JavaScript
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I've been heads-down wrapping up my AU content, so I thought I'd publish at least some of it here. Here's the handout for my "AU kick-off" class which is at 8am on the first day of the conference – the morning after the ADN party – so despite the fact the class is currently full, we'll see if that turns out to be the case. 😉 VR comes of age Presenting 2D images that allow the brain to reconstruct 3D has its roots in the early stereoscopes invented in the late 1830s. These were eventually democratized by Sawyers and their…
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In the last post we saw how we could integrate an HTML and JavaScript palette hosting Cytoscape.js into AutoCAD to map progress made in a text adventure. In today's post we take the additional step of converting the graph data into AutoCAD geometry. To be clear, there's a bit more to this post than having fun mapping old-school interactive fiction inside AutoCAD: I can think of lots of scenarios where you might want to use a comparable tool to build a graph of data and lay it out manually before bringing the graph into AutoCAD as native geometry. But I'm…
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I mostly despise jetlag but once in a while manage to harness it for something positive. I remember some great trips to Asia, waking up at strange times to experience the dawn, walking the streets and seeing everyday life starting up around me. These days I typically find jetlag to be a bit of a curse, but this weekend I ended up using it to tackle a fun challenge: generating maps for Z-machine games such as Zork inside AutoCAD. Something I mentioned in a recent blog post but was reminded of last Thursday while catching up with Christer Janson in…
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After going down the path of making this blog responsive, it made sense to do the same for Jigsawify.com: I think it's a really nice illustration of the potential for AutoCAD I/O to use the web-site from your mobile phone to generate a DWG in the cloud. The site itself was functional enough on mobile: the issue related more to making the UI usable without having to zoom in and out all the time both to see the results and then use the various UI elements. The "responsive" technology underpinning the Typepad template I used for this blog is Bootstrap.…
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I've been working with AutoCAD I/O quite heavily over the last week or two – mainly spending time fleshing out my Jigsawify web application well in advance of AU2015 – and came across this helpful trick for visualizing an OData-based REST API graphically: you can copy and paste the XML schema for the AutoCAD I/O API into a file and then load it into the handy XOData tool. Here's what was generated (after a little editing from my side for layout): I'm making pretty good progress using AutoCAD I/O from Node.js – which is interesting as I can now run…
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Last week I was in Singapore for our annual, internal, two-day technical summit. Upwards of 500 members of Autodesk's various engineering and technical teams gathered together at the iconic Marina Bay Sands for the event. The hotel was pretty amazing. Having been told my room number (4619), I first exited the elevator at the 4th floor. It's only then that I realised the rooms on each floor were numbered in double digits, and so my room was on the 46th! While I didn't end up making much use of the hotel's facilities – aside from the conference centre, of course…
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It's live! Our entry for the recent VR Hackathon in San Francisco has received a significant amount of spit and polish (OK, perhaps not the best mental image) over the last couple of weeks and is now ready for prime time (i.e. Beta testing ;-). Check it out at http://vrok.it! It should work well with Chrome, Firefox or Safari, although for best results I'd stick with Chrome on mobile devices. The term "vrok" is one I came up with on the trip back from San Francisco… it's a combination of an invented acronym – Virtual Reality Online Collaboration – and…
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The 2nd VR Hackathon, which took place in San Francisco over the weekend, was an absolute blast. It was held at Galvanize, a co-working space about a 15-minute walk from our 1 Market Street office. The venue was great: it had plenty of space but also with a fair amount of natural light (very important for those of us getting over our jetlag). There were fewer people at this second event – inevitably, as it happened over the Memorial Day weekend – but there was nonetheless a great energy in the room. At the core of our team – which…
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The title of this post is probably a bit misleading: I'm not actually going to show how this works, today, but I do intend to plot a path for addressing this topic over the coming weeks. I was spurred on by a tweet I received a couple of hours ago: @keanw Dear kean, I've been looking into AutoCAD I/O and it looks like it may only execute "scripts"; so no .NET API calls or LISP? — Cyborg (@CyborgEvilHam) May 13, 2015 The short answer to this is "yes, it's absolutely possible!". But readers of this blog are clearly interested in…
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A reminder that proposals are open for AU2015 until May 26th. I've just submitted two, myself. Of the three topics I had in mind – relating to VR, AutoCAD I/O and TypeScript – I decided to submit proposals on the first two: I'll do my best to use TypeScript for one or both of the other two (assuming they get accepted) which will at least give people some exposure to how the technology works. And give some good fodder for blog posts, of course. Here are the abstracts I submitted: Virtual Reality viewing of 3D models using Autodesk's View and…