Autodesk
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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…
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I mentioned some time ago that our Localization Services (LS) team was embarking on a community-based translation of Homestyler into Russian. The fruits of this labour are now ready for testing: the various translation projects, for the application, for its content and for supporting web-pages are now 100% complete. But that's not to say things haven't been missed or mis-translated, so we would love to get feedback from Russian speakers on the quality of the work performed. The below information has been provided by our LS team for people who are interested in taking Russian Homestyler for a spin (and…
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I'm delighted to be announcing that Jim Quanci, Director of the Autodesk Developer Network, has started a blog on partnering with large companies such as Autodesk: Dances with Elephants. I know Jim has been considering writing a blog for some time, and I'm really happy he's managed to find the time in his busy schedule to get this one going. I've worked with Jim pretty much since I started at Autodesk, and have reported directly to him for the last 6.5 years (although that will change in a few short weeks). I'm definitely going to miss being part of his…