Tag Archives: Cloud

Autodesk Cloud – don’t panic, business as usual

Autodesk recently made a big announcement about its Cloud initiatives, and reactions have been all over the place. Some people can barely contain their breathless excitement while others are outraged to the point of passing out the pitchforks. Why? It’s pretty much business as usual.

It’s nothing like Dassault’s disastrous we’re-moving-you-to-the-Cloud FUD campaign against its own product, SolidWorks. There’s no hint here of AutoCAD (real AutoCAD, I mean, not “AutoCAD” WS) being moved to the Cloud, or anything as radical as that. (Yes, I know there’s a limited experiment along those lines but that’s nothing to do with this announcement). It’s just a collection of relatively minor changes to Autodesk’s existing on-line services, collected together to make a newsworthy press release.

(As an aside, I must say this was a much more worthwhile announcement than the ridiculously over-hyped DE8.16N thing. So I was supposed to get excited about a routine upgrade of a product I have already been using for months, on an OS I don’t use, when the upgraded product is still half-baked just like the first underwhelming effort? Fortunately, I didn’t get sucked in by the pre-announcement build-up so I wasn’t disappointed, just amused when the truth was revealed. Autodesk PR, please don’t cry wolf so often; keep the hype in reserve for the hypeworthy stuff.)

Back to the Cloud thing, and putting aside hype and horror, here’s the stuff that has just happened:

Autodesk Cloud documents lets anybody store up to 1 GB documents on-line, or 3 GB if you’re a Subscription customer. This isn’t new, but until recently it was an Autodesk Labs project called Nitrous. The infrastructure is provided via Amazon and Citrix.
AutoCAD WS has been updated to integrate its storage with Autodesk Cloud documents. Remember, WS isn’t anything like real AutoCAD, but rather a limited on-line DWG editing tool. There’s a WS iPhone app, but that’s not new.
There’s an Autodesk Design Review iPhone app for reviewing DWF files you’ve stored in Autodesk Cloud. It won’t do DWG; use WS for that.
There are several cloud-based services that are available “free” to Subscription-paying users of a small subset of Autodesk software, mostly Revit and Inventor-based suites. They are:
- Inventor Optimization
- Cloud Rendering
- Green Building Studio
- Conceptual Energy Analysis
- Buzzsaw (now bundled with Vault Subscription)
AutoCAD users need not apply for any of these services.

So some of Autodesk’s on-line services are now being provided only to Subscription customers, and one is offered in improved form for Subscription customers. There are two obvious reasons for this: tie-in and revenue.

First, Autodesk wants its customers tied to the Subscription gravy train, if you’ll excuse a fairly awful mix of metaphors. Offering Subscription benefits like this is preferable to some of the much less pleasant arm-twisting that has been happening recently (e.g. trebling upgrade prices). Is it too much to hope that Autodesk has learned that offering carrots to its customers is a better strategy than threatening them with sticks?

Second, Autodesk needs to start making money out of this stuff somehow. For some years, it has spent several fortunes on buying and developing on-line services and then given them away for nothing, usually as Labs projects. This obviously can’t go on for ever, but just slapping a charge on these services wasn’t going to fly. Bundling Cloud services up with Subscription is a way of easing people into paying for them, and this is something I expect to be expanded in future, for example with AutoCAD WS. Once that’s been established for a few years, it wouldn’t surprise me to then see Subscription for at least some of the services split off, so you’re paying for Cloud services explicitly. By then, enough customers may consider them to be worth paying for and they may therefore survive beyond the short term.

Will it work? I’m not sure. Time will tell which of these services will thrive and which will die, and such uncertainty is one of the many reasons real-world customers aren’t excited about getting their heads in the Cloud. I don’t intend to make use of these services (I’m not even allowed to), so I’m not too bothered what happens to them. Like the vast majority of Autodesk customers, I will just carry on using conventional software in that old-fashioned 20th century way that just happens to work very well. Autodesk will go on providing its software in that way, because that’s what most customers will want for at least a while yet, and Autodesk can’t survive on wisps of Cloudy revenue.

Move along, people, nothing to see here.

When is AutoCAD not AutoCAD?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Command line poll replaced

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For the past couple of months, I have been running a poll about the command line. I ran it using wording copied directly from a Project Butterfly poll, to get some kind of comparison between the poll respondents on this blog and those on the Project Butterfly blog.

It’s fair to say that I don’t like the wording of the available options, which appear designed to influence the result rather than find out what people really think. The “I can’t work with…” option has negative connotations; if I pick this choice, it implies that my abilities fall short in some way and I lack flexibility. On the other hand, the “I think it’s time for a new way…” option has a positive feel about it. If I pick this choice, I’m a thinker, I’m progressive, I’m looking to the future. It’s no accident that marketing people love to plaster “NEW!” over their products.

Despite the push-poll options, the command line was the clear winner on both blogs. Here are the Project Butterfly results (unknown number of voters):

I can’t work without the command line (66%)
I think it’s time for a new way to draw without the command line (34%)

Here are my results (378 voters):

I can’t work without the command line (81.7%)
I think it’s time for a new way to draw without the command line (18.3%)

I expected to see a greater preference for the command line among readers of this blog (largely command-line-using AutoCAD users) than among readers of the Project Butterfly blog (largely command-line-less Project Butterfly users). My expectation has been met. Instead of about a 2:1 majority there, command-line people here have about a 4.5:1 majority.

Now let’s try a similar poll, hopefully without biased options, and see if that affects the result. I have replaced the above poll with this one:

Should CAD software have a command line?

Yes
No

There are several ways in which this question could have been asked (do you prefer, is it more efficient, is it better, etc.), but the above appears to be the least biased I can come up with. Please have a look at this and other polls over on the right and vote if you feel so moved.

AutoCAD 2011 online Help changes – a curate’s egg

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As announced by Shaan Hurley, Autodesk has made some changes to the AutoCAD 2011 online Help system. Please check it out and see what you think. After a short time with it, here are my experiences using IE6 (yes, I know). As this is a dynamic system and dependent on browser characteristics, Internet connectivity and any changes Autodesk may make between me writing this and you reading it, your mileage will vary.

There are some cosmetic changes, including a fixup of the Autodesk logo in IE6 that was done a couple of weeks ago. Sadly, my pink Comic Sans logo has not been adopted. As I can’t do a direct side-by-side comparison with the pre-change setup under identical conditions, I can’t make a definitive statement about performance. I can say that it does appear to have improved somewhat. It now takes about 3.5 seconds from hitting F1 to seeing a complete landing screen. Once cached, I’m seeing it in come up in just under 2 seconds.

The main change from a usability point of view is that the Search facility now defaults to searching All Books rather than whatever document you happen to have highlighted over on the left sidebar. That’s welcome. Also, the searches generally appear to give better results. For example, a simple search for LINE in the original 2011 online system gave a list of 199 results, of which the actual LINE command was 26th! Now, a search for LINE puts the LINE command third in the list; much better. The results come up faster than before (2.5 seconds in this example), but I have seen widely varying search times reported so I would be interested to hear about your experiences.

The way the search results are presented is now significantly different. Instead of a single line for each result, 4 lines are now used. There is a descriptive hyperlink line, a line containing sample of text from the page the link points to, a spelled-out link line and a blank line. The second line appears to be randomly chosen. In our LINE example, the text starts with “If the most recently drawn object is an arc…”, which is a fairly long way down the LINE command page itself. The third line’s only function appears to be to waste space. I can right-click on the main link if I want that information. I can’t even copy and paste that third line; attempting to click and drag in the search results pane selects the whole lot.

Because of the newly verbose display format, it obviously doesn’t make sense to display 199 results, as there would be too much scrolling. What is now displayed is 8 results, with links to another 7 pages (I’m not sure what happened to the 199 – 64 = 135 other results). If your desired result is in the first 8, that’s fine. If it’s not, then you have a harder job now to find what you’re after. You can’t use your browser’s find feature to look for a specific word among the full set of results. You will have to click on each page in turn and wait for it to appear before scanning the results. Fortunately, each page comes up fairly quickly (about 1 second), but I would much prefer to have the option of seeing more results displayed on each page. I suspect things have been arranged this way to improve performance (fair enough) and make it work better on mobile devices. While that’s all nice and cool and trendy and geeky and everything, I don’t intend to ever use AutoCAD on an iPhone. I would much prefer it if Autodesk prioritised its user interface design based on what the vast majority of its users are going to be using when they need the documentation.

Choosing a different page within the search results and then using the Back button takes me back to the main landing page rather than my previous results page. Using the Forward button to try to get back where I was, just puts me back on page 1 again. This is obviously not good.

That’s enough of the changes in isolation, how does today’s system compare with what went before? I did a quick test to see what was involved in finding out about a given command. I chose the WBLOCK command. Other commands and other users may give better or worse results.

AutoCAD 2010 CHM Help
Method: F1, type W, double-click on WBLOCK
Time taken: 2.6 seconds

AutoCAD 2011 offline Help (as shipped)
Method: F1, click in search box, type W, Enter, click on W commands, click on WBLOCK, click on Write Block Dialog Box
Time taken: 12.1 seconds

AutoCAD 2010 online Help (as at 12 May 2010)
Method: F1, click in search box, type W, click outside search box, click on search arrow, click on W commands, click on WBLOCK, click on Write Block Dialog Box
Time taken: 16.0 seconds

Given those results, it would be pretty hard to argue that the new system is more efficient for users. Again, this is just a sample command and method, and if you can find a different one where the new stuff works better than the old, I’m all ears. The method I ended up using for testing the 2011 online search actually required a fair bit of trial and error. Here are some things I tried first:

F1, click in search box, type W, autocomplete gives me ‘wireless’ (left over from some other search I used on an unrelated site), Enter, nothing happens
F1, click in search box, type W, click outside search box so I just have W, Enter, nothing happens
F1, click on search arrow, click in search box, type W, it gets added to the end of the word Search, giving me ‘SearchW’!

A few minutes after my tests, I tried again to see if there was a better way. What I found was that the W Commands link I needed was completely absent from the search results!

W System variables, check. W Methods, check. W commands? Nope. Not on this page. Not on any of the other 7. Where did it go? Will it return one day? Who knows?

One of the risks of online-based software is that it can be a moving target. Stuff that you used in the past may not be there the next time you need it. It’s easy to see users getting confused and frustrated by this kind of stuff. After all, it’s supposed to be Help, not Hinder.

In summary, some of the changes are welcome, but the system is still a long way short of being anywhere near as efficient or friendly as the one it replaced. The performance is better than it was, but still slow. The interface contains some clangers that tell me that user feedback has been absent, inadequate and/or ignored.

I suggest this system be withdrawn, and soon. AutoCAD 2011 Update 1 should contain a complete and properly integrated CHM-based Help system, and Autodesk should go back to the drawing board with the whole browser-based Help idea.

If, after due consideration and extensive user consultation, Autodesk still thinks that online Help is a good idea, it should spend the time required to make it work properly, introduce it only when Beta testers are satisfied that it is at least as good as what it is replacing, and then introduce it alongside the CHM system. The two systems should be run in parallel for as many releases as it takes to convince the vast bulk of users that online is best, at which point the losing system can be discarded.

Right now, it’s abundantly clear which system should be ditched, and it’s not the CHM one.

Autodesk’s cloudy drawing offering

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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.