APS (Forge)
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I'm on the train, heading to Geneva airport for my trip across to Barcelona for the latest Forge Accelerator. It seems there's a good crowd in the room, already, so it should be a fun week. Yesterday I submitted two classes for Autodesk University 2018 in Las Vegas: I wonder what proportion of classes are submitted on the last day of the CFP period, and whether this number is stable, year after year. I usually try to submit my own classes earlier, but this year things have been a little hectic, for some reason. The first class I submitted is…
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Yesterday I headed across to Zürich for a number of different meetings. One that I wanted to talk about on this blog is my visit to Empa, the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology, and – in particular – their NEST building. NEST is a testbed and showcase for emerging techniques in the construction and operation of buildings. They have a heavy focus on modularization, pre-fabrication and robotics. I'd been invited to visit by Reto Largo, Director of NEST, along with Philipp Mueller from Autodesk's Education team. Reto wanted to hear about Dasher 360, while I wanted to…
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I came across this classic tome while wandering the halls of the Neuchatel office, this week. It's one I remember reading when in my last year at University (in fact I'm almost certain I have a copy gathering dust in my basement). This particular volume once belonged to James Carrington (at least that's my best guess from a Post-It on the inside that mentions his first name), who was an early member of the Developer Support team at the ESC (European Software Centre) in Neuchatel, way back when. This edition is from 1986, which I'm pretty sure makes it a…
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Last week I mentioned the effort to update Dasher 360 to use v4.2 of the Forge viewer (the most recent version, at the time of writing, and a fairly big jump from our previously-used version, v3.2.1). Here's how Dasher 360 is now looking after these various changes: In this post I'm going to give more details of what specifically was involved in refreshing Dasher 360 to the latest Forge viewer, in the hope it'll help people make decisions around their own use of the viewer and hopw/when they migrate their applications. Background As we've developed Dasher 360, we've done our…
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This year will be the 3rd edition of the Forge DevCon. Once again it's being held in Las Vegas on the Monday before Autodesk University 2018 starts, which for this year means November 12th, 2018. The "call for proposals" website is now live, and will remain open until June 11th. If you're interested in submitting a class for this year's DevCon then head on over: we'd love to hear from you! This year's event will have the following tracks: Forge Platform and Roadmap Getting started with Forge and Forge APIs Community stories and case studies General web programming Complementary technologies…
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Over the last few days I've been battling with migrating Dasher 360 from using v3.2.1 of the Forge viewer to the latest & greatest at the time of writing, v4.2. Somewhere around the v4.0 release, quite a few changes were integrated into the viewer that relate to UI theming and docking panels. Some of these are really interesting: the UI feels a lot cleaner than it did with v3.x, for instance. To give a sense for how some of these changes might break an application, here's what happened when I simply upgraded the viewer and stylesheet references in Dasher 360:…
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There's a lot of change going on, over in the Forge Partner Development team. This is the team of talented individuals who help customers and partners working with Forge – as well as members of the Autodesk Developer Network, of course. One of the team's Senior Managers, Stephen Preston (who took over many of my former responsibilities when I left them in their pre-Forge days back in 2012, as well as doing a lot of other important work besides) is moving into the Forge Business Development team. Yes, so his new title will have just a one word difference from…
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Many of you have been using Forge services to good effect, whether the Forge viewer or the Data Management, Model Derivative and Design Automation APIs. There's lots of really cool stuff you can do with Forge – we use it heavily in Dasher 360, for instance – but the existing services are largely engineered to deal with data created by existing desktop technology, i.e. they're file-centric. The next generation of Forge web-services will help you and your customers move beyond files. Here's a class from last year's Forge DevCon that gives an introduction to two key technologies in this new…
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Those of you who have followed the progress on Dasher 360 will be aware that it currently works with a single building (or other) model. It's always been our intention to go "Beyond BIM" (both in terms of addressing the needs of other industries but also scaling up to look at sites and cities) but over the last few weeks we've made a big push, making our first real forays into this new territory. Here's a sneak peek at a campus view in Dasher 360 that integrates an additional Forge viewer control (this might also use a 3D mapping control…
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For those of you who (like me) missed this year's in-person DevDays – or perhaps have colleagues who would benefit from seeing sessions you managed to attend yourself in Las Vegas or elsewhere – you'll be interested to hear that DevDays Online will be disseminating all that DevDays goodness over the wire during the month of February. The great news is that this isn't being limited to ADN members: anyone can sign up and attend. The sessions will also be recorded, in case any are at times that don't work for you. You can register to attend the various sessions…