Category Archives: Bricsys

Gallery – Gent visit 2017 – People

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Here are some pictures of some people I met in Gent (Ghent) during my visit attending the Bricsys Insights press event in April 2017. I published this at the time but had to remove it due to technical difficulties I was having with WordPress galleries. This post is partially a live test for an alternative method of displaying galleries on this blog.

Click on an image to enter the Carousel full-screen gallery viewer. If you have any difficulties, please let me know the problem and the device you’re using. Thanks!

Steve, R.K. Mcswain, Cyrena Respini-Irwin, Erik De Keyser
R.K. Mcswain
Press attending Bricsys Insights
Press attending Bricsys Insights
Erik De Keyser
Luc De Batselier
Bricsys and Chapoo (now 24/7) workers
Hans De Backer
Steve likes swords
Steve, and Erik De Keyser
Belgian beer. Mmmmm…
Sander Scheiris
Diners
Cyrena interrogates Sander
Diners
Steve and the legendary Don Strimbu – what a loss for Autodesk!
Bricsys developers contemplate the extensive beer list

Why digitally sign your LISP files?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Setting your application or document window size using LISP

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why Bricsys makes the best AutoCAD for Mac

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is BricsCAD Shape?

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

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

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

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

How do I get it?

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

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

How is it licensed? How much is it?

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

So what’s in it for Bricsys?

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

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

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

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

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

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

AutoCAD 2018 for Mac – welcome to twenty years ago

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tip: what to do when your text becomes empty rectangles

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

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

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

Tip – making your 3D controller work sensibly in BricsCAD

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This tip applies to BricsCAD V14 to V18 inclusive, and possibly other versions too.

BricsCAD automatically works with a 3D “mouse” (e.g. 3DConnexion SpaceNavigator controller), and due to the generally excellent performance of BricsCAD in 3D, it works very smoothly and is a real productivity boon for 3D work. If you don’t already have one and you work in 3D, it’s well worth spending a fraction of the money you saved by switching to BricsCAD to get hold of one.

Unfortunately, the way BricsCAD reacts to use of this device fails to lock the horizon by default. This means it does not keep the vertical axis vertical, so unless you have an exceptionally light and skilled touch, you will soon have your model skewed, upside down and/or flopping around all over the place.

OK, this may be a silly default setting, but how do you change it? Read on.

Method 1

Press the left button on your controller. If you’re lucky, you will see the 3dxWare Panel. (I’m not seeing it in V18 so maybe I need a driver update). Use the Button Configuration tab and change it from “All Applications” to “BricsCAD”, then it should show as:

  • L: BricsCAD Default Menu
  • R: Fit

Picking the controller’s left button in BricsCAD after doing this brings up a context menu containing a Lock Horizon option.


Once you turn this on, the controller will work as expected.

Method 2

If you don’t have those options available to you when you pick the controller’s left button and you’re comfortable messing around in the Registry (the usual caveats apply here), you can fix it up.

First close BricsCAD. Now start REGEDIT and search for the 3dMouseMenu section, e.g. HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Bricsys\BricsCAD\V18x64\en_US\Profiles\3D Modeling\3dMouseMenu. Under there is a LockHorizon value: change that from 0 to 1. Next time you start BricsCAD, the controller should work as expected. If therre are multiple user profiles, you will need to repeat this process for each profile.

Method 3

If you don’t have rights to use REGEDIT or you don’t feel comfortable doing so, you can achieve the same result by exporting and importing a user profile, with a little bit of text editing inbetween.

  • Close BricsCAD
  • Start the User Profile Manager (e.g. Start > All Programs > Bricsys > BricsCAD V18 (x64) en_US > V18×64 User Profile Manager
  • Choose a user profile and export it
  • Manually edit the resultant .arg using a text editor (e.g. Notepad) and change the appropriate line under 3dMouseMenu to “LockHorizon”=dword:00000001
  • If that section doesn’t exist, add it as follows (ensuring you use the right version information, e.g. V16x64 in place of V18x64):
    [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Bricsys\BricsCAD\V18x64\en_US\Profiles\3D Modeling\3dMouseMenu]
    "Rotate"=dword:00000001
    "PanZoom"=dword:00000001
    "LockHorizon"=dword:00000001
    "RotCenterModeAuto"=dword:00000001
    "RotCenterModeSelected"=dword:00000001
    "Speed"=dword:00000001
    "3dMouseMode"=dword:00000000
    "RotCenterVis"=dword:00000002
  • Import the edited .arg – you’ll have to provide a different name to any existing profile. Don’t worry, you can rename and delete profiles later as required.
  • Set that profile current
  • Start BricsCAD

You can do the same from within BricsCAD using Tools > User Profile Manager, but as you need to restart BricsCAD anyway before the change takes effect, you may as well do the above.

BricsCAD V18 – showing Autodesk how to do DWG CAD

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

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

Wrong.

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

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

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

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

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

Bricsys 2017 Conference

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I have recently returned from the Bricsys 2017 Conference, held this year at the Carrousel du Louvre, Paris. There were many impressive things demonstrated at this conference and I will be posting about them in due course. In the meantime, here is a short video from Bricsys:

You may wish to check out my Twitter feed to see what I live tweeted at the time, along with the #bricsys2017 tag to see what myself and other CAD press and bloggers thought of it.

Press and bloggers at Bricsys 2017

Disclosure: Bricsys covered my travel expenses for this conference.

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.

What’s changed at blog nauseam and why

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Last week, blog nauseam died. This post explains the background to that. You’re probably not that interested, so feel free to skip to the dot points that list the changes that have resulted.

The problem was a faulty WordPress installation was using excessive resources. This caused severe performance issues and resulted in the server software stepping in to throttle the site to prevent more widespread problems. The trigger for the WordPress fault has not been determined and may never be. This is somewhat akin to an old AutoCAD drawing suddenly going bad for unknown reasons. The problem may date back years but only recently became critical.

In discussions with my completely blameless web host, Saratoga Hosting, we determined the best course of action was to create a new, clean WordPress site and transfer over as much as possible from the mortally wounded old installation. This is similar to copying and pasting or inserting valid entities from a bad drawing to a clean one, and this is what we did.

I say ‘we’ because Dave from the most excellent Saratoga did a huge amount of work for me to ensure things went as smoothly as possible and with the best result. This is not the first time I have received quite outstanding above-and-beyond customer service from Saratoga in return for the few measly bucks a month I pay for hosting. Thank you, Dave!

Doing things this way provided opportunities for several improvements to both blog nauseam and its parent site, cadnauseam.com. These include:

  • Improving performance. A clean install that’s not generating many errors per second will load much faster than one that isn’t, just like a small clean program like BricsCAD will perform much better than an old bloated mess like AutoCAD that’s attempting to do hundreds of things a second even when sitting there doing nothing.
  • Upgrading site security. In addition to various unseen improvements including upgraded protection against hackers and better backups, the site now uses https SSL security, which is the way things are going to have to be in coming years. You may have noticed that the URL now starts with https:// and displays a little closed padlock, indicating this is a secure site.
  • Integrating cad nauseam with blog nauseam. My old cad nauseam site was a bunch of hand-coded HTML pages that were real cool in the 90s but which have been neglected for years. It’s now part of the same WordPress installation as the blog, which avoids duplication of various things and is much easier to maintain. It also makes sense for me from a business point of view to have my business site more closely associated with a successful blog.
  • Modern full-screen interface. The integration of cad nauseam and blog nauseam didn’t work well with the old Tempera site template, so I took the opportunity to switch to a cleaner, more modern looking template, Fluida. In addition to being very configurable, this template does all sorts of fancy hover-over stuff that some of you will undoubtedly hate, but in my tests it performed well and didn’t get in my way. The best thing about it is that it’s now full-width: Tempera was not. Some of you won’t like that change either, but I always dislike using a web site that confines itself to a narrow stripe in the middle of a high resolution CAD screen. Now I don’t have to dislike my own site.
  • I’ve redesigned the favicon to reflect the dual cad nauseam / blog nauseam nature of the site.

I have now restored the polls and image galleries. The automated redirection of old URLs to the new location should now be working. The downloads page is still a work in progress and will remain hidden for a while, but that’s mostly of historical interest anyway.

Again, my apologies for the breakdown and the inconvenience of change, but I’m glad that there have been quite a few positives arising from a bad situation.

If there are things about the site you don’t like now, feel free to let me know.

Bentley marketers love Autodesk

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Bentley Systems marketers are currently taking advantage of Autodesk customers’ distaste for the Big A’s rent-or-GTFO business model.

For any Autodesk competitor, this is a fairly smart move. Autodesk has offered a free kick to its competitors and is betting on them all kicking the ball wide of the net. How accurate is Bentley’s shooting?

In this case, AutoCAD customers are being encouraged to take up MicroStation. Via the Cadalyst Direct opt-in advertising list, I received an email entitled AutoCAD Users, you need options. We listened:


Talk about feeling trapped (which has many Autodesk customers angry), options and flexibility (which Autodesk has removed) and listening (which Autodesk really sucks at) are clearly taking advantage of Autodesk’s self-inflicted subscription predicament.

“Work the way you want to” is only partly true. If you want to work with a pool of network licenses and not get unpleasant surprises in the way of excess-use invoices every so often, the Bentley Select licensing system may not be for you. Bentley has fixed some of the worst aspects of that system but it’s still controversial and unpopular.

It’s also stretching things to describe DWG as a natively supported format with no data conversions necessary. It’s true that MicroStation has supported open and save of DWG for some years, but as a secondary format. It’s not like BricsCAD, where DWG is the primary format and files can generally be seamlessly shared with AutoCAD users. I know from personal experience that DWG files originating in MicroStation cause a bunch of problems for AutoCAD users. I’ve had to write code to work around some of the issues.

Back to the marketing. The email, complete with imagery of a man cramped up in a cardboard box, pointed me to this page with a similarly confined woman:

With the cardboard box theme, it’s a good thing that Bentley isn’t marketing to cats. They would probably make ideal Autodesk customers.

So what’s the substance of the offer here?

If you own AutoCAD perpetual licenses, you can receive credit for the current value of your AutoCAD license toward the purchase of a MicroStation perpetual license.

 
That’s as specific as it gets: “credit for the current value of your AutoCAD license” could mean anything. Autodesk doesn’t sell software any more, so what’s the value of a license that has no current list price? You could have bought your AutoCAD 30 years ago for $2000 and spend $15000 keeping it up to date. How much credit do you get based on that value? 100%? 1%?

It’s an unknown discount off an unknown amount. What are the terms and conditions? Which AutoCAD releases and variants qualify? Do you get to keep your AutoCAD license? (Of course you do, Bentley can’t take it away from you, but they could have said so).

To fill in the gaps you’re expected to fill in a form and presumably get a quote. I bet most people will stop right there and close the browser window. I don’t know about you, but my interest in offers falls off dramatically when I can’t see what’s being offered.

I think Bentley has kicked the ball the wrong side of the post here.

The big Bricsys interview 11 – free viewer?

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This is the final post in a series covering an extensive interview with Bricsys CEO Erik De Keyser and COO Mark Van Den Bergh. If you’ve made it through to the end of this series, congratulations! I hope you found it illuminating.

In this post, R.K. McSwain asks a question about a possible BricsCAD-based DWG viewer, which turns into a brainstorming session!

R.K.: Do you guys have a viewer? A read-only viewer? Is it something you’re looking to do?

Erik: No. BricsCAD classic costs, you know, $400.

Steve: Autodesk is giving one away anyway.

R.K.: They give it away, but you know what it is. It’s almost a 1 GB download, I was thinking as maybe a way to get people interested in BricsCAD? Here’s a viewer, I wonder what else it can do…

Mark: What? (disbelieving) The viewer is almost one gig?

Steve: It’s about 800 MB.

Erik: It’s a matter of choices and priorities.

Steve: It is a marketing opportunity. A viewer that’s easier to use, because you can download and install it within five minutes. And you could be providing them with basically BricsCAD with stuff disabled. You could even have a Buy Me button that un-disables that stuff.

Erik: Yeah, yeah!

Steve: This isn’t an interview now, it’s a product brainstorming session!

Erik/Mark: (laughs)

Mark: Let’s continue! Let’s continue! As you know, you can download our software and evaluate it for 30 days (and you can ask for an extension) but one of the options we’ve discussed is that after the 30 days it turns into a viewer.

Erik: Maybe we’ll do that.

R.K.: That gives them the 30 day window up front, even if they’re just looking for the viewer.

Erik: Yeah.

This is the complete set of links to this interview series:

The big Bricsys interview 10 – platforms

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This is one of a series of posts covering an extensive interview with Bricsys CEO Erik De Keyser and COO Mark Van Den Bergh.

In this post, R.K. McSwain asks about BricsCAD running on three different platforms. Erik explains why BricsCAD for Mac (and Linux) is so much more complete than AutoCAD for Mac, which has more holes than a block of Swiss cheese.

R.K.: Do all three platforms (Windows, Linux, Mac) contain the same functionality?

Erik: Yes. Sometimes it’s a bit hard with the Mac to bring it along but so far, so good. The only problem sometimes is in the APIs.

We are using wxWidgets and not the Microsoft classes. This gives us the ability, with the same source code more or less, to serve Mac, Linux and Windows. By far Windows is the most important one. By history, all the applications are on Windows, because AutoCAD was only Windows. What we have as APIs, and the most important ones are BRX and .NET. If you want to port an application to Mac, it means our API must support that as well. BRX is doing that for 90 to 95%; there are a couple of functions that only work on Windows. For most of the applications, they can port their application to Linux or the Mac without any problems.

Steve: And you support the Visual LISP COM functions as well, right?

Mark: Yes, we cover them and they are also available on Mac and Linux.

Steve: You have a solution there that Autodesk doesn’t, which gives us the strange situation that BricsCAD for Mac is more AutoCAD-compatible than AutoCAD for Mac.

R.K.: AutoCAD for Mac leaves a lot of holes.

Erik: That’s because they rewrote the whole interface for Cocoa, and we didn’t. We are using one code base. You can be more Catholic than the Pope, yeah? If you rewrite AutoCAD completely for the Mac, the result is many holes, no applications possible, it doesn’t help anybody. We’re better off being pragmatic and doing it the way we did it.

Still, we must say that applications availability for Mac and Linux is not much. That has to do with 95% of our sales being on Windows. We expect that might change for BIM, because more architects are Mac users, partly because the first version of ArchiCAD was on Mac, Vectorworks is, so it’s really an Architect’s machine. We expect that maybe for BIM, it might change and we might sell more versions on the Mac.

Steve: Autodesk doesn’t have a competitor there, does it?

Erik: No, absolutely not.

Mark: I should mention that all of our keys are cross-platform. So when you buy a key, you can run them all. So every time you on decide to run on Mac and later on you decide to switch it to Windows, we don’t have any problem. You can switch whenever you want, from one to the other, on to Linux if you want.

Erik: Again, choice. It’s up to the users.

This is the complete set of links to this interview series:

The big Bricsys interview 9 – treading on developers

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This is one of a series of posts covering an extensive interview with Bricsys CEO Erik De Keyser and COO Mark Van Den Bergh. Erik explains that Bricsys won’t trample over its application partners in Autodesk-like fashion, except…

Steve: Autodesk is known for treading on its third-party developers and replacing their market. Can you tell us about your attitude to doing that?

Erik: We have always said that we are not stepping into any application market. We will not do it.

There’s only one exception, that’s where there is no [other] possibility. There was no sheet metal. There is no viable [third-party] DWG sheet metal product in the market today for sheet metal. Then we do it, of course.

For BIM, there are. There is a German product. We have talked to those guys, but the problem is, for BIM the way we do it, it’s so deep in the core, the direct modeling engine that we have build… there’s no way that we could expect, of all the partners that are working on AEC, that one would have the strength and the force to bring the product where it is today. We have worked with maybe 30, 40 people for three, four years to do that. I don’t know of any application partner that has more than ten employees. And then those ten employees do everything.

Mark: Except for Intergraph, of course!

Erik: Except Intergraph! Except Intergraph! In the AEC space, I mean. When it comes to making an architectural modeler, there was no other possibility but to do it ourselves. Then we do it. But what we do then is provide all the APIs so the rest of the AEC community can profit off it. Otherwise, I think we would have lost the AEC space. If we didn’t do that, with what we have shown you today on BIM, we would lose the AEC space completely. That could not happen.

This is the complete set of links to this interview series:

The big Bricsys interview 8 – boundaries and BIM

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This is one of a series of posts covering an extensive interview with Bricsys CEO Erik De Keyser and COO Mark Van Den Bergh.

Erik discusses where Bricsys can go in future and the place BIM has in that.

Cyrena: So what is your vision, ultimately, of what Bricsys will become in tandem with your partners? Do you have limits or boundaries of which markets you will address and which you won’t? Are you going to be bigger than… “somebody else” one day?

Erik: If it comes to the number of customers, challenging AutoCAD is difficult. 12 million registered users. If you count illegal users it might add up to, I don’t know, 20 million, 30 million? I don’t know, nobody knows.

What are the boundaries of where we can go? It’s more or less dictated by the application markets. We have application developers in GIS, we have them in AEC, we have them in mechanical. In Mechanical 3D, AutoCAD was not present. They were present with AutoCAD Mechanical, but that’s a 2D product. If for a moment I leave Inventor out, because it’s another file format, but for DWG, the market for sheet metal and the things that Solidworks and others do, you don’t see third party applications with power participating in that market, with AutoCAD. With all the other markets, there are plenty of other applications: GIS, AEC, it’s endless. We want to bring everyone who wants to work with us, we’re going to feed and help them, and that’s more or less the boundary of where we can go.

For BIM, that’s something we are driving ourselves and it’s a huge market. There’s a lot of attention being paid to Revit [by elements of the press]. We think there are a lot of DWG users that want to move to BIM, but first of all Revit is too expensive, it’s too complicated by far, and it’s another file format. These are hurdles that not everybody wants to jump at the moment. It’s fair to say that we are working to eliminate all those hurdles. An existing DWG user, AutoCAD or BricsCAD already knows 80% of our BIM product. He has to learn 20% extra and he can participate, probably in an easier and more intuitive way than he can ever do with Revit.

We didn’t talk a lot about the differences between Revit and our BIM solution. I think in six months and a year we’re going to spend more time to really explain the differences. BIM is hyped, but there are studies that show that 19% of the people who talk about BIM are actually using it. It’s a couple of hundred thousands, it’s not millions already. There’s a lot of hype around it but the real challenge is to bring five or six million people on DWG in the AEC space into BIM. That’s our goal. If they want to stay on DWG, we are their only chance. For that part only, that’s already a huge start. If you then count all the applications on top of that and around it, the addressable market for us on that is immense.

This is the complete set of links to this interview series:

The big Bricsys interview 7 – the applications ecosystem

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This is one of a series of posts covering an extensive interview with Bricsys CEO Erik De Keyser and COO Mark Van Den Bergh.

In this post, Erik discusses the Bricsys efforts to work with and assist third-party developers. He does this without being prompted by a question – it’s obviously very important to him.

Erik: For our future growth it’s very important, the ecosystem of the applications we have now. We have talked a lot about what we are doing and about our own products, but we should maybe have spent more time on the importance of the ecosystem. The worst thing we could do is forget the application market for us.

We will not, and we are not able, to develop another HVAC system or a [inaudible] system. We are limited in our resources and focused too much in our development. We believe that if there are five or ten HVAC packages, one in Germany, one in France, one in the US and one in Australia, all those guys understand their local markets and it’s very difficult to take an HVAC package made in America and sell it in Germany. The last thing we want to do is destroy that diversity of the application market. On the contrary, we’re going to encourage it. Therefore we will continuously provide APIs to the application market and invite and encourage them to become more professional. This support is so important. That’s where we can make a difference with many of our colleagues, and we should bring the application market to the same level of professionalism. That’s where we are investing as well. They can use all our systems for free.

It would be a great and a wonderful world if you as a customer if you come to our website or you go to an application website and finds the same systems and buys something, and communicates… if there’s a problem, it’s our problem. He can tell us, the application partner can tell us, if it’s an application problem we will tell them or the customer will tell them. But that kind of trio between the customer, us and the application market is so important. We need that.

We need those kind of applications working with our system. And they are there! For over ten years they have wonderful applications. The point is, they lacked, for the moment, the technology to grow into IFC and the BIM market. That’s what we are developing for them now. Right now we need the apps, and we’re delivering to them. But it’s a very important thing for us, that ecosystem. And again I think that’s another difference between us and many, er, alternatives (laughs).

Steve: Not saying “the A word” there…

Erik/Mark: (laughs)

Steve: It’s something I’ve noticed for years, actually, that you guys look after the third-party developers whereas Autodesk sees them as a revenue source.

Erik: Absolutely. We are convinced we need them. They have to say they need us as well. That’s a very good symbiosis. And the top of that is Intergraph. For us, it’s an application partner, right? There’s scalability a bit more than before.  If Intergraph takes this step, let us invite every other application developer to do the same.

This is the complete set of links to this interview series:

The big Bricsys interview 6 – lean and focused

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This is one of a series of posts covering an extensive interview with Bricsys CEO Erik De Keyser and COO Mark Van Den Bergh. In this post, the dynamic duo explain the mystery of how Bricsys can sell smaller numbers of a more capable product than AutoCAD for a fraction of the cost – and still make money.

Steve: It’s kind of interesting that your product is so much cheaper than AutoCAD, and more capable. They’re making a loss and you’re making increasing profits. How does that work?

Erik: I think it has to do with being lean and being focused. I mean, we’re talking about Autodesk, and we’re talking about AutoCAD and Revit and Inventor, but did you have a look at all the products they have? The managers that have to work on those products… I don’t study the detail of their annual figures, but I think it’s obvious that if you have that ton of products, not all of those products are profitable. Of course, not all of them are losing money, but you can’t call it lean.

What we are doing is… we are forced to be profitable. We force ourselves to be profitable. And then we have to be lean. We have four developers that constantly automate our systems, and that four will be extended again. That pays off big-time. It’s an investment; continuous, continuous, continuous. To invent new things where we can improve to be lean as well.

Mark: Stressing again that Autodesk has one hundred products, we basically have one product. We can see for mechanical, we can see for BIM, basically it’s one product.

Steve: It’s the same core.

Mark: It’s the same core, absolutely. So when we started to develop BIM, we used the same toolset as we used for sheet metal; exactly the same. Of course it’s tweaked to be used in BIM or sheet metal, but in the ground it’s the same.

This is the complete set of links to this interview series:

Props to Bricsys for supporting education

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Some time ago I raised a glass to Autodesk for supporting students and educators by making its software available free. I have been remiss in neglecting to point out that Bricsys also does this.

So I raise a glass of dark, tasty and ridiculously strong Belgian beer to Bricsys for doing this. Cheers!