, so I have chosen the single page I’m allowed to have open and I want to use the features it describes. This test PC only has a single 1280 x 1024 screen so there really isn’t room for both AutoCAD and Help at the same time, a situation that will be familiar to users of notebooks. I click on the AutoCAD drawing area behind the Help window, expecting AutoCAD to come to the top and to go behind it. Nothing happens, other than Help losing focus. Help stays on top, obscuring the drawing area. If I click the main AutoCAD taskbar button (this is in XP), that minimizes both Help and AutoCAD. Restoring AutoCAD also restores Help, so it still obscures the drawing area. The two windows are linked, and not in a good way for somebody with one screen. I guess some users will want Help to stay on top, but there are plenty of others who won’t, so what could Autodesk have done to keep everybody happy? Made it configurable, obviously.

Eventually I worked out that I could work on AutoCAD if I explicitly minimised the Help window, so away I went. I used the Commands for Working… page, then the VIEWBASE page to start my model documentation experiment. I then picked another link from the VIEWBASE page, the Drawing View Creation Ribbon Contextual Tab page. Having finished with that, I wanted to get back to the Commands for Working… page, so instead of picking multiple Back buttons (which as noted above is fraught with danger if you do it too often), I clicked on that result in the Search panel on the left. Did this take me back to the Commands for Working… page? No, it did not. It did nothing at all. To make it work I had to click another search result first, and only then the one I really wanted.

One saving grace is that I discovered that if I right-clicked on a link in Help, I could copy the URL and then paste it into a proper browser. This works both on and offline, and allowed me to work around many of the problems noted above. This kludge doesn’t work for search results, though, only for links in pages.

I’ve given AutoCAD 2013 Help a decent go, as much as the average reasonable person would before giving up. Maybe more so. I feel pretty comfortable about giving it what I consider a fair assessment. The content of the Help pages itself looks pretty good to me, at least for those pages I visited and the context in which I was using them. If you already know what command you’re supposed to be using, you just hit F1 from within that command to get at the page you want and you don’t need to go any further, you could well be satisfied. But if you’re using the system in any other way, there’s no getting away from it, it’s a crock. The content is not the problem, it’s the loss of structure to that content, and the browser thing being used to present that content. That loss of structure was A Bad Idea and the browser is a very poor effort. The system as a whole should not have been inflicted on customers.

As a courtesy, Autodesk should do what it did following the 2011 Help debacle and provide a CHM solution for customers to download. It should then go on providing a CHM solution indefinitely, until it can come up with something that is of comparable quality. People are already talking about making their own 2013 CHMs. Autodesk, please do the right thing and save them the bother; let us all know that you’re going to provide CHM as a workaround and get it to us as soon as you can. Don’t worry about losing face by admitting that the 2013 Help isn’t up to scratch. It’s too late for that; we’ve already noticed.

AutoCAD 2013 – Help improved in one area

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There’s one important area in which AutoCAD 2013’s Help shines when compared with its immediate predecessors. If you’re a Visual LISP user, you’ll be pleased to know that if you select a function name in the editor (e.g. (vla-get-ActiveDocument)) and hit Ctrl+F1, this now takes you to the appropriate page in the ActiveX and VBA Reference, as it should. In AutoCAD 2011 you just got a cryptic message or a 404 error, depending on the context. In AutoCAD 2012, you were just taken to the front page of Help and expected to find it yourself. Props to Autodesk for fixing this problem.

As a bonus, the reference you’re taken to is still a CHM so it works nicely. The Search tab doesn’t work in Windows 7, but that applies to all CHM Help and it’s Microsoft’s fault, not Autodesk’s. The structured contents and index are fully functional, which makes the whole thing usable even without the search facility.

AutoCAD 2013 – Autodesk video tutorial for Help

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Autodesk has produced a 2-minute video explaining the features of the new Help system in AutoCAD 2013 that I recently panned. As you might expect, it’s kind of upbeat and chirpy, but the fact that Autodesk feels the need to provide a tutorial on how to use Help says it all, really. Whatever, it may be useful to you, so here it is. It’s hosted on the Autodesk site, unlike many other Autodesk videos (and my own, to be fair), so those of you who have YouTube blocked at work may still be able to watch it.

If you’re having trouble watching the tutorial, don’t panic. I expect Autodesk will soon produce another tutorial explaining how to use the tutorial explaining how to use Help explaining how to use the product to actually do work.

Autodesk acquires Angry Birds developer Rovio

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Autodesk announced today that it had welcomed Rovio Entertainment into the Autodesk fold. Following a US$2.6 billion acquisition, the publisher of mega hit video game Angry Birds is now Autodesk’s Mobile Entertainment division based in Espoo, Finland. “This is a tremendously exciting development for Autodesk going forward,” said Autodesk CEO Carl Bass. “Rovio is the world leader in mobile entertainment software,” he added, “so for Autodesk to have access to that market and that technology opens up a whole new world for us.”

Bass was effusive about the synergistic benefits of the merger and the benefits it will bring to the user interfaces of all Autodesk products. “When a kid starts playing Angry Birds, they don’t need to read a huge mass of documentation. Just show them a few cartoons and they’re away, instantly productive. This is the essence of the democratization of design; it’s not dumbing down, it’s funning up.” This potential ease of use is excellent news for AutoCAD users, because the documentation is now so terrible that it will be wonderful if we no longer have to try to use it.

Former Rovio CEO, Taikke Monniennren, now Autodesk Vice President in charge of Mobile Entertainment, is equally excited about the future. “We have already been given access to the Autodesk code base and my developers can see the potential there. By copying and pasting some code modules, we hope to be able to piece together the Angry Birds 3D Max Suite in a few short years,” said Monniennren. “The main challenge will be in keeping the download size manageable, but with a bit of luck we will be able to keep it down to just a few gigabytes.” In comparison, the original Angry Birds game was just over a megabyte.

“Do not underestimate the strategic importance of this announcement,” said Bass. “Although it may come as an unpleasant surprise to our competitors, our customers are well aware that this is the direction we have been moving for some time now.” This is true. Autodesk is doing whatever it can to appear young, hip, cool, trendy, mobile, social and just totally with it, man. It has been talking and sometimes acting big on Cloud and mobile computing for a while. Clearly, acquiring Visual Tao (now AutoCAD WS) was just the beginning.

Who would dare to call Autodesk antisocial? Autodesk videos are all over YouTube. On Twitter, many key Autodesk people tweet many times a day. The recent AutoCAD 2013 launch in San Francisco was done entirely via Facebook (which enhanced Autodesk’s green credentials by allowing a reduction in the number of press and bloggers flown in from around the world to only 120). The first thing a new AutoCAD 2013 user sees on installation is a Welcome screen that is largely dedicated to Autodesk pushing its app store and Facebook and Twitter pages. Because the Welcome screen phones home on each use, Autodesk can easily slip in new links to any other sites it wishes to promote. I expect your AutoCAD 2013 Welcome screen will sport Angry Birds gaming links within a few days. Angry Birds gaming plug-ins for AutoCAD and related products are likely to appear in the app store soon, but I expect we will have to wait for AutoCAD 2014 until the games become part of the core product.

Clearly for Autodesk, kids are the new adults. But is what spoiled teenagers do on their iPhones really a sound basis for the needs of professional CAD users in a corporate environment? How well does this concept work in practice? Bass answered that by showing a prototype user interface for AutoCAD that uses the new technology. He demonstrated it on a 48″ touch-screen, but it is believed that it will be at least partly functional using old-fashioned mouse-based technology.

Bass started by selecting a red bird from the Ribbon, which sported a snazzy new flouro theme. He dragged the bird down into the drawing area (which had a beautiful animated background with kittens, rainbows and unicorns; let’s hope that makes into production). While this was going on, the system was providing haptic feedback, with the screen vibrating and the bird squawking when dragged close enough to an existing object. By dropping the bird close to the end of a line, Bass was able to start drawing a line from exactly that point. He then drew back the bird and released it such that it was launched in the direction he wanted the line to go. As the bird shot forward, Bass touched it just as it crossed another line and it snapped on to the midpoint with a happy chirp. Perfect!

He then demonstrated other birds in action. To draw a polyline you use the yellow bird and touch it at each vertex as it flings itself along your desired path. To explode a block you use the black bird, triggering a loud explosion which I think will have to be toned down for office use. Ellipse? That white chicken thing that lays an egg. Multileader? The little grey one that splits up when you touch it. And so on. Bass already has his Finnish developers hard at work devising hundreds of new birds that cover most of AutoCAD’s key functionality. Some unimportant features, such as plotting and xrefs, are difficult to translate into birds and will be deprecated into command-line-only versions before being dropped completely in a future release.

The demonstration had to be curtailed after a few minutes when Bass’s arms became too tired for him to continue, but it provided an enticing view of a future where CAD is fun, fun, fun! Addicted users are productive users, according to Bass. “If you’ve ever seen kids playing Angry Birds, you know that they will happily sit there playing it all day every day without complaint. They don’t even stop to eat. The only time they take a break is when they’re forced to visit the bathroom. Even when they’re in there they will probably photograph themselves in the mirror and post it on Facebook. CAD Managers, don’t you wish you could tap that astronomical productivity resource?”

According to Bass, those managers will soon be able to do exactly that. His advice is, “Fire the old fuddy-duddy naysaying Luddites who are allergic to change and replace them with a bunch of kids off the streets. Give them Autodesk software they can’t resist using and they’ll soon be flinging pixels around like there’s no tomorrow. You’ll have an instant office full of the cheapest engineers you’ll ever find, and they’ll be begging you to take their work home with them. With the literally infinite anytime anywhere power of Autodesk 360, they’ll be able to do exactly that. In a few years, the kids in hoodies you see hanging around shopping malls won’t be waiting to snatch your bag, they’ll be leeching wi-fi so they can design your next car on their phones. And they’ll be doing it using Autodesk software.”

Bass refused to be drawn on leaked details about the upcoming iPod Shuffle version of AutoCAD or its supposed marketing slogan Shake to Design, though. “We have a very strict policy of never discussing our plans for future products,” he explained, “except when it suits us.”

The marketing gurus at Autodesk have written an independent productivity report that shows that AutoCAD with the new interface improves productivity by 632.7%. On Windows only, that is. This productivity phenomenon will not apply to AutoCAD for Mac, because there are no plans to provide the Angry Birds interface on OS X. Autodesk believes that this won’t concern Apple users, because Macs are shiny and look really nice.

The impressive productivity figure was generated by performing carefully selected tasks on AutoCAD 2013 using the prototype interface, when using the latest, fastest and most expensive hardware. This was then compared with completely different tasks performed using AutoCAD 1.4. On a twin-floppy IBM PC. With a 12″ monochrome monitor driven by CGA. But without an 8087. The resultant percentage was then multiplied by the number of years since Autodesk produced an AutoCAD feature that wasn’t half-baked on release.

In related news, Autodesk’s legal department has lodged applications to register the words ‘Angry’, ‘Birds’ and all images of feathered flying creatures as Autodesk trademarks. Cease-and-desist notices have already been sent to publishers of ornithologist guide books. Also in Autodesk’s legal sights is Disney Corporation, which clearly violates Autodesk’s intellectual property rights with its depiction of Donald Duck as not just a bird, but frequently as an angry one who goes around smashing things up.

The last word goes to Bass. “Look, the trend is irresistible, and those who can’t keep up will be left behind. Here at Autodesk we believe in freedom of choice. You can either choose to follow our vision of the future, or take to the streets with a cardboard sign and a chipped enamel mug. What could be more democratic than that?”

AutoCAD 2013 – Autodesk pulls off a miracle with Help

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In AutoCAD 2011, Autodesk introduced on-line Help. It was badly done and poorly received. It was slow and generally awful to use, and so obviously inferior to the generally well-crafted old CHM-based system in so many ways, that there were squeals of joy when somebody discovered that one of the AutoCAD-based vertical products hadn’t been updated to the new regime and still provided a CHM file. That file became hot property, being posted by users on Autodesk’s own discussion groups and other places. Eventually, the outcry was loud enough that Autodesk was forced to make the CHM version of Help available for download. Those of us who actually use the documentation from time to time (or support people who do) breathed a sigh of relief and got on with our work, grateful that Autodesk had seen the error of its ways. But had it, really?

No. In AutoCAD 2012, Help was not only online, but integrated with AutoCAD Exchange in Autodesk’s dodgy version of a pseudo-browser. How good is Autodesk at writing browsers? About as good as you’d expect, sadly. No AutoCAD 2012 CHM was provided with the product at launch time, or even later as a download.

So how well did this new and improved attempt at on-line Help go down with the punters? In my poll on the worst AutoCAD features of all time, Help (on line / 2012) came in third, which gives you some idea. Third worst of all time! That’s a really, really bad place to be. There’s only one place to go from there, surely?

With AutoCAD 2013, Autodesk has wrought a miracle, taking this terrible failure of a system and completely revamping it. Somehow, incredibly, impossibly, Autodesk has managed to make it even worse. Not slightly worse, either. Much worse. AutoCAD Help has been plucked from the depths of mediocrity and plunged deeper still, to a dark place where the pressure of awfulness is so great that spontaneous implosion is a real risk.

Enough rhetoric, what’s actually wrong with it?

  1. It’s online by default. That means it’s slow and can’t possibly be 100% reliable. This is an example of Autodesk pushing its ‘vision’ at the expense of the practical needs of its customers. Nothing new there, then.
  2. Like many of Autodesk software’s attempts to access the Internet, it has been written poorly, such that it attempts to access IPs directly instead of using calls that will work correctly through a proxy server with firewall. As a result, it fails completely in some secure corporate environments. Mine, for example.
  3. Never mind, let’s just go and tell it to use the offline version instead. Turn off the Options > System > Help and Welcome Screen > Access online content when available toggle, hit F1 and see what happens. This does:
    What? You mean it’s not already installed? I have to download and install it separately myself? To be fair, during installation, you are kind of warned about this with a little information glyph. Hover over it and you will see this:OK, for an individual user that’s a drag, but for a CAD Manager with a large number of computers to set up, that’s way beyond inconvenient. Not to mention a user that’s in a location where online access is expensive, intermittent and/or absent. It would not have been at all hard to include offline Help in a 2013 install, and the fact that a deliberate decision was made to not do so smacks of arrogance. Assuming this worked properly, this situation would reflect pretty badly on Autodesk. But it’s worse than that; read on.
  4. Once the offline Help has been downloaded and installed, let’s try hitting F1 again.  This is what I saw:A little investigative work proved that the Help files were not located in the C:\Program Files\Autodesk\AutoCAD 2013\Help location, but rather in C:\Program Files\Autodesk\AutoCAD 2013 Help\English\Help. That’s right, Autodesk requires you to perform two installations, one of which apparently places files in a different location from that in which the other will go looking. Luckily, instead of going round moving files or changing settings, I just restarted AutoCAD and the problem went away. It’s quite possible I would never have seen the problem if I had done the second installation while AutoCAD wasn’t running, but it’s quite likely that many users will download and install in exactly that situation. The result is confusion, the impression given is amateurish.
  5. When you finally do get to get something other than error messages, this is it:Where’s the User Guide? Command Reference? Customization Guide? Gone. There’s no structure to it. It’s basically just a huge mass of web pages you’re expected to search through. There is no index, no contents, no list of commands, nothing. You want to find Help on something, you go search for it. Not sure exactly what the name is of the feature or command you’re searching for? Bad luck.
  6. You know what Autodesk’s search mechanisms are like, right? Yes, this one sucks too. Beginner? Want to draw a line? In AutoCAD 2010, in the Index tab, start typing LINE and the item appears at the top of the list. Double-click it and you’re there. In AutoCAD 2013, enter LINE in the search box, pick the button and this is what you see:

    So where’s the LINE command? It’s not even on the first page of results. You need to scroll down to find it. No, I’m not kidding. To add insult to injury, unlike every other Windows scroll bar I’ve seen, the one in the search results panel doesn’t page down when you click under the button, it just scrolls a single line at a time. It was probably pretty hard to program it to do that.
  7. Once you’ve got to a page and you want to get around a bit, usability is poor. By default, the search item is highlighted so the title of the LINE page, for example, will display as white on a yellow background. Very readable. There is a general lack of controls, and navigation is awkward and slow. Without a hierarchical structure and no breadcrumb feature, it’s difficult to get an idea where you are and what subjects might also be useful to look at. The tabs that we had in 2010 are gone. There are links to related references and concepts, but they’re at the bottom of each page. If you can see that the page you’re in is not useful to you, you have a bunch of scrolling to before you get to those links. The back and forward buttons on my mouse don’t work here, although they work fine everywhere else.

I could go on and on with the faults, but this post is already a monster so I’ll stop there. It’s difficult to think of ways in which this could have been done worse, but I’m sure Autodesk is working on it for 2014. Seriously, this is just embarrassing.

Autodesk, it’s not as if your software is cheap or sells in tiny quantities. You’re not short of the resources you need to do a good job, yet your AutoCAD Help system is so ridiculously inferior to that of numerous freeware and shareware applications that it’s not funny. What on earth were you thinking when you spewed out this rubbish? Did you think we wouldn’t notice?

You obviously want to convince your customer base that you’re all on-line trendy and capable of providing great Internet-based solutions that will have people flocking to use your Cloud stuff. OK, start by getting your finger out and making this stuff work. After three releases, you can’t do an acceptable job at something so seemingly tailor-made for online use as a bunch of text, images and video (which pretty much describes the World Wide Web). What kind of job can you be trusted to do with something much more difficult, such as CAD on the Cloud?

AutoCAD 2013 – Download from Subscription without Akamai

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Edit (October 2016): see this post to download Autodesk software easily.

This year, Autodesk appears to have finally got its act together in terms of making software downloads and serial numbers available to Subscription customers quickly after the AutoCAD release. For me at least, the serial numbers and downloads were available as soon as I looked for them, so Autodesk deserves praise for improving matters considerably when compared with the last couple of years.

If you’re a Subscription customer about to download AutoCAD 2013, you may be wondering how you can avoid the awful Akamai Download Manager. If you go to the download page, scroll through the various languages and find the product you’re interested in, you will see a Download Now button. Do not click it, because that will trigger an Akamai infestation. Instead, click on the down arrow to the right of the button. That will give you the option of performing a Browser Download. Click that and away you go.

Subscription Download

The download sizes listed on the site are nearly double the real size of the downloaded files. The 32-bit version is actually 0.98 GB, not 1.89 GB. When you run the executable, it will unzip itself to expand to that size, but that’s not the size you need to know about when you’re downloading something.

In my case, the download happened at rather less than half the speed at which the trial came down (taking over 30 minutes for the 32-bit version rather than 13 minutes), but that’s not a valid comparison as I used a different Internet connection and a different browser. The file I downloaded from Subscription was byte-for-byte identical to the equivalent file downloaded as a trial.

AutoCAD 2013 – Download the trial without Akamai

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Edit (October 2016): see this post to download Autodesk software easily.

It’s AutoCAD new release time again and many of you will want to get hold of the trial software, or download the production software from the trial site rather than the Subscription site for performance or other reasons (the resultant downloads are identical). As in previous years, Autodesk is heavily pushing the use of the Akamai Download Manager to download it, going to what I consider unethical lengths to do so. For a variety of reasons, some of which I’m not at liberty to discuss and others of which I have already discussed extensively, I strongly recommend not installing this software. In my view, it is a very bad idea to let anything by Akamai anywhere near your computer. If you’re in a secure corporate environment, it’s quite likely that you won’t be able to do so, or if you can, that it won’t work anyway.

Although the Autodesk download process gives every impression that you have no choice in the matter, this is not true. In the past I have had to install an unsupported browser (Opera) to get at a straightforward download link, but this time it is possible to get the software without having to resort to that. Here’s what to do. Go to http://usa.autodesk.com/autocad/trial/, fill in the form and click the Download Now button. You will be presented with this screen:

Avoiding Akamai

This is a pack of lies. Ignore everything except the line that says If you cannot complete the installation, click here. Click that and you will see this:

Avoiding Akamai

The feedback link takes you to Akamai’s site so it’s probably not useful as a mechanism to let Autodesk know what you think of its use of the Akamai Download Manager. I have used it in the past and it’s a black hole, so don’t waste your time there.

As you can see, there may not be an OK button visible, but if you scroll down you will see it. Click it.

Avoiding Akamai

That will get you to this screen:

Avoiding Akamai

More misleading stuff here, but the important thing is the text that says Click here to download using your browser. Click that and you can start actually downloading the installation executable.

The links I eventually got to using this process were:

http://trial.autodesk.com/SWDLDDLM/2013/ACD/ESD/AutoCAD_2013_English_Win_32bit.exe
http://trial.autodesk.com/SWDLDDLM/2013/ACD/ESD/AutoCAD_2013_English_Win_64bit.exe

At home, using Firefox 11.0, each download took just under a quarter of an hour without using any special download manager software. These links may not work for you and your experience may vary depending on your browser, location and language.

Oh, and Autodesk, the 2013 trial download page is still called AutoCAD 2012 – Free Trial – Download AutoCAD Trial – Autodesk and contains a link to the 2012 download FAQ. You might want to change that. You might also want to change the wording on the messages shown above to something less deceptive, especially if you’re interested in how much your customers trust you in future. Finally, I strongly suggest you give up on pushing this Akamai junk. Please.

AutoCAD 2013 – What’s new?

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As AutoCAD 2013 (yes, that’s what it’s called, shock, horror!) has now been released in Japan (Google translation), I can start to discuss it. I’m not yet free to go into details about anything that does not have publicly released information avaialable, but here’s a brief summary of what I can say. I will discuss some of these things in more detail later.

  • It has a powerful tool for mosquito aggregation (allows you to effortlessly gather together a Cloud of bugs)

OK, I’m kidding around, that’s just the Google translator struggling a little. Let’s get serious and list some new things that are easy enough to understand from the translation:

  • Command-line options that you can click on (could be good, depends on how it performs)
  • Other command-line changes (you can see in some of the screenshots that the command line now looks very different)
  • Property editing preview (similar to the Microsoft Office feature where you can hover over a user interface element and have the contents dynamically show you the changes before you confirm with a click)
  • Viewport preview of the changes (same kind of thing but with viewport display)
  • View and cross-sectional view detailed diagram (Model Documentation improvements including sections and details)
  • Strikethrough in text, leaders, tables, etc. (some will find this very useful)
  • Inventor file import (again, useful to some if it works well)
  • Latest user templates (updated with new title blocks, styles, etc.)
  • Boundary stretching tool according to the situation (PressPull improvements)
  • Extract the surface dividing line (looks like you can pick a point on a surface and have a line generated on it)
  • More context-sensitive Ribbon tabs have been added
  • Tool palettes can now be migrated (not that I trust Migration with anything)
  • Autodesk Cloud connection (you can export drawings to the Cloud; more on this in later posts)
  • Social media connection (I’m sure you’re all delighted to see Facebook and Twitter incorporated into AutoCAD; this makes perfect sense in a production environment)
  • Windows Vista is no longer supported. You can use XP or Windows 7, but not the OS inbetween.

Here are some things that are not so easy to understand from the translation, so I won’t be commenting on them for now:

  • Customize synchronization and support files
  • Application of AutoCAD Autodesk Exchange

There are also several things listed that are specific to AutoCAD 2013 for Mac. The additional functionality here is because it’s still playing catch-up to fill in some of the many functionality holes, but there are still plenty of obvious holes left (e.g. DCL):

  • Project Manager (the Sheet Set Manager)
  • Multi-Edit Hatch
  • Leader line that is included in the text up to the front
  • PDF underlay

So, AutoCAD users, what do you think? In the days before you were financially press-ganged into Subscription, would you have called this a Compelling Upgrade? The sort of thing you would berate your boss to upgrade to? Anything there reach out and grab you?

Autodesk Cloud interview May 2010 – Part 3

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Steve: Another issue I have with Cloud-based environments is the lack of customisation. One of the things that makes AutoCAD so efficient for people is that they can get it exactly the way they want it. With a browser-based environment, we’re pretty much stuck with what you guys decide to give us. Can you see any solution to that in the longer term?

Tal: From a pure technical point of view, there’s not a lot of difference in terms of the way you can customise an application on the desktop versus customising it on the web. I think AutoCAD, having a very mature application has a lot of functionality which has built up over the years to provide customisation capabilities to the nth degree. So I think it has less to do with the platform of your choice and more to do with the maturity of the solution and how much customisation the people who designed the product wanted to put in there.

Steve: I guess you have the issue of where does that customisation live? Does it live on the PC or on the Cloud?

Tal: A good thing about moving it to the Cloud would be that if you moved to another computer, the app would still be customised to your needs.

Guri: I was going to say the same. It’s actually an advantage to store it in the Cloud because regardless of where you are accessing it from, you can still have your customisation go with you wherever you go.

To address your previous question about customisation, I think it’s a pretty relevant request to be able customise this application. But at the same time, remember who is the target audience for that. If you are an AutoCAD user, we assume you have AutoCAD with all the advantages that come along, but if you are not an AutoCAD user, you are somebody downstream that just wants to look at a document and collaborate on it, then you’re probably less sophisticated from that perspective and you will probably require have less customisation needs. Nevertheless, I do believe that the request to add customisation to this product is completely relevant.

Steve: As well as user customisation, there are third party developers wanting to be able to add their own value to the product. Do you see that being available in the longer term, that you will provide an API for third party developers, whether they are commercial developers or in-house developers for large organisations to do their thing with it?

Guri: We are considering it.

Steve: That’s tricky, isn’t it? It’s more difficult than if you have a desktop environment. How do people provide their add-ons to customers, or to their internal users?

Tal: I’m not sure. If you look at the major web platforms of today, look at the social ones such as Facebook, third party integration, customisation of that, that can be taken to the nth degree. I think a lot of the time, for organisations to deploy customisation on the web where you don’t even have to go to the PC and configure a customisation for a user, for that to be available centrally on-line, and to know that when you move to a different computer for example, all those extensions and all that configuration, all that good stuff, goes along with you, it’s actually an advantage. You can do a lot of the things around customisation and configuration of the product on line, that would be harder to do sometimes on a desktop.

Steve: There are a limited number of DWG object types that are currently supported. I assume you’ll be adding to them over time. What about 3D objects?

Tal: Butterfly supports all AutoCAD 2D objects that are supported by horizontal or vanilla AutoCAD at this time, so you can view that, and you can have drawings from vertical versions with proxy graphics that will be displayed. So for 2D I think you have probably full and complete support for 2D data types. Before we move on to 3D, we want to make sure we nail the experience just right. You say you have a list of things you’d like to see us improve in 2D, and we’d like to be able to go and work on as many of our users’ lists for 2D before we head on over to 3D, because at the end of the day it’s all about nailing the experience just right rather than just adding a lot of the functionality to the product which is not fully mature and fully complete, and as a result of that, not add value to our customers.

Steve: I guess people may be concerned with losing data because you’re not supporting the full set of object types. Is round-tripping fully supported?

Tal: I can rest your mind at ease on that point. When you upload an AutoCAD drawing to Butterfly, that file is not converted, and resides in fully original form on the server. And when you make changes, for example on line, those changes are then injected into the drawing using authentic genuine DWG technology, so when you download that file back to your computer, you maintain full integrity of it. There’s no conversion process, no data loss, and you get a very strong experience on that front. So users should not have any concerns at all concerning that.

Steve: So round-tripping works with everything; is that true? For example, you may have a Civil 3D DWG that you modify using Butterfly. Does the drawing return fully intact, including the Civil 3D objects with all their intelligence?

Tal: That Civil 3D object is intact in the same way that if you take that Civil 3D drawing, and open it in AutoCAD LT and manipulate geometry. All your Civil 3D objects remain intact. It’s the exact same experience. That data is not modified, it’s not converted, it’s not lost. While Butterfly may not be able to edit the contents of those Civil 3D objects in the same way that AutoCAD LT or AutoCAD vanilla does not enable you to, it still maintains full data integrity and there is no data loss.

This post concludes this interview series. Links to part 1 and part 2.

The worst feature ever added to AutoCAD is…

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…the Ribbon, according to your selections in the What are the worst features ever added to AutoCAD? poll. As in the best ever poll, the winner (loser?) in this race had no serious competition. I’ve listed eleven top (bottom?) features here rather than ten, partly because the popular (unpopular?) choice Memory Overuse isn’t exactly a feature. But it’s mainly because I’d hate to see Action Recorder unfairly miss out on a well-deserved mention.

  • Ribbon (30%)
  • CUI (20%)
  • Help (on line / 2012) (18%)
  • Memory Overuse (17%)
  • AutoCAD Today (2000i/2002) (16%)
  • White / Cream Drawing Background (16%)
  • Unreconciled Layers (16%)
  • Nudge (10%)
  • Blipmode (9%)
  • Proxy Object Compatibility (9%)
  • Action Recorder (8%)

Given the reception the Ribbon received when it was introduced, maybe it’s unsurprising to see it top the lists here. Cloud observers may find it interesting to note that that Autodesk’s attempt to move AutoCAD’s Help on line has been very poorly received. Yo Autodesk with your Cloud an’ all, I’m really happy for you, I’ma let you finish, but on-line Help has been voted one of the worst features of all time! Of all time!

The dislike of the intrusive, useful-to-some but short-lived AutoCAD Today feature remains strong a decade later. Light drawing backgrounds remain unpopular, which should not be a surprise to anyone, except maybe some people at Autodesk who thought it was a good idea to rehash old mistakes in a new and exciting way (“This time it’s magnolia!“). History, doomed to repeat, etc.

As for poor old Action Recorder, that has to be the ultimate brochure feature. It’s something for Autodesk to boast about rather than something for customers to actually use; “We responded to customer requests and fulfilled AUGI wishlists for a macro recorder!” Well, you did, kind of, by giving us something that’s about as useful as a chocolate fireguard. Looks nice, though. Autodesk, please try again, but this time do it properly.

It’s interesting to note that the “worst ever” list is significantly younger than the “best ever” list. Only poor old blipmode is truly ancient. Only a single “best” feature (dynamic blocks) comes from AutoCAD 2006 or later. (In fact, that’s the only feature in the “best” list that was even introduced this century). In comparison, most of the “worst” list comes from AutoCAD 2006 or later, including the top (bottom?) three. So what does that tell you?

Autodesk Cloud interview May 2010 – Part 2

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Steve: Autodesk is currently giving away these Cloud-based services, Butterfly for example. Presumably you’re not going to keep doing that for ever. Are you going to start charging for these services eventually?

Guri: Again, you’re pushing us to talk about future. Currently, for as long as this is in a Labs environment, we’re encouraging users to use it and we’re giving it free in the Labs environment and we’re not putting any limits on it during the Labs experiment. Once we make it a commercial product we may change that.

Steve: I put a poll on my blog asking readers what they thought about CAD on the Cloud, and most of them are either concerned or frightened. Solidworks users are in revolt about what they see as being forced onto the Cloud. Why do you think there is this fear or apprehension of CAD on the Cloud?

Guri: I’m not sure. I’m curious myself about this type of reaction. Maybe it’s fear of the unknown, it’s a new environment, maybe there is some fear about security of documents while they are in the Cloud, it’s just “it’s a new thing”. We believe the approaches we are taking in providing a complementary product to the desktop environment which takes advantage of the latest and greatest web technology and enables those advantages to the user actually will make them feel more at ease. We’re not changing their normal CAD tools, we’re adding to them by enhancing them to take advantage of the capability of infinite storage and infinite CPU that the Cloud brings to them. So in a way, it’s a mixed environment. It’s probably easier to think about moving from desktop only to a mix of desktop and Cloud rather than a step-function where you move entirely to the Cloud.

Tal: Yeah, and when moving to a new platform, you probably know, even when moving to PCs say 10 or 15 years ago, there was a lot of apprehension and whenever you move to a new platform (and rightly so), you’re going to see a lot of concerns being raised by users and it’s our responsibility to provide our users with a very gradual and easy migration path which enables them to pick which components, which things, which processes they would like to do on the desktop and which make more sense to be able to do on the web.

Guri: Steve, you’ve been around CAD for many, many years. You know that CAD users usually worry about a few things. They worry about their documents and drawings. They have a lot of investment in archives of documents and drawings, they want to know that whatever changes happen in the future in the world, will enable them to keep using those drawings as usual. The other thing they worry about is their own training and experience, the way they work every day. They have a lot of habits and practices that they develop over the years and they want to know that they don’t have to retrain themselves or any other new users into new ways of doing things. And what we’re proposing is addressing both. You can use your drawings, this is still DWG, these are still AutoCAD documents, you don’t have to change, every drawing that you have that is created now or 10 years ago is still going to be useful.

So that’s one comment and the other is you can still use AutoCAD; that’s your tool of choice and whatever you do in the Cloud we purposely keep very simple so learning it and training it is really a very, very simple task.

Steve: I think you raised a valid point there about people being afraid of “what’s going to happen to my drawings”; people are concerned that if they move completely to the Cloud then they’re handing over control; they no longer have control of their documents. Do you think that’s a valid concern?

Guri: Well, I think that’s a concern, and people who have it will probably have it for a long time. What we want to do is let them choose how to deal with that. So we are not forcing anything here; we’re letting them keep their drawings on the desktop if they want, we’re letting them upload to the Cloud if they want to take advantage of it, so it’s entirely up to the user what to do. What we’re trying to do is show them that if they want to move to the Cloud, the advantages are the same advantages as photography sites such as Picasa. If you upload your family photos to the Cloud, somebody has done the backup for you; somebody has put security on it that is probably even better than you can do yourself, you can share it easily with others, provide access to your family without sending attachments and stuff like that. So there is a lot of advantages. We’re telling users it’s completely up to you; there are advantages that come along with moving stuff to the Cloud, if you’re not confident with that, that’s perfectly fine, stay on the desktop. So we’re letting the user do it at their own pace.

Steve: Can I share some of my experiences with using Butterfly? Perhaps I was using it wrong; I was trying to draw with it! As you’ve indicated, that’s maybe not what it’s really there for. I found that it wouldn’t open some drawings that I tried to upload. The display was a bit fuzzy, particularly on text, particularly when it was selected. A big issue I have with it is that I have two great big screens here in front of me and because Butterfly is confined to a browser window, it’s only using one rectangle. With AutoCAD, I can grab various bits and pieces of the interface and drag them over to the second screen, so I find Butterfly rather limiting. There also seems to be a lot of wasted space in the Butterfly environment. I can get AutoCAD to use about 91% of the screen space for drawing area; with Butterfly it was about 53%. So you’re working in a tiny little window. People pay lots of money for these big screens, and because you’re working within a browser, and because within that there’s a lot of wasted space, a lot of that investment is wasted. I’ll stop there before I confuse you all, but I have a great big list here of stuff that I found difficult to live with.

Tal: I’d love to have that list. We get a lot of requests from users, and a lot of different things bother different people. You know, we get a lot of requests that are the complete opposite, like I have a laptop with a small screen so I want to be able to optimise, I use Butterfly on the go, I need to have Butterfly optimised for that kind of resolution. But if you have a list of things we’d actually love to see it, and a lot of the times when you’re connected to a product designer on our team and have you talk to him and really go through the things that bother you, because at the end of the day it’s really our job to be able to do a good job and provide the tools which a user loves and delights users, and be able to focus on the things that are important to the majority of users and really do a good job of nailing those experiences. So if you have a list we’d love to have it and engage with you on it and see what makes sense for us to put in there and what we feel is not the highest priority for us feature-wise right now.

Steve: I’m sure you’re working on printing/plotting, because it’s pretty terrible at the moment. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that’s a priority.

Tal: Basically it does not plot right now. It enables you to print your screen, but not plot. I wouldn’t say it’s bad plotting, it does not plot right now. If you want a quick printout of whatever you have on screen, it will do the job. Plotting is one feature that is definitely very interesting to us, it’s important to a lot of users, and we’re definitely looking into it, and providing hopefully in the future a better experience revolving around that.

Steve: And the limitation of selecting more than 30 objects; is that going to go away at some stage?

Tal: I believe you’re going to be seeing a lot of improvements in that area relatively shortly.

Links to part 1 and part 3.

The best feature ever added to AutoCAD is…

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…LISP. I have now closed the What are the best features ever added to AutoCAD? poll, and the winner is AutoLISP/Visual LISP, by a long, long way. I don’t always agree with the majority view expressed in the polls here, but in this case I wholeheartedly agree. Adding LISP was the biggest and best thing that ever happened to AutoCAD. Autodesk owes an enormous debt of gratitude to John Walker for incorporating the work of David Betz, who was of course standing on the shoulders of John McCarthy. It’s a crying shame that Autodesk has been so terribly neglectful of Visual LISP for over a decade.

Here are your top ten “best ever” AutoCAD features:

  • AutoLISP / Visual LISP (32%)
  • Paper / Model Space / Layouts (21%)
  • Xrefs (20%)
  • Copy / Paste between drawings (19%)
  • Dynamic Blocks (16%)
  • Object Snaps (15%)
  • Layer Visibility per Viewport (12%)
  • Undo (12%)
  • Grips (12%)
  • AutoSnap (9%)

Something interesting I noticed is the age of these features:

  • AutoLISP / Visual LISP – 1985 (significantly improved 1999)
  • Paper / Model Space / Layouts – 1990 (significantly improved 1999)
  • Xrefs – 1990
  • Copy / Paste between drawings – 1991
  • Dynamic Blocks – 2005
  • Object Snaps – 1984
  • Layer Visibility per Viewport – 1990 (improved 2008)
  • Undo – 1986
  • Grips – 1992
  • AutoSnap – 1992

The youngest feature here is 6 years old, the oldest is 27. The average top-ten AutoCAD feature is over 20 years old. What does that tell you?

Autodesk Cloud interview May 2010 – Part 1

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On 26 May 2010, I had the opportunity to ask Autodesk some questions about the Cloud in general and what was then Project Butterfly (now AutoCAD WS) in particular. The Autodesk people were:

  • Guri Stark,Vice President, AutoCAD & Platform Products
  • Tal Weiss, R&D Center Manager (Israel)
  • Noah Cole, Corporate Media Relations

The interview was conducted by phone conference with no prior notice of the questions. Here is the first part of the interview, which I will be posting in three sections.

Steve: Guri, are you responsible for all of Autodesk’s Cloud-based offerings?

Guri: Tal and I are responsible for Butterfly, that’s the only Cloud-based offering that we are responsible for.

Noah: Steve, you can put the cloud-based offerings into three categories, those that are related to current products and therefore come out of the same organisations and divisions that those products come out of. So Butterfly which is related to AutoCAD so it’s coming out of the AutoCAD group. Similarly what you’d see happening with manufacturing and those projects. You also have the more emerging Cloud solutions like Dragonfly was (that’s now Homestyler) that’s coming out of Labs. So you see projects coming out of either the divisions if it’s related to product or the Labs group if it’s more forward-looking.

Steve: Can you give me a one-sentence summary of each of the Cloud-based offerings and what market it’s intended to fill?

Guri: Butterfly is one we’ll talk about in more detail in a minute. One we just launched as a product is Autodesk Homestyler (previously Project Dragonfly). It’s a SaaS-based offering done completely in a browser, targeting the home improvement market. It’s free to the end user so users who want to redecorate or remodel their kitchen or their living room can access this product, do a layout, place in it different types of furniture from libraries, and see how physical spaces fit together in this 2D and 3D type of product which is a completely SaaS-based offering.

The end user for this is not traditionally an engineer or CAD user at all, it’s more like the person at home; a typical user would be a 35-year-old lady who is interested in home decoration. The libraries in the product are either generic libraries or branded vendor-provided libraries from a variety of vendors in this space. That’s another type of product using SaaS technology that enabled us to get into a market that we’re currently not in.

There are other projects going on under the umbrella of taking existing products and trying to run them in a Cloud environment, and measuring the performance that they give us. All of them are experimental; some of them are on Labs already with some limitations of distance. So if you are in the California area you can try and use, mostly for trial and evaluation, some of our products such as AutoCAD or Inventor even, in this type of environment. You don’t need to install anything because the application runs in the Cloud; you have full access to the full application for a trial perspective.So there are different approaches to the Cloud. One approach is starting from scratch, developing something like Butterfly or Homestyler from scratch in the cloud to try and target a new market possibly. Another attempt is to take an existing application and try and run them centrally in the Cloud and see whatever performance it gets. Currently our intent is to use it for product evaluation.

Steve: The existing products running in the Cloud in the geographically restricted trial, is it just AutoCAD and Inventor?

Noah: AutoCAD, Inventor and Maya are the only ones currently running. There are also two recent technology previews happening in Manufacturing for Centaur and Cumulus which are different, but that involves Inventor and Moldflow.

Steve: With my experience with Project Butterfly, I agree that as a collaboration and review and viewing/markup tool it’s excellent, but it seems to me that it’s also being promoted as a drafting tool; that people will actually draw with it. It doesn’t seem so strong to me, for that. What is Project Butterfly now, and what is it going to end up being?

Guri: Steve, we’re not promoting this as a drafting tool, we say that the real authoring tool to create drawings is AutoCAD on the desktop. This enables you to upload a drawing that was created using AutoCAD to the Cloud, and in addition to review it and annotate it and share it; you can also make changes to it, to edit it. So what we’re providing in Butterfly is editing tools, not really drawing creation tools. I can tell you we have a free product called Autodesk Design Review, this product has only viewing and annotation capabilities. What a lot of users there are asking for is some basic editing tools where they want to make some local changes, and that’s what we are providing. The editing tools are intended for users that are not necessarily AutoCAD users, we keep them simple for that purpose.

Steve: So it’s not intended to be a drafting tool and you never intend it to actually become one in the end; is that correct?

Guri: I’d rather not comment on future direction. I can tell you right now that the positioning of the product is as a web accompaniment to AutoCAD, in a way similar to Microsoft’s Office Online in the most recent Office application is doing, in which an author on the desktop using Microsoft Word can upload it to the Cloud, view it, share it, edit it. So we are enabling editing of documents in the Cloud.

Tal: Just to add to that, we have different platforms, the desktop and the web. Each platform does certain things very well. So authoring, for example, on the desktop is something that is great, it’s mature and you can do a lot of amazing stuff there. What we want to focus on in building a tool for the web is leverage what the web can do for our users. Stuff like being able to access from anywhere, design timeline, collaboration, sharing; really hitting all those sweet spots instead of trying to imitate what’s already up there on the desktop and is working well. That’s why you see the different focus on the different platforms trying to do that thing it can do best.

Links to part 2 and part 3.

All major Autodesk products on the Cloud by 2014?

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As reported by multiple on-line news outlets, Autodesk just announced that it is increasing its research and development budget (having slashed it last year), and increasing the percentage of that budget on the Cloud. Carl Bass:

When there are technology transitions in place, you better be more mindful of that, or you become roadkill.

That’s fair enough. Autodesk would be stupid to ignore the Cloud, and needs to bet at least some of its cash on anything that stands a significant chance of being important. This quote from Autodesk spokesman Paul Sullivan gets more specific:

We are devoting a larger percentage of our R&D budget to cloud computing, with a significant portion of our new product investments going toward products that are cloud-enabled. We expect that all of our major products will be available in the cloud within the next three years.

Now “available” can mean various things. The restricted trial of Cloud-based AutoCAD, Inventor and other products is already year-old news, but that fits the “available” bill. So does a situation where the product is exclusively available on the Cloud and you can no longer buy standalone software. Between those two extremes, there are a variety of possible definitions of “available”. So we’re not that much wiser as a result of that statement.

However, one thing is clear. Autodesk is spending up big on making this Cloud thing happen, so traditional software is going to suffer from a comparitive lack of investment. Autodesk customers, you’re the source of all that cash. How do you feel about subsidising the move of your software tools to the Cloud?

(so (long (and (thanks (for (all (the (parentheses))))))))

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A few days ago, John McCarthy died at the age of 84. He didn’t make a fortune selling gadgets, he just profoundly affected the world of computing. He will be remembered mainly as the father of LISP, without which it is quite possible that AutoCAD and Autodesk would not have survived beyond the 80s. However, his original thinking went well beyond the development of a language. For example, 50 years ago he came up with an idea that is very relevant to what we are actively discussing today:

In 1961, he was the first to publicly suggest (in a speech given to celebrate MIT’s centennial) that computer time-sharing technology might lead to a future in which computing power and even specific applications could be sold through the utility business model (like water or electricity). This idea of a computer or information utility was very popular in the late 1960s, but faded by the mid-1990s. However, since 2000, the idea has resurfaced in new forms (see application service provider, grid computing, and cloud computing.)

(Credit: Wikipedia)

Back to LISP, I still use John’s antique language today. It’s still the best language choice for the vast majority of the development I do. Thanks, John.

Cloud benefits – processing power

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A frequently stated advantage of CAD on the Cloud is the access to large amounts of processing power. Instead of relying on your lowly local processor to perform complex tasks, you can instead zap the job up to the Cloud where vast numbers of processors churn away in massively parallel fashion and then zap the results back to you before you’ve even had time to head for the coffee machine.

This is a scenario that applies only for certain types of very complex tasks that are suited to subdividing the calculations among many processors. Autodesk already has a big toe in the waters in several of those areas. The recent Autodesk Cloud changes made available Inventor Optimization, Cloud Rendering, Green Building Studio and Conceptual Energy Analysis to a small subset of Subscription customers. It’s safe to assume that these services will be improved and expanded over the next few years. (Is there anybody out there using Autodesk Cloud services for these processor-intensive tasks? Let’s hear about your real-world experiences.)

What this doesn’t mean is that it makes sense for us all to be using CAD on the Cloud, all the time. The processing time gained by using the Cloud is offset by the communication time spent passing the data back and forth, so any processing gain has to be substantial to make it worthwhile. Twenty years ago, when every zoom extents was followed by a looooong wait, a big swag of extra processing power would have come in very handy. These days, processors are ridiculously fast in comparison. They are also very cheap and getting cheaper. Even low-end PCs have had multiple cores for some years, and these days seeing eight almost unused cores on your performance monitor is pretty normal.

The performance of today’s CPUs and the variable performance of today’s Internet, mean that calculations need to be very substantial to make them worth outsourcing to the Cloud. For the vast majority of tasks associated with using CAD software you simply don’t need to hand the job to somebody else’s hardware, because there is ample capacity right there on your desk.

(As an aside, whether it’s on your desk or a server farm, writing software that takes advantage of all those cores must be really difficult. I say that because today’s CAD software seldom uses more than one or two at the same time. Even a seemingly straightforward split like loading AutoCAD’s Ribbon while allowing you to start drawing appears to be too hard. It took Autodesk four Ribboned AutoCAD releases to even attempt this, and the result is a failure; the cursor lag while background loading the Ribbon is unacceptable.)

For tasks where there is the technical potential to share the load, a remote service still might not be the best solution. How about a private cloud instead, where the processing load gets shared between your company’s idle processors via your LAN, and your data never leaves the premises? It seems to me that such a solution could provide most of the Cloud benefits and remove almost all of the concerns. This has already happened in pilot with some Autodesk software. I’d like to see more emphasis placed on private-cloud-friendly software, because I think it has a much better chance of customer acceptance and the development effort is less likely to be wasted.

Best and worst AutoCAD features ever – polls

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Using your suggestions and a few of my own, I have added two polls for you to select what are, in your opinion, the best and worst features ever added to AutoCAD. To help us find The Answer, there are 42 items in each poll, from which you can choose up to three.

A few items (e.g. Action Recorder) made it into both lists, while several items in the ‘worst’ list (e.g. 2012 Array, Ribbon, Annotative Scaling) were suggested multiple times. It will be interesting to see how the poll results pan out.