Autodesk
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I've spent the best part of the last two weeks in the Bay Area, which has been fantastic. It was great to attend Autodesk's annual, internal Tech Summit, both to network with colleagues and to find out about some of the really interesting projects being worked on within the company. It was also really good to reconnect with members of the AutoCAD Engineering and ADN teams. While there's been quite a lot of work over the last few weeks, there has also been some time for play: The evening social event at San Francisco's TechShop. Renting bikes in Napa Valley…
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Some time ago I mentioned the launch of ADN's DevBlogs, and followed up, last week, with the announcement that the AEC version had launched. Now that we have DevBlogs covering AutoCAD, Infrastructure Modeling and our AEC products, it's only natural that we launch a Manufacturing DevBlog. Brian has mentioned it, over on his blog, too. Those of you working with Inventor, in particular, should be sure to bookmark Brian & Wayne's Mod the Machine blog as well as the Manufacturing DevBlog (after a period of relatively low activity, things have definitely picked up over at MtM). It's great to see…
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As announced previously on this blog, the Autodesk Developer Network (ADN) team is in the process of launching a series of DevBlogs, publishing material publicly that would previously only have been made available to ADN members. I see some fantastic material being posted there: more than I can keep up with, personally, but I expect that will settle down once the team has created posts from the bulk of the DevNotes published on the ADN web-site. Following the availability of those for AutoCAD and Infrastructure Modeling, I'm pleased to announce the AEC DevBlog is now live. If you're [considering] developing…
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It's been a while since I've talked about our "reality capture" (or 3D reconstruction) technologies, but I still like to play around with them, when I get the chance. My previous projects have all been with the PC version of 123D Catch (previously known as the Photo Scene Editor for Project Photofly), but I've just spent a few hours messing around with the new web and iPad versions of this tool (Shaan has already spent some time talking about these new versions over on his blog, in case). Thinking about it, these two new versions have been made possible by…
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This is all very exciting: given the recent launch of a number of "360" products by Autodesk – including Autodesk 360, Autodesk PLM 360 and Autodesk BIM 360 – it looks as though we're about to enter a strategic relationship with Microsoft to make Autodesk products interoperate seamlessly with their industry-leading games platform, the Xbox 360. It's as yet unclear exactly what this means for the two companies and their respective 360 products, although I'm hopeful that some of the work I've been doing to prototype the use of Kinect and Metro with our products is going to be relevant…
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This is a topic I've been meaning to cover for some time. It concerns a transition we're seeing overall in the software industry, and is certainly one that the ADN team broached in depth during the last two DevDays tours. I don't think anyone is in real doubt, at this stage, that software is increasingly being delivered "as a service", rather than via locally-installed desktop applications. Some readers may understandably be skeptical about the near-term likelihood of powerful design tools working in the cloud… I personally believe it's an inevitable shift (whether we're talking about a timeframe of 2 years…
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After my struggles to get here, I've had a fun (working) weekend in the Bay Area. We held our first internal Hackathon event, where members of the AutoCAD Engineering organisation sat in a room and developed applications that work with AutoCAD. Food and drink was provided throughout the 4-day event – reducing the need for people to leave the room – and someone even brought a sleeping bag along and camped out in the lobby for Saturday night. The final submissions deadline is looming, in a few short hours, and then tomorrow there'll be a series of demonstrations, showing (and…
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Today is the first day of Autodesk's fiscal year – hence the title of the post, short for Happy New Fiscal Year. Not that I know anyone in the company who actually celebrates the event, as such: many Autodeskers are very busy wrapping up the finances for last year, in fact. Today also marks the beginning of an era for me, personally, as I officially move across into the AutoCAD Engineering organisation. Moving groups feels like quite a big deal after more than 16 years in the Autodesk Developer Network team, but I'm nonetheless excited about embarking on this new…
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For those of you who missed the announcement (or just the event itself), here's a recording of last week's very interesting Singularity University webcast featuring Carl Bass: If you're interested in viewing others in the "Which Way Next?" series (there are two posted, at the time of writing), please visit the WWN archive.
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photo credit: rednivaram via photopin cc Most readers of this blog won't have realised (mainly because I queued up last week's blog posts in advance of my trip) that I was in India for the whole of last week. Not that I'm under any illusions that there are people out there wondering where I am, but I did want to talk a little about my trip – and my connection to India – as the topic of today's post. I've been visiting Bangalore since I was a child: my parents met when my father was working there as an ex-pat…