No, I haven’t written a post containing a summary of AutoCAD 2011 features. I won’t be doing so, either. Instead, I’ll just point you at R.K. McSwain’s excellent AutoCAD 2011 in 3 minutes post on his CAD Panacea blog.
I won’t be ignoring the new release; I will be covering selected AutoCAD 2011 features in more detail in future posts. I just don’t see much point in doing a “me too” post when somebody else has already done such a fine job of it.
Just announced by Shaan Hurley via Twitter and Facebook:
Busy on the final details for a special Autodesk event next week in San Francisco with some bloggers. http://www.autodesk.com/webcast
Follow the link and you will find this:
Autodesk Webcast
Date: 3/25/10
Start Time: 9:00 SF/12:00 New York/16:00 UK/17:00 CETRegister today to join Autodesk CEO Carl Bass and Senior Vice President Amar Hanspal for an exclusive live webcast to learn about updates to Autodesk’s portfolio of design software for the AEC, manufacturing and general design industries.
In Autodeskspeak, “general design” means AutoCAD (AEC = Revit, manufacturing = Inventor), so you can expect this to be the same kind of thing as the AutoCAD 2010 launch I attended last year. (Note: ‘launch’ does not mean ‘release’). At this event, selected bloggers will probably get to see the big production effort that goes into the launch webcast (no, it’s not done on Shaan’s laptop webcam). They can expect to be transported, housed, fed and watered by Autodesk, which I trust we’ll see disclosed by everybody this year.
More importantly, they will most likely be given access to various significant Autodesk people, such as my video interview on the Autodesk Listening theme. These events are both worthwhile and great fun, and my best wishes go out to those bloggers who will be attending this time round.
For the previous three years, you will have seen bloggers reporting on the contents of the new release in early February, but this has not happened not this time. Why is the information being held back so long this time, with the launch 48 days later this year than last? I genuinely have absolutely no idea. Feel free to speculate.
Here’s a tip I just rediscovered while cleaning out my old emails. It applies to all recent AutoCAD releases.
Let’s say you have a drawing that you think has been used as an xref by at least one other drawing, and maybe more. How can you find out which drawings use it as an xref?
First, turn on DesignCenter. You can do this with Tools > Palettes > DesignCenter, the ADCENTER command, or Ctrl+2. Pick on the Search button at the top (the magnifying glass thingy). In the Search dialogue box, change the “Look for” item to Xrefs (but have a look at what else you can search for, you may find that useful too). You can pick Browse to tell it where to look, and you can make it look down into all the subfolders if you like. Type the xref name into the “Search for the name” field and pick Search Now.
DesignCenter has lots of handy features, such as the ability to drag a block from one drawing to your current drawing without opening the drawing containing the block. Some of the features are hard to find (like the xref search above), but they are very useful once you know about them.
Another handy tool for obtaining all sorts of information about xrefs is the Reference Manager, which was introduced in AutoCAD 2004. This is a standalone program, for which you can find a shortcut in the same Start > Programs > Autodesk > AutoCAD 200x menu as AutoCAD itself. There’s too much good stuff in there to cover in a post like this, but many people are unaware that it exists and I just want to raise awareness. For details, please check out the Help from within Reference Manager itself.
Note
I sent most of the above tip to the users I support in June 2006. I was asked about how to do this by one of my users and found out about it somehow or other, but I now can’t remember how I found out. I may have read about it somewhere on the Internet, but I just don’t know. I have searched and found a similar tip in various places (including Cadalyst and Ellen Finkelstein’s blog) but have not yet seen one that is dated before I wrote about it myself. If you think you know of someone who deserves credit for earlier publication of this tip, please let me know.
Edit: It now appears quite likely that credit belongs to Mai Ezzat, via Ellen Finkelstein, possibly via R.K. McSwain.
This is a revisit of a post I made about a year ago.
You may have noticed that some people’s comments have an avatar picture next to them (no, not the film with the Roger Dean visuals), while others have a randomly assigned pattern. On this blog, the avatar picture is a gravatar (globally recognised avatar), and you can have one too. Once you set it up, you will find that it works in all sorts of places, not just this blog. Some other blogs may use other avatar standards, though.
Here’s how to do it:
That’s it, although you can manage your account to provide multiple email addresses and images if you wish. Wait 5 or 10 minutes, then check out this or other blogs and web locations where you have made comments in the past. Those blogs with layouts that support gravatars should now display the picture that you associated with the email address you supplied when you made your comment. If the image doesn’t show up, do a reload/refresh and/or clear your browser’s cache and try again.
No, I don’t mean Autodesk is now so impoverished that it is running short of monitors for its staff, I mean send a capture of your screen to Autodesk. Guillermo Melantoni, one of AutoCAD’s Product Managers, would like to see how you arrange your user interface for production use. As I’ve mentioned before, Guillermo is a very smart guy who is responsible for recent 3D enhancements to AutoCAD. He is open to listening to customers and trying to accommodate their needs. Here’s what he has to say:
I would like to ask all of you to send me screen capture of your AutoCAD in production. I’d like to understand how you organize the diverse components, how you use the Ribbon and/or the toolbars, if you display the command line or not, if you use tool palettes.
I’m very happy Guillermo is seeking to gain a fuller understanding of the diverse ways in which we use AutoCAD, and I encourage you to send him a screen capture of your working environment. If you have several workspaces, send him several screen captures explaining what each capture is showing and how often it is used. If you are a CAD manager or other person with access to several users who set up their interfaces differently, then please send in examples from those other users too.
There are many ways of creating screen captures, but the good old Print Scrn button should do the job fine here, capturing both screens if you use a dual-monitor setup. You can then fire up any graphics app such as Paint (e.g. in XP, Start > Run > mspaint [Enter]) and paste in your capture. Please don’t save it as a BMP file even if that’s the default, as that’s extremely space-inefficient. The PNG format works well for screen captures, being compact without losing quality.
Please send your captures by email to guillermo.melantoni@autodesk.com, and use a subject that begins with MyUI, to help Guillermo deal with what I hope is a lot of screen capture emails!
On the Project Butterfly blog, a recent poll gave these choices:
In a follow-up post, the observation was made that “We thought that only a few people would work without a command line, but the results were refreshing.” Apparently, only 66% of respondents selected the first of the available options.
To this I respond, “Beware the trap of the biased sample”. The poll asked people who are largely users of a product that involves drawing without a command line if they can work without it. In response, an amazing 2/3 of them say “I can’t work without the command line”, i.e. they can’t possibly do what they are currently doing, every time they use the product on which the blog is based.
How is that “refreshing”? 34% is an incredibly small number when the only alternative answer is self-contradictory. It should be very close to 100%, surely?
Every poll has a biased sample, including my own polls here. The trick is in working out how strong the bias is and determining if it invalidates the results. In this case, readers of the Butterfly blog are largely users of a command-line-less product and therefore likely to have a strong bias against the command line. So that 66% number would be a bit bigger if addressed to a more general population, I reckon.
I’ve added my own poll for my own biased sample (that’s you lot out there, largely users of a command line-based application) using exactly the same question format. I’m not entirely happy with the way the options are worded as it is not entirely neutral, but I’ll stick with it for the purpose of the comparison.
While I might dispute the conclusions that might be drawn from the poll, I must say that I like the way the Project Butterfly team is doing this in the open. It’s much better than the traditional Autodesk practice of claiming that what they are doing is supported by polls among customers, then refusing all requests for the full details of those polls. As the devil is in the details, I automatically discount any such claims based on secret research, from Autodesk or anyone else. I encourage the Butterfly people to keep doing what they are doing, regardless of any nitpicking from me; it is very refreshing (there’s that word again) to see Autodesk being open and I want to encourage it.
In addition to voting, I’d love to have you add your own comments either for or against use of the command line in CAD. It may be old and unfashionable, but does that make it inefficient? Have you tried turning it off in AutoCAD and running purely on Dynamic Input? Have you had experience with CAD or similar products without command lines? Let’s hear it.
I want your views on how much control I should exert over the comments that people make here. I’ve been led to thinking about this by a couple of things. Mostly by the occasion of the first troll comment on this blog, and to a lesser extent by Shaan Hurley turning off comments on posts older than three months on his Between The Lines blog. (I am not complaining about this; it’s Shaan’s justifiable reaction to mass spam attacks and it has nothing to do with censorship. There are some Autodesk blogs that don’t allow comments at all, which may in itself be justifiable).
I’m a proponent of freedom of speech and don’t want to restrict your ability to say what you think. I’m perfectly happy to see you express your contrary opinions and would never dream of removing or editing a comment simply because it contains viewpoints with which I disagree. There are plenty of comments on this blog from people who disagree with my stated views, and at least one containing an insult aimed at me personally using a variant of a word that many people would consider very offensive. I haven’t touched those comments. I haven’t even touched the troll comment.
Spam, on the other hand, is mercillesly dealt with. The vast majority of it is automatically excluded by Akismet, a handful I have to remove manually, but in all cases the comment is deleted and the sender’s IP is banned from accessing the site. I can do that with other commenters too, but I have not yet done so.
My question to you is where do you think I should draw the line? If a discussion leads to a vendor commenting to let people know that his company provides a service relevant to the discussion, is that spam or should I let it go? Should I remove deliberate trolling attempts? What about comments or words based on race or religion? If somebody drops an f-bomb or a c-bomb without attacking anybody, is that a problem for you? How about attacks on companies or individuals? If commenters start personally attacking each other, should I let it go? If somebody has a go at a company in a way that looks unhinged to some, is that OK? What if somebody else says it is loony bin material? What if that then leads to a flame war?
I’d like to draw up some moderation guidelines so everyone knows where they stand. I know I will have to make judgement calls wherever the line is drawn, but I’d appreciate it if you would give me an idea about your own preferences. I’ll consider adding a poll later if the discussion throws up a few options.
This morning I spoke with CAD International‘s Nigel Varley. Here is a paraphrased summary of the interview.
SJ: When did CAD International buy the drcauto intellectual property rights?
NV: About two weeks ago.
SJ: You are currently helping drcauto customers with authorisation codes, is that correct?
NV: Yes, masses of them. It’s taking up a lot of our peoples’ time.
SJ: Are you charging for this service?
NV: Not at present.
SJ: Do you intend to charge for this service in the future?
NV: Maybe. We may need to, both to pay for our time and to recoup our investment. I don’t particularly like the idea of annual renewals for software, so we may do something different in future.
SJ: If somebody wanted to buy drcauto products such as LT Toolkit now, could they do so?
NV: No, we’re still processing the materials we were given when we bought the rights. It wasn’t left in a well-organised state. I’m not sure if that was done deliberately or if it was just like that.
SJ: Do you have any plans to continue development of LT Toolkit or the other drcauto products?
NV: It’s too early to say at this time. I understand it doesn’t work right now with AutoCAD LT 2010 with Update 2 applied, or on 64-bit Windows, or on Windows 7. It’s not clear at this stage how much work is involved in making it work. It should be doable, but we can’t make any commitments at this stage.
SJ: So do you have a timeframe for doing any of this stuff?
NV: No, it’s too early. We’re still processing it.
SJ: What about former drcauto employees helping people out with authorisation codes?
NV: They have no rights to do that. They don’t own the intellectual property, we do. People need to be very careful.
SJ: Are you contemplating legal action?
NV: I think I’ll keep that under my hat for now.
SJ: Do you foresee any problems with Autodesk if you go ahead with LT Toolkit?
NV: I don’t think so. Autodesk would be pretty naive, with competing products around at a lower price than LT and with LISP built in, to think that they would gain any sales by blocking LT Toolkit. They would just be shooting themselves in the foot.
SJ: Autodesk has always been strongly opposed to products like LT Toolkit. Are you concerned about legal action from Autodesk?
NV: Well, people say that Autodesk has been against it, but I haven’t seen any evidence of that. When I spoke to the late Gary D’Arcy he told me that Autodesk had never once even contacted him to try to get him to stop developing it.
On Deelip’s blog there has been some discussion about resellers and what they should be allowed to do, so I asked some questions along those lines.
SJ: What is the relationship between CAD International in the USA and Australia?
NV: We’re an Austalian company, moving into the US marketplace for those people in the USA who want to buy our products. We don’t have offices in the USA, but we do have people on the ground.
SJ: Is CAD International an authorised AutoCAD reseller?
NV: No. We’ve been selling Autodesk products for 15 years without a direct relationship. We buy from Scholastic like everybody else in the same position. It’s not worth becoming a dealer; the obligations are too great and the margins are not worthwhile. We’ve been asked on several ocasions over the years and always said no.
[Note: I’ve since read (in something written well before this issue was raised here) that Autodesk Australia intends to tighten up the reseller situation in the very near future. These things go in cycles, and have for the last 25 years.]
SJ: Does Autodesk have a problem with you promoting competing products such as Bricscad?
NV: They have never spoken to us about it in the past, but as we don’t have a direct relationship with them it’s not surprising.
SJ: I see from your web site that you are selling DWG TrueView for $195. Isn’t that a free product?
NV: That fee is for supply services; research services if you prefer. People can download it from Autodesk if they like or get it from us. We just put it on the site as a trial to see if anybody wanted to buy it. Nobody has, yet.
SJ: I can’t say I’m greatly surprised by that. Has Autodesk contacted you about this issue?
NV: No, we’ve heard nothing from Autodesk. They don’t really care about us, we’re a pretty small player in the market.
[Edit: the $195 price tag has since vanished from the site.]
Things have moved on since my first post on this subject in which I passed on the information that Leonard Liang (a former drcauto employee) could help with codes for LT Toolkit orphans. In recent developments
I thought I would have a chat with CAD International’s Nigel Varley to see if I could clear up the situation as he sees it. It was a very interesting interview, the results of which I will publish very soon.
Autodesk’s Project Butterfly is its latest offering in the Cloud (Software as a Service, SaaS, web-based software, whatever) area. This is a Labs technology preview (i.e. it ain’t cooked yet) of browser-based drawing system based on Autodesk’s purchase of Visual Tao. The idea is that no software other than a browser is required to create, edit or just view drawings. To try it out, head to http://butterfly.autodesk.com/ and pick on Try Now. If you’re interested in going further with it, you will need to create an account, which is a quick and painless process. This account is separate from your Autodesk ID.
For more details, see Scott Sheppard’s posts here and here, the Project Butterfly blog, and the Project Butterfly page on the Autodesk Labs site, which includes a series of videos such as this one:
I’ve had a brief play with it and while it’s not as horribly slow as I had feared (the Ribbon is much quicker than AutoCAD’s, although that’s not difficult), it’s currently an extremely limited environment. Other than viewing and some very crude drawing operations, pretty much everything I wanted to do either couldn’t be done, or couldn’t be done in a satisfactory way. Once I had discovered how to get a drawing out of the clouds and in my own hands (it’s not Save As), the export crashed with an HTTP Status 500 error. Apparently, the server encountered an internal error () that prevented it from fulfilling this request.
Teething problems aside, it’s hard to imagine anyone accustomed to full-featured CAD software actually spending all day drawing with this mechanism. In fact, I can’t imagine spending more than an hour on it before tearing my hair out; a few minutes was enough. It’s perfectly adequate for viewing and marking up, but as a drafting tool it’s just a toy.
But it’s a start, and Autodesk is wise to get its head into the clouds. If SaaS really is The Next Big Thing in CAD, then Autodesk would have looked very silly if it had missed the boat altogether. I’m not convinced that SaaS is going to have the impact that some are predicting, but I’ll cover that argument in a separate post.
I was amused to see Shaan Hurley losing his locks at AU. Some of you may recall me suggesting this course of action a couple of years ago. How close do you think I got with my artist’s impression?
Original images © 2008 and 2009 Shaan Hurley.
LT Toolkit from the now-defunct drcauto was an add-on for AutoCAD LT that provided LISP and other capabilities that Autodesk disabled. Autodesk hated this, of course, but the late Gary D’Arcy made sure everything was done legally so it couldn’t be stopped even by Autodesk’s hyperactive legal team.
If you are a user of LT Toolkit and you want to keep using the software now the company has closed down, you may find this information from Evan Yares useful:
I’ve gotten in contact with Leonard Liang, the former key developer at DRCauto. He’s asked me to send any Toolkit Max users to him, and he will help them. His website is www.cadsta.com. His email, at that domain, is “leonardl”.
Source: a comment in this this WorldCAD Access post. If you don’t read comments, you may well have missed this, so I thought it was worth repeating.
Edit: events have overtaken this news since it was written. Please see here and here.
One of the blogs I read regularly is Photoshop Disasters, which recently posted a picture of a Ralph Lauren ad. In common with many fashion photos, this showed a skinny model that appeared to have been further skinnified on somebody’s computer to the point that the poor waif was ridiculously deformed. Like this:
Nothing out of the ordinary there, then. Under normal circumstances it would have received a few dozen comments and scrolled off the front page in a week or so, because there is no shortage of bad image manipulation out there for the blog to snigger at. The image was reposted at Boing Boing, but it would still have been forgotten in a week.
Except this time, Ralph Lauren prodded its lawyers into action and demanded the image be removed from both sites, issuing a DMCA notice. The DMCA request was spurious, as this is a clear case of fair use of an image for the purposes of criticism. Photoshop Disasters is hosted by Blogspot, which automatically complies with such requests. Boing Boing is not, and instead went on the offensive. They refused to take down the picture, instead reposting it with biting sarcasm. Read it, it’s funny. Ralph Lauren, if you’re reading this, please send me a DMCA notice too. I’m feeling left out.
This led to a flurry of comments, reposts and reports all over the Internet, including here. The comments (running at over a hundred an hour right now) are almost universally mocking of Ralph Lauren, its legal team, its models and its image manipulation propensities. The criticism goes way beyond the few snipes at a mangled-body image that would have been the case if Ralph Lauren had done nothing. It has moved on to the fashion designer’s ethical standards and those of the fashion industry as a whole for promoting artificially skinny bodies to eating-disorder-vulnerable people.
Now, is Ralph Lauren really that clueless and out of touch, to think that this kind of suppression would work? Or is this actually a deliberate marketing move, using the Streisand Effect to gain free publicity? Maybe, but it’s a deplorable attack on freedom of speech either way, and a boycott is fully justified. I’m not going to buy any of their stuff, ever, and I encourage you to do likewise. To be fair, I was unlikely to be a rich source of income. Even if I were a female with lots of excess money to throw away on clothes that look really awful, there is no way they would ever fit me. Or any living human, from the look of that photo.
Don’t get too excited, because I’m sure Autodesk will appeal, but as reported at Owen Wengerd’s CAD/Court, Vernor has won the right to resell his used copies of AutoCAD. While this is seen by some as a victory for customers, it isn’t. This doesn’t open up a brave new world in which we are allowed to sell the software we buy once we’re finished with it. If it had, I would be rejoicing as loud as anybody, because Autodesk’s ban on software transfers is an unconscionable restriction and deserves to die. But that’s not what this decision means. There are specific and paradoxical circumstances here, which allowed Vernor to win this case despite being morally wrong in my view, but will not benefit legitimate software users.
Vernor won (for now, and in one jurisdiction) because the court found he was not a party to the EULA. He didn’t read it, he didn’t click on anything to indicate his agreement to it, nothing. He just bought a bunch of books and discs and wanted to sell them on eBay. The fact that the item being sold is a remnant from software that had already been upgraded was not considered relevant. Neither was the fact that Autodesk is not obliged to provide the buyer of the discs with the codes they will need to make the software work. The upshot is that this decision will allow a small number of people to buy and sell useless discs. What about the buyers of those discs who may not know they are useless until too late? Caveat emptor, I guess. Some other court can sort out that mess.
I agree with Ralph Grabowski that “software should be no different than any other consumer good: buy it, use it, resell it, or toss it”. I’d love to see Autodesk and other vendors forced to support a legitimate used software resale market (as they once did in pre-eBay days), but this decision won’t make that happen. It won’t help customers at all. If your firm has shrunk a bit and you have some spare licenses, you still can’t sell them because you are a party to the EULA (probably, although this area is still a bit fuzzy). But take heart! If you go bust, your creditors may be able to slip any discs left over from your upgrade history into a garage sale and hope that Mr. Vernor drops by. Mr. Vernor will be allowed to sell them, and the new buyers will be allowed to put them on their shelves and look at them.
Is that really a win for customers? I don’t think so.
Shaan Hurley has posted some useful information about another AutoCAD-based virus that is doing the rounds, and I strongly suggest you read it. However, I have some reservations about the solution that is posted there and in the Autodesk knowledgebase.
The LISP code suggested will delete any files called acad.vlx or logo.gif that are located in the current user’s current AutoCAD search path. There are a couple of problems with that.
I commend Shaan and Autodesk for posting this information and proposed solution. However, I recommend caution before using this code as suggested. Check with your CAD Manager (if you have one) first to ensure there are no legitimate acad.vlx files in your environment. Do a search for these files yourself and see if there is a legitimate reason for them being where they are.
As with most malware attacks, taking care with incoming files is a very important part of the solution. Don’t just blindly use the contents of a zip file full of drawings, even from a trusted source. If somebody sends you a zip file containing an acad.vlx file, let the sender know about the problem and ask for an uninfected set of files.
There is a piece of malware out there written as an ObjectARX application, i.e. it will only affect AutoCAD users. It’s a China-based adware client, which Andrew Brandt at the Webroot threat blog has named Trojan-Pigrig. For full details, see here. Also, see here for AutoCAD-specific advice from the AutoCAD support team at the Without a Net blog.
The annual AUGI Salary Survey (ably run by friend and fellow geek/blogger Melanie Perry) is open for your responses until 30 June, so if you’re planning to fill it in, please get in soon. There are 19 simple questions on one page, and it only takes a couple of minutes. If you have questions about the survey, read the FAQ.
In these troubled times, many of you may find the previous years’ results a valuable resource.
There are four candidates for two positions on the AUGI Board of Directors. The voting page is now open, although it will not go active until voting commences on 29 June. The candidates are (in alphabetical order):
I encourage you to read their profiles (click on the names above) and examine the PDFs of their answers to a fixed set of questions. Also, check out the candidates’ responses in the AUGI Board Candidates Discussion forum.
If you have anything to say about the candidates, their suitability for the position or their responses to questions, feel free to add your comments here. Such discussion is banned on the AUGI forums, but you won’t find any such censorship here. As long as your comments are not actually libellous, I won’t be modifying or deleting anything.
In a comment, R.K. McSwain raises the spectre of people being banned from the AUGI forums for their comments outside it. Having made one Streisand Effect error of judgement on this issue already, I wouldn’t have thought the BoD would be silly enough to immediately repeat that error by getting even more heavy-handed, but you never know. I’m prepared to wear the risk, but if you’re worried about it, you don’t need to use your real name or AUGI forum name here. Even if you did, there’s no way of the BoD proving that the person using that name here is the same person on the AUGI forums. I won’t be handing out any identifying information to anyone, so go for it and say what you like.
Phil Read has, according to him, been re-admitted as an Autodesk University 2009 speaker. Yay!
Is this a victory for people power? A victory for the blogosphere? I rather think it’s just a victory for common sense.
In a recent blog post, Deelip Menezes appears to be shocked by the very idea that a particular CAD company (no, not Autodesk) would ship software that contains known bugs. I thought he was joking, because he’s surely aware that practically all software companies with highly complex products release software with known bugs. As Deelip points out, those companies with 12-month cycles are particularly prone to doing this. There is no possible way any company can release something as complex as a CAD application within a fixed 12-month cycle without it containing dozens* of known bugs (because there isn’t time to fix them after discovery) and dozens* of unknown ones (because of insufficient Beta testing time).
Reading Deelip’s post and subsequent comments more carefully, it becomes clear that he doesn’t mean what a casual glance might lead you to believe he means. Deelip makes a specific distinction between “bugs” and “known issues”. He states that if a bug is discovered and the software is then adjusted such that it does not abort the software in a badly-behaved way, and this is then documented, then the bug ceases to be a bug and becomes a “known issue”.
I disagree. Bugs can cause crashes or not; they can cause “nice” crashes or not; they can be known about prior to release or not; they can be documented internally or not; they can be documented publicly or not. As far as I’m concerned, if the software doesn’t act “as designed” or “as intended”, then that’s a bug. Here’s what Wikipedia has to say, and I concur:
A software bug is the common term used to describe an error, flaw, mistake, failure, or fault in a computer program that prevents it from behaving as intended (e.g., producing an incorrect or unexpected result).
That doesn’t mean that software that is “as designed” (free of bugs) is free of defects. Defects are things that make the software work in a way other than “as it should”. They can be bugs, design errors or omissions, performance problems, user interface logic failures, API holes, feature changes or removals with unintended undesirable consequences, and so on. Unfortunately, defining “as it should” isn’t a precise science. You can’t just compare the software to the documentation and say that the differences are defects. The documentation could be faulty or incomplete, or it could perfectly describe the deeply flawed way in which the software works.
While I disagree with Deelip’s definition of bugs, I couldn’t agree more with a more important point he makes in his blog post. That point is of a fixed 12-month cycle being the root cause of a plethora of bugs/issues/whatever making it into shipping software, and this being an unacceptable situation. This is a view I expressed in Cadalyst before I started participating in Autodesk’s sadly defunct MyFeedback program, and it’s a view I hold even more strongly today.
In conclusion, I would have to say that the fixed yearly release schedule is not good for AutoCAD. It is good for Autodesk, certainly in the short term, but that’s not at all the same thing as being good for AutoCAD or its users.
I’m not alone in thinking this. The polls I’ve run on this subject, discussions with many individuals on-line and in person, and many comments here and elsewhere, indicate that a dislike of the 12-month cycle is the majority viewpoint. For example, when asked the question, “Do you think the 12-month release cycle is harming the quality of AutoCAD and its variants?”, 85% of poll respondents here answered “Definitely” or “Probably”. In another poll, 71% of respondents indicated a preference for AutoCAD release cycles of 24 months or greater.
Somebody please tell me I’m wrong here. Somebody tell me that I’ve misread things, that customers really think the 12-month cycle is great, and that it’s not actually harmful for the product. Anyone?
* Or hundreds. Or thousands.