August 2012: Autodesk increases profits, but not as much as expected, and gets rid of 500 people. This sort of thing has happened before, resulting in the loss of good, skilled people, some with many years of priceless and irreplacable experience.
September 2012: Autodesk goes on a recruiting drive.
So, if you want to work for a company that will put you out with the trash the next time reality doesn’t quite match some financial analyst’s estimate, you know where to go. Good luck with that.
In a recent post on Between the Lines, Shaan passed on the following response from the AutoCAD Team:
There has been some recent discussions about the built-in help system in AutoCAD 2013, both positive and some criticism. As our longtime users know, AutoCAD help has been through many evolutions.
We are particularly proud of the new AutoCAD 2013 online learning environment we recently released (AutoCAD Online Help Mid-Year Updates.) This update addressed several user requested fixes and changes, and we will continue to take our direction from our user’s feedback.
We do recognize that the online learning environment may not be the solution for every user, so while we are focused on creating a rich and personalized online experience, we will continue to maintain our current basic offline experience.
(The emphasis is mine). This statement, although couched in marketingspeak, confirms what I’ve had to say on the subject. Here’s my translation into plain English:
AutoCAD 2013 Help sucked, the customers said so, the recent update improved matters somewhat for online users, but the awful old system stays in place for offline users. The offline system is in maintenance mode, and the experience will continue to remain basic (i.e. it will suck long-term).
There’s no mention of correcting this situation; it’s clearly a matter of policy rather than some unfortunate accident.
Today, I was using Autodesk Navisworks Manage 2013. As you might expect from an Autodesk product, it’s powerful but unstable. In addition to the lockups and crashes, it has various bugs and annoyances. In looking for a way of working around one of the annoyances, I delved into the Help system. Strangely enough, this product (much younger than AutoCAD) uses something that looks remarkably like an old-fashioned CHM-based Help system. It worked offline. It was quick. It had contents, search and index tabs, and they worked on a Windows 7 64-bit system. It had a hierarchical structure and a breadcrumb bar that helped me understand the context of what I was reading. Using it was, in short, a breath of fresh air.
Memo to Autodesk: if you’re going to try to make online Help look good by mangling offline help, you’re going to have to do this to all your products at once to make it remotely convincing.
In my effusive welcome of AutoCAD 2013’s updated Help system, I wondered if I had been shocked into missing some glaring problem. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what happened. In my enthusiasm, I managed to totally miss the fact that the new system has not been introduced for offline users.
If you use the new system, there’s a link on the front page to the offline files. I got as far as downloading and installing what I thought was the offline version of the new system and discovered that it didn’t want to install because the old one was already installed. What I should have then done, and didn’t, was to uninstall the old and install the new, before running it in offline mode. I intended to get around to that to check the performance and responsiveness of the respective versions, but didn’t have the time right then. If I had done so, I would have noticed that my download, uninstall and reinstall would have been in vain, because the offline version pointed to by the new system is still the old version. My apologies to anybody who wasted their time because of what I originally wrote.
There are many legitimate reasons why Autodesk customers want or need to use their software, including the documentation, entirely in offline mode. For example, the users I manage can’t access the online Help system from AutoCAD because Autodesk writes its software in such a way as to fail in a secure proxy server environment (yes, this has been reported as a bug, repeatedly). So for my users and many others, it’s true to say that despite the best efforts of Dieter and his team, AutoCAD 2013’s Help still sucks.
Look at this from the point of view of such offline AutoCAD 2013 Help users. We pay large amounts of money for software and Subscription. No “entitled” 99-cent users here. We’ve provided extensive feedback on the woeful system that was inflicted on us at release time. We’ve hung out for half a release cycle with no adequate stopgap, even though one could easily have been provided. A small team has finally wrought an outstanding improvement and deserves congratulations for doing so. The improved system is dangled in front of our faces, and then we discover that we’re not allowed to have it. Not for any plausible technical or resourcing reason, but because Autodesk simply doesn’t want us to have it. How are we supposed to feel about that?
That’s right. Autodesk has managed to snatch a crushing defeat from the jaws of what should have been a stunning victory. I guess I should have expected something like this; for Autodesk, the half-baked job is de rigeur. But this goes beyond the usual problem of countless features that would have been great if they had been finished. This isn’t a matter of a product team struggling to develop features adequately within an impossible timeframe imposed by the yearly release cycle. This is a matter of policy. Some Pointy Haired Boss at Autodesk has decided to deliberately disenfranchise a significant group of its paying customers, by refusing to make available something that already exists and could easily be provided. This adds insult to the injury of having to wait 6 months for a CHM stopgap that was clearly the right thing to do, but which never came.
Why? What on earth would lead anyone to even contemplate the possibility that this might be a good idea? Lack of resources? While I’m quite aware that individual parts of Autodesk have their own budgets and limited resources, I don’t buy that as an excuse for the organisation as a whole. A multi-billion-dollar corporation that pays its executives millions? One that just threw away $60M on a dud social media buyout? Crying poor over something that would have cost maybe a few thousand? Sure, sounds legit.
No, a lack of resources is not the reason. It’s a policy issue. “There’s no reason for it, it’s just policy.” But why would such an anti-customer policy exist? Vision. Autodesk is currently led by a Cloudy Vision. It’s important to Autodesk that everything Cloudy looks good. It’s clearly not enough to actually make online stuff work well. For one thing, that’s obviously pretty difficult, judging from Autodesk’s offerings to date. No, anything that’s offline has to be made to work badly, so the comparison looks as favourable as it possibly can. That’s much easier to arrange.
That’s why there was no CHM solution on the release date, despite Autodesk having a set of unpaid volunteers ready to put the thing together. That’s why there was no CHM solution provided a week later, or a month later, or six months later. Don’t think that it wasn’t provided because of a lack of resources; that excuse is entirely specious. It wasn’t provided because it would have made the online version look bad in comparison. The online version already looked abysmal, but an offline CHM solution would have just made the comparison so ridiculously one-sided that nobody would have been in any doubt about what a terrible idea on-line Help was. The Cloudy Vision would have looked suspect at best, and we can’t have that, can we?
What Autodesk wants is for people to think “Cloud good, non-Cloud bad”. If the Cloud can’t be made good, then making non-Cloud bad will have to act as substitute. Loading the dice in this way might stand a chance of working if customers were as clueless as some Autodesk decision-makers, but most of us aren’t total idiots. We notice these things.
This is a line-in-the-sand issue. This is about Autodesk pushing its vision at the expense of customers. No news there then, but from my point of view, this is one step too far. This is the tipping point where the not-convinced-about-the-Cloud phase could well turn into a full-scale take-your-Cloud-and-shove-it customer revolt. Me? I’m quite prepared to hand out the pitchforks and torches.
Source images: Hermann Anton (public domain) / Carl Bass (creative commons)
Carl Bass, you need to pull your troops into line. Let them know that while your Vision is important, implementing it must never come at the expense of common sense. It must definitely, never, ever come at the expense of your customers’ needs. Blindly following a Cloudy Vision didn’t end well for Joan of Arc, and it’s unlikely to end well for Autodesk either. Please remember the source of Autodesk’s income. Without customers, you are nothing. You are treating your customers badly, and worse, treating us as idiots. Please, give it up before we give you up.
Last week, Autodesk released Service Pack 1 for AutoCAD 2013, and then removed it a few days later.
Service Pack 1 for AutoCAD 2013 has been temporarily removed due to a newly discovered fatal error. The AutoCAD team is actively working on resolving this and a new service pack will be posted here as soon as it is available.
This is the sort of thing that Beta testing is supposed to prevent, but in this case it obviously didn’t. Somebody in a position of influence at Autodesk needs to investigate whether this is just a freak one-off, or if there is some systemic weakness within the Beta testing program.
One of the supposed benefits of Cloud software is that there are no updates for users to worry about. It’s all taken care of on the vendor’s server and you’re always using the most up to date version. OK, now fast forward five years and imagine how this scenario would have panned out if AutoCAD was a SaaS product.
You come in one morning to find your AutoCAD keeps crashing, or worse, corrupting your files. It keeps doing this for several days until Autodesk is convinced that the problem lies at its end and reverts the changes on its server while it works out how to fix it. In the meantime, there’s nothing you can do to keep your business running except use one of those old-fashioned copies of AutoCAD you have lying around the place. Except your Subscription agreement only allows you to go back 3 releases. Autodesk no longer supports the release you happen to have handy, and won’t allow the software to be activated. You don’t have a 30-day window because you once evaluated that release on your PC and your 30 days are well and truly gone. Oh, and the file format of the drawings you have been using lately has changed several times and the old release won’t open them anyway.
Why would anyone want to put their business in this position?
Edit: A couple of weeks later, Autodesk released AutoCAD 2013 Service Pack 1.1 to resolve the problem.
A couple of years ago, I reported on the missing features in AutoCAD 2011 for Mac. While some generous souls were prepared to accept something half-baked as a first attempt, even that excuse doesn’t wash when it comes to a third iteration. So how well is Autodesk doing at filling those holes? Decide for yourself. Here’s an updated list of missing features in AutoCAD 2013 for Mac:
Many of these are big-ticket, dealbreaking items. No DCL? Still? Seriously? To these we can add a whole application, Inventor Fusion, which comes as part of the AutoCAD 2013 for Windows install set. (Edit: Inventor Fusion for Mac is available to download as a Technology Preview application from Autodesk Labs and from the Apple App Store). I don’t expect many Mac users will be heartbroken about the lack of a permanent Ribbon (although there are Ribbon-like things that come and go), but as Autodesk reckons it’s responsible for a 44% productivity boost, maybe they should be. Oh, and it isn’t supported and doesn’t work properly on the current release of OS X.
To be fair, it’s not all one-way traffic. Here’s the list of features that appear only in AutoCAD for Mac:
Well, that’s all right, then.
We’re used to Autodesk’s unfortunate mastery of the long-term half-baked feature, but carrying on with a whole product this unfinished for three releases is more than a little embarrassing. Charging the same amount for it as real AutoCAD adds insult to injury. While I’m sure there are dozens of Mac users happy to be using anything with the AutoCAD name on it on the platform of their choice, this is not a sustainable state of affairs.
Autodesk really needs to make up its mind about this product before embarking on more Mac misadventures such as porting Revit and other products. Autodesk needs to either take AutoCAD for Mac seriously and finish it off to an acceptable standard, or kill it off as a bad idea. As there’s no sign of the former happening and Autodesk history is replete with examples of the latter, I wouldn’t suggest anybody gets too attached to running AutoCAD natively on OS X.
Source: Autodesk knowledgebase article TS15833488.
Three years ago, I was happy to promote Autodesk’s then-new site AutoCAD Exchange. However, Autodesk has now given up on this attempt to maintain a social site of its own. My comment at the time, “AutoCAD Exchange is an important and potentially very useful site for AutoCAD users” turned out to be optimistic. I was closer to the mark with “It has yet to be seen if Autodesk manages to develop a real community on this site”. Now we’ve seen the answer. No, it didn’t. Autodesk has instead handed control to more socially successful sites, as this message indicates:
Thank you for visiting AutoCAD Exchange. In an effort to consolidate our online AutoCAD community efforts to more popular networks, we will be migrating AutoCAD Exchange content and activities to Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.
Through the AutoCAD Facebook page we provide tips & tricks, tutorial videos and opportunities to engage with the employees at Autodesk that have helped build the product from the ground up.
We look forward to interacting with you on our social properties.
AutoCAD on Facebook
AutoCAD on Twitter
AutoCAD on YouTubeNote:AutoCAD Plant Exchange will continue on this site, providing updates, content packs, and productivity tools. Click the Plant Exchange tab or visit www.autodesk.com/plantexchange.
If you are at a corporate location it’s quite likely that Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are strictly off-limits, so I guess your AutoCAD-based social life just fell in a hole. OK, it was a worthy attempt which didn’t work, and it’s understandable that Autodesk pulled the plug. It was by no means the first Autodesk failed venture and it won’t be the last. Companies need to try out new things and nobody succeeds all the time. Apple Newton, anyone? Windows Me? IBM PCjr? AutoCAD for Mac? (The original attempt, that is. Jury is still out on the second one).
What if it had been a more important Autodesk on-line service that didn’t work out? One that you had grown to depend on? When Autodesk gives up on a piece of conventional software you’re using (as has happened countless times in the past, even with successful applications), you can at least go on using it until external factors force you to stop. That might be years down the track. I continued to use Autodesk’s Graphic Impact for presentations when most of Autodesk’s employees had forgotten it ever existed. But when Autodesk gives up on a piece of on-line software you’re using (and you’d have to be mindlessly optimistic to believe that such a thing won’t happen), you’re severely out of luck. So who’s going to volunteer to tie their company in to CAD on the Cloud?
When you register ClassicArray, you are supposed to receive an automated response with the registration code. I have not been able to get this working reliably, so for some customers I have been sending out the email manually. Personal circumstances dictate that I will be unable to do this promptly for much of April, so if you purchase ClassicArray and do not receive your code immediately, please accept my apologies in advance.
I will also not be able to be very active on this blog for much of April.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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:
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:
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.
That will get you to this screen:
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.
As I’ve already discussed, one of the areas where CAD on the Cloud shows potential is in handling specific tasks that require performing intensive calculations that are suitable for sharing among many processors. That sounds great in theory, and a lot of Cloud marketing (e.g. Virtually Infinite Computing) emphasises that point.
OK, that sounds promising, but how does it pan out in real life? One problem dissuading me from finding out is that Autodesk is being very restrictive with access to many of its Autodesk Cloud products (I’d probably throw a few sample render jobs into the Cloud and compare the performance, but I’m not the right kind of Subscription customer so I’m not allowed). Another problem is that I’m not qualified to review things like structural engineering software where the greatest computational potential appears to lie. Fortunately, Alex Bausk is qualified, so it was interesting to read his review of Autodesk’s Project Storm software.
It’s important to point out here that anything Autodesk with ‘Project’ in the name is not a finished product. It’s an Autodesk Labs thing, designed to attract feedback rather than use in production. I very much approve of this process. It’s one area in which I’m happy to endorse the way Autodesk is approaching the whole Cloud thing, and has several benefits over the flawed private Beta process that Autodesk uses for its mainstream products such as AutoCAD.
The downside for Autodesk when it comes to doing pre-release things publicly is that the criticism can be public, too. For example, selected from Alex’s review:
…the product is, for reasons unknown, available only in selected countries…
…utterly meaningless popups…
Options for analysis settings are, to put it short, appalling.
Project Storm is nothing more than a web envelope for our good old ARSA package. It is basically the same “Robot link” that reviteers have already had for quite a long time…
But the software’s practical use is extremely tiny, to the point of no use at all. You may surely forfeit all hope to do anything with it that would even remotely be relevant to all the “cloud analysis” hype in videos, intros and announcements.
I was unable to make any use of Storm with the sample models that come packed with Revit Structure and Robot Structural Analysis. To feed these default, Autodesk-made models to Storm, some really disruptive editing had to be made that involved deleting whole parts of the model, rendering it practically useless, only able to demonstrate how the process is meant to work.
Ouch! OK, so far it’s mainly just pointing out how half-baked the product is at this stage. Given that it’s a Project and not a finished product, that’s not so bad. It’s shipping products and features that are half-baked that I object to, and Autodesk has certainly produced a few of those. Anyway, here’s the bit I found particularly interesting:
Analysis speed, to a surprise, isn’t looking any good compared to desktop. The Storm’s cloud web analysis is extremely slow, likely because the server would yield a tiny fraction of its resources to your particular task.
In other words, the cloud speed and resource claim in case of Project Storm is no more than a standard cloud computing mantra.
…cloud calculations took around four minutes for this simple model, compared to fraction of a second using desktop…
What does this all mean? It could mean that Alex forgot to turn on the Ludicrous Speed toggle. It could mean that Autodesk is doing this experiment on the cheap and hasn’t paid for enough resources to make it work well. If so, that would be pretty short-sighted, and if Carl wants this Cloud thing to impress people he should sign off on a bunch more cash for Scott’s server farm budget. It could mean that this type of calculation is unsuited to parallel processing, in which case it’s probably not a great candidate for a Cloud product. Or it could mean that the calculation parts of this software haven’t been done properly yet, and everything will fly like the wind as soon as the developers get the hang of things.
Or maybe, just maybe, it means that the reality of Cloud computing isn’t quite as infinitely powerful as the hype makes out.
I have closed the Which of these is most evil? poll, which had been running from 20 February 2009. It attracted 2,351 voters, each of whom could distribute up to three votes among thirteen (yes, that number was deliberate) candidates. Here are the ranked results:
That top three is not going to shock anyone (except perhaps some fanbois), but are some surprises in the list. For example, more than a quarter of voters were aware enough of the evils of Big Content to be able to decipher the alphabet soup RIAA/IFPI/MPAA choice and select it. More than four times as many people think this litigious pack of demons is voteworthy than think the same about arch enemies The Pirate Bay. That’s not so shocking for those of us with our fingers on the pulse of popular opinion, but I was surprised to see so few people choose Big Content arch-villain Sony. Rootkit, anyone?
For Autodesk, this poll is something of a triumph, with less than a quarter of voters putting the company in the top three. Mind you, Autodesk was faced with some very stiff competition, being very narrowly edged out of fifth place by Miley Cyrus.
Only one in ten of you thought Google was worthy of selection. This is Google, a company that knows more about you than you do. Google, which passes out your information whenever it feels it might gain some strategic advantage from doing so, and really doesn’t care when it violates your privacy. Google, which insists on knowing my phone number before it lets me sign up for its Facebook-copy thing, because it obviously feels it doesn’t already have enough information about me. Google is apparently “do no evil” enough to attract far fewer votes than more sinister recipients such as, say, Disney.
Dell has been on my personal brown list for some years now, since repeatedly sending out fax spam to me and many other Australian businesses. It forced me to deal with its abysmal “customer service” [sic] Indian call centre in order to try to get it stopped. After making me wait for ridiculously long times while passing me round between various clueless, indecipherable people, a manager finally lied to me to get me off the phone. He assured me I would be taken off the list. The Dell fax spam continued until I finally gave up and threw the machine away; rather that than attempt to deal with Dell again.
Prior to this, I had no dealings with Dell and had just assumed it was a reasonably respectable company. It was only after this episode that I learned that Dell is utterly without ethics; my experience was perfectly normal. Indeed, victims of its shonkier practices (illegal bait-and-switch marketing, lying about stock and deliveries, repeatedly sending out “repaired” units that are totally non-functional, etc.) will probably think that I got off very lightly indeed. Dell has never seen a cent from me and never will. I’ve been very happy to pass on my feelings about the company to everyone who has ever asked for my hardware advice, as happens from time to time. 7% or not, Dell can go to Hell.
Finally, it’s official, I am more evil than Gaahl. Who? Gaahl is a Satanic death-grunt vocalist from black metal band Gorgoroth. He has performed in corpse paint on a stage decorated with sheep’s heads on spikes, and blood-splattered naked women hung up on crosses. Gaahl has been convicted of viscious violent assault multiple times, including one occasion where he was alleged to have threatened to drink his victim’s blood. I’m sure my metal friends will be very impressed by me being considered more evil than that. \m/
…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.
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?
Akamai is an Internet/Cloud infrastructure company, used extensively by Autodesk. To be polite, my experiences using its services over several years have been somewhat negative. Back in March, when trying to download the AutoCAD 2012 trial, I went through the usual Akamai download manager struggles before being informed of the wonderful Opera workaround (thanks again, Helper). I thought I’d seen the last of Akamai for a while, but today, while left unattended, Windows threw up this warning:
Huh? What is Akamai software trying to do here? I hadn’t asked it to do anything. I’m not downloading Autodesk software or even visiting an Autodesk site. There’s no reason for it to be running at all. Whatever it is, I don’t like it. Time to uninstall anything and everything Akamai, I think; something I should have done back in March. But wait! When I go to uninstall, what do I see? This:
Note that the dates are in DD/MM/YYYY format. There’s an application installed back in March, for which I granted permission (unwisely, apparently). OK, but there’s another one installed today! No permission was sought or granted. Right, that’s it. Akamai is now on my brown list, which is not a place anyone wants to be. Nothing in any way related to Akamai will ever be installed any my computer or any computer over which I have influence or control. If Autodesk continues to use Akamai’s services, Autodesk can expect to see continued strong criticism in this area. Unless, of course, somebody from Autodesk and/or Akamai can provide a reasonable explanation of what’s gone on here. Over to you.
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.
Audience participation time, I think. A comment on one of AutoCAD 2012’s new features recently set me thinking about what were the worst features ever introduced to AutoCAD. That in turn got me thinking about what were the best.
I’ll keep my opinions to myself for a while, as I’d like your input and don’t want to influence it. Please add a comment with your list of what you consider the best three features ever added to AutoCAD and the worst three. If you can’t think of three of each, you can submit less, but please don’t submit more. By all means discuss at length the things you love or loathe, but make it clear what you’re submitting by using a clear format like this (meaningless examples only):
Best:
1. Content Explorer
2. Online Help
3. Nudge
Worst:
1. AutoLISP
2. Transparent zoom and pan
3. Paper/model space
What do the words “feature”, “best” and “worst” mean? I’ll leave that for you to decide for yourself. You might consider “worst” to be something that’s a bad idea, poorly implemented, slow, inefficient, poorly documented, bloated, buggy, half-baked in the short or long term, clueless in some other way, or some or all of the above. It’s up to you.
When I have enough submissions, I’ll collate the most popular (and unpopular) features into a pair of polls for you all to vote on. Have fun!
Edit: I have now added the polls and closed comments on this post.
Note: this post is not an April fool’s joke. It may be ridiculous and hard to believe, but unfortunately it’s all true.
After I managed to overcome Autodesk’s obstructive download manger and download AutoCAD 2012, it became available on the Subscription site (when that site wasn’t running unusably slowly). Or it became kind-of available. Here’s what is actually available:
These file sizes are roughly double those of the AutoCAD 2012 English files I’ve already downloaded from the trial page and installed. The 32-bit English file is 1,144,011,680 bytes, or 55% of the size of what the Subscription site is trying to offer me.
Why? Because the Subscription downloads contain three bonus Asian language packs. It has apparently escaped Autodesk’s notice that Australia is an English-speaking country, and that the ability to install a Korean version of AutoCAD 2012 isn’t going to be spectacularly useful here. Duh!
There was a a distribution fiasco last year when Autodesk couldn’t make up its mind which AutoCAD 2011 language variant Australian users were supposed to use. This resulted in weeks of delays, uncertainty and disrupted shipments. This year, there’s less uncertainty. Somebody has made a firm decision about what we’re getting, right from the start. What a shame it’s the wrong one, and it makes Autodesk look utterly clueless.
Just in case you’re wondering, the AutoCAD 2012 English from the trial page installs and works fine, correctly detecting that I’m in Australia and presenting the correct legal information. The installation also registers and authorises correctly using the serial number provided on the Subscription site. No problems there, then.
What, then, is the reason for the massive download bloat? Is it really just stupidity, or is there some legitimate reason for it? I’m informed that installing the English version of 2012 in Australia may cause some problems with Migration when upgrading to 2013. I am unconcerned about this for two reasons. First, I’m sure migrating from 2012 English to 2013 English will work just as well here as it does elsewhere in the world. it’s not as if the Migration utility has to invert the bits or anything for Down Under users. Second, I have avoided Migration anyway since AutoCAD 2006, when “improvements” rendered it effectively unusable to me.
If you preselect some objects in AutoCAD 2012 and hold down [Ctrl], then the objects will move a bit if you hit an arrow key. Great, cool!
Exactly how far do they move? Let’s try it, shall we. First time, the move was about 4.5565 units. Zoom around a bit and try again. This time, it’s about 11.6677 units. Zoom around a bit more and it’s different again. And again. What’s actually happening is that the Nudge feature is moving the objects by 3 pixels. What? Since when has AutoCAD dealt with object location in terms of pixels? Since 2012 came out. Does object snap help? No. So you can expect to see a bunch more drawings that have been eyed in. “Looks near enough to me!”
OK, so you can turn Snap on and have the objects nudged around in a more rational way, or just ignore the feature altogether. But that’s not going to help you clean up the messy drawings that are now going to come your way for editing. Of course, some people have never needed any help to make messy drawings, but those that needed a little nudge in that direction have just been given it.
Edit (October 2016): see this post to download Autodesk software easily.
Let’s say you’re trying to download some software and it insists on first installing some intermediary download manager. Do you think, “Great, this will make my life easier, things are bound to go quickly and smoothly now”? No, didn’t think so. How about when it’s by Akamai? Does that make you feel more confident? No, nor me.
If I download stuff without a manager, it just works. Sometimes it’s slow, but it works. If I use a general-purpose download manager that’s part of my browser, or one I chose to install and use (e.g. Free Download Manager), things generally go very well. If there’s a direct download link to use, success and a very quick download are almost guaranteed. But it seems that every time some company wants to force a download manager on me, something bad happens. Now maybe I’m only remembering the failures and forgetting the successes, but I’m absolutely sure that download reliability is way, way poorer when companies insist on inflicting their download managers on me. I’ve had issues with them at home with a straightforward ADSL connection, and I’ve had no end of problems with them at work in a proxy server environment. Even when they work, the download speed is generally significantly poorer than when I use something like Free Download Manager.
The latest in a long line of download manager difficulties is this morning’s attempted download of the AutoCAD 2012 trial. Why, as a Subscription customer, am I downloading the trial? Why don’t I just get it from the Subscription Center? Because Autodesk hasn’t got around to putting 2012 on there yet. Paying customers come some way down the priority list, apparently. I hope it’s just a temporary delay, because last year here in Australia the delivery of AutoCAD 2011 software to customers was a complete debacle that took some weeks to sort out.
I went to the AutoCAD 2012 Trial page yesterday. At the time, it said 2012 wasn’t available to me, but by this morning that has been fixed. So I went through the fill-in-your-details stuff, and was told to Click “run” or “open” to start the installer. There was no “run” available, so I clicked on the link that said Don’t see the installer? Try reopening it. I got a Security Warning dialog with the option to Run something called installer.exe from client.akamai.com.
Now at this point I’m getting pretty dubious about this process, as I’m being asked to put faith in an undocumented and generically named executable that does who-knows-what, from a company that has messed things up on numerous past occasions. Call me an inveterate optimist, but I crossed my fingers and picked Run anyway. Then I got another Security Warning dialog to run Akamai Installer. Fingers still crossed, I hit Run again. A small Connecting… progress panel appeared, which almost immediately got a quarter of the way though, then threw up an Install Error. Can’t say I was surprised, really. I went through the process several times and couldn’t find a simple download link anywhere. I gave up on this and decided to try later at home.
At home, free of any proxy server complications, I had another go at it. This time, running installer.exe seemed to work, the installing-the-installer-to-download-the-installer-installer progress bar got all the way to the end, and the download allegedly started. A progress bar appeared on Autodesk’s download page, purporting to show the progress. Unlike a proper download manager, there is no mention anywhere of the size of the file, the amount downloaded so far, or the rate at which data is being transferred, so this bar is all I have to go on. In the past, a large AutoCAD download has taken 20 to 30 minutes using Free Download Manager. As I type, 32 minutes into the alleged download, have a guess at how far the progress bar has moved. Half way, perhaps? A bit less? Nope, it hasn’t moved at all. Not one pixel. My browser is sitting there, alternating between saying Waiting for 127.0.0.1 and Transferring data from 127.0.0.1, but otherwise appearing to do nothing. A brief speed test tells me that my ADSL is running at pretty normal speed while this is going on, so it’s my guess that nothing useful is really happening.
Akamai download manger fail. Again.
Autodesk isn’t the only culprit here. There are other companies who insist on throwing this sort of unnecessary complication into the lives of their customers and potential customers. For example, Adobe is doing its best to make Flash unpopular by inflicting unpopular and bloated download managers on its users.
I know Autodesk will say that it has to use a content delivery network like that provided by Akamai in order to prevent server bottlenecks when providing large files to lots of people. I can see that is a legitimate problem, but these download managers are a clumsy and inappropriate solution. There are countless other places on the Internet that don’t do this. Most downloads I perform just use a simple link. Guess what? They just work.
Companies, don’t leverage your technology to simplify and enhance my seamlessly integrated user experience with your intrusive download managers. Just provide a simple link to the file the downloader is trying to download. It’s not rocket science, so don’t try to make it overcomplicated. If you really, really insist on offering a download manager, make sure it’s optional and there’s a real link available. Please.
Edit: Thanks to a comment from Helper, I have successfully downloaded AutoCAD 2012 using Opera. Downloading and installing Opera was very quick, and Autodesk/Akamai doesn’t support it, so a real link is provided instead. Opera’s built-in download features are showed me exactly what was going on, and it took about 45 minutes to download the 64-bit version. Doing the same initial steps again with the 32-bit version, I copied and pasted the link into Free Download Manager, rather than letting Opera do the download. This time, it took about 14 minutes. Awesome!
You may remember my pre-release speculation about what was likely to be missing from the Mac version of AutoCAD 2011. It turns out that my list was pretty accurate as far as it went, but very incomplete.
In a move that I can only applaud, Autodesk has now published its own list of missing Mac features. It includes this statement:
Although AutoCAD 2011 for Mac is based on AutoCAD 2011, it was written to be a native Mac application. As such, it is a new and separate product and not simply a port from the Windows version. In the first release of this new product, there are some features and functionality that exist in AutoCAD 2011 that are not yet available in AutoCAD 2011 for Mac, including (but not limited to):
This is followed by a list of over 80 holes in the product. Many of them are minor, but the number of absent but important features is quite an eye-opener. I really can’t imagine anyone who is used to the Windows-based product being content with AutoCAD for Mac 2011 if forced to switch by a Apple-centric boss. Hardware, great. OS, fine. App, not so much. I expect future releases will gradually fill many of those holes, but Autodesk isn’t promising that. For now, I can state that at least one of my dire predictions was spot-on. AutoCAD for Mac is indeed half-baked.
Autodesk has stated that the Mac version is the same price as the Windows version, despite being incomplete, because Mac users (particularly architects) won’t notice the missing stuff. That may be true (if somewhat insulting to architects and fanboys) or not, but it definitely doesn’t apply to the rest of us.
Existing AutoCAD users, have a look at the list. What in there would be a dealbreaker for you? From my own CAD manager point of view, I can see about a dozen killer omissions, with the API holes at the top of the pile. No DCL support, for example? Wow.