For the last week or so I've been busy making sure Dasher works well with multiple themes. You can see the progress across these posts. I'm not quite ready for a full unveiling, but it should go live at some point in the next week, give or take. In the meantime, here are some screenshots of the main page (you'll be able to select the theme either as you enter Dasher via the front page or from within the application's settings UI, which is integrated into the Forge viewer's). One of the big-ticket items in this coming release will be…

Despite the unfolding horror of the situation with Covid-19 – and stuff is really starting to hit the fan, here in Switzerland, with schools and non-essential commerces being closed and rumours of an enforced sequestration being considered – I'm at least getting some quality time to work on Dasher. Last week we saw how it was possible to support both dark and light themes from the Autodesk HIG in a Forge viewer application. I mentioned both times my desire to allow Dasher's theme to be selected by the user at runtime. After searching fruitlessly on the internet for some time,…

Last time we saw how it's possible to use Autodesk's HIG to add different visual themes to a Forge viewer application. When I first started down this path, I thought I'd probably just stop at implementing another dark theme inside Dasher: I suspected it would be a lot of work to implement a light theme. It turns out I was wrong: towards the end of last year I'd spent a few days rationalising our use of styles inside Dasher, by eradicating every use of "hardcoded" colours inside CSS styles and have them stored in SCSS variables. It felt like a…

I mentioned in the last post that I've been working on integrating a new timeline component into Dasher. By default the component supports a different visual theme than the one we've been using in Dasher: in order to make the look & feel consistent, I had to include Autodesk's HIG toolkit in the Dasher project. HIG stands for Human Interface Guidelines, and it's Autodesk's effort to increase visual consistency across our products (especially those that are web-based). And the best thing is, it's open source and available for anyone to integrate in their projects via npm or yarn. And if…

We have a feature in Dasher called "kiosk mode". It basically takes control of the browser to run a sequence of operations that show people how Dasher works. I published a series of posts a couple of years ago that explain a bit about how we implemented it. One of the issues in kiosk mode is knowing when Forge viewer operations – such as view transitions or state restorations – are complete. Until recently the code just checked the viewer's progressbar property, to see whether its value was close to 100 or not. This wasn't ever a very good approach,…

In Dasher we have some interesting functionality to isolate parts of the building by level. This is increasingly something you can do via "out of the box" Forge viewer functionality, but we've found a couple of reasons to go beyond that basic capability: Not all elements or objects are assigned to the correct level. Some elements – such as those belonging to the building facade or perhaps internal pipes – transcend levels, and so don't behave well. It's of course possible to split elements/objects that belong to the second category, but we tend to take the approach of allowing certain…

I've been heads-down this week on a couple of tasks related to Dasher: the first relates to working on the integration of a new timeline control. I'm hoping this will be ready for people to try in the coming weeks, but we're not quite there yet. The second relates to bringing more data into our time-series back-end from the NEST building: I noticed last week that we were missing data from October of last year onwards. It turns out we had a credentials problem – we have a "conduit" that regularly federates the NEST data into our back-end, but it…