PaaS
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It was an amazing, whirlwind first day at the first ever Forge DevCon. I was there at 7am to put the finishing touches on the very cool Autodesk VR experience in the exhibit hall. The day's session kicked off with a keynote by Amar Hanspal and a number of other great presenters. I was really pleased with how our VR stand came together. Merten Stroetzel and Hans Kellner – colleagues in the Office of the CTO – provided their deep technical expertise, while JJ Stott and Clementine Joly did an amazing job with their demos. Here's the crew getting settled…
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It was a great weekend of football at Autodesk's annual tournament – this time nicely closely to home in Zurich. The Neuchâtel team did really well in the group round, as in recent years: we came top of Group C, which turned out to be the "group of death" – two teams we beat went on to finish 1st (England) and 3rd (VP Staff). Our goalkeeper – and our rock-solid defence – didn't concede a single goal during any of the matches, until we ended up being knocked out by Barcelona on penalties in the quarter-finals. So it goes –…
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In anticipation of next week's first Forge DevCon, the Forge platform has just been updated. Here's a quick look at what's new and changed: You'll notice there's a new Data Management API, which allows you to access data stored in A360, Fusion 360 and Autodesk's Object Storage Service. This is going to make it much easier to keep things simple and consistent when developing applications requiring access to design data. The Model Derivative API is another new API that does a few different things. Firstly it allows you to translate models into SVF – which is consumed by the…
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One of the projects I've been working on – alongside Simon Breslav, a colleague from Autodesk Research Toronto – is a prototype, web-based client for our IoT back-end. I'll be demoing it next week at the Forge DevCon. It uses Forge's viewer component to provide access to sensor readings from within a 3D model. Here are a few sequences of images to give you an idea of what it does. It's still early days, but we're steadily working towards feature parity with the desktop-based Project Dasher. The first sequence shows how you can view the sensors in a building model:…
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As mentioned in the last post, we're now going to take a closer look at writing extensions for the Autodesk View & Data API. To start with, we're going to create an extension which displays a vertical toolbar docked to the left of the Autodesk viewer. This toolbar will be centred on the viewer area and only contain three buttons: two will be toggles – with events assigned to when they're both clicked and unclicked – while the third will simply launch an action. Here's the JavaScript for this extension: /////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// // Autodesk.Research.TtIf.Extension.Toolbar // /////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// AutodeskNamespace('Autodesk.Research.TtIf.Extension'); Autodesk.Research.TtIf.Extension.Toolbar = function…
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I've been working on a prototype implementation of a research project that makes use of the View & Data API for its visualization. It's interesting to get back into using this API, especially as it's a fundamental piece of the Forge platform. As we expect this particular application to grow, over time, we're using extensions to house logically separate parts of the UI implementation. Extensions are a great mechanism for encapsulating functionality: they're basically JavaScript objects that have load() and unload() methods that are called when the viewer loads/unloads them. A number of samples in the Autodesk samples repository make…
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It's been a hectic – but very fun – few days in Munich, working with a group of 60-70 developers from all over Europe who are getting started with Autodesk's cloud services. I'm particularly focused on those working with AutoCAD I/O, which means probably 5-6 companies in total. Here's a quick summary of some of the problems that have come up, many of which are for pure AutoCAD… Draw Order warning One developer has a long-running custom operation that presents the following message: AutoCAD Warning: This operation may take a long time. To greatly improve performance, the system can disregard…
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Autodesk is holding its first Autodesk Forge Accelerator from March 14-18, 2016 in San Francisco. I say it's the first, but it's really a rebranding of the Autodesk Cloud Accelerators that were held earlier this year to have the same moniker as the recently announced developer platform, fund and conference. The "call for proposals" started just before the holiday break, and will remain open until January 31, 2016. So there are just over 3 weeks left to submit your sub-2,000 word proposal on how you intend to use an Autodesk web-service API during the accelerator. These currently include View &…
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I'm finally on my way home from AU 2015. As usual, the three days of AU were a completely whirlwind: I feel like someone pressed the fast-forward button and I entered into some kind of hyperlapse state. So not much chance to blog and tweet, sadly: too much time spent interacting IRL. Which is very welcome, of course: these interactions are so very valuable, and help drive activities through the rest of the year. Anyway, as alluded to in the last post, I wanted to make sure people were aware about one of the big announcements from this year's AU:…
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With the clock ticking before next week's AU 2015, here's the second of my class handouts (here's a link to the first). For those of you lucky enough to be heading to this year's event, see you in Vegas! Introduction During the course of this session, we're going to look at the steps required to implement a web-site for turning pictures into jigsaw puzzles. We're not going to go quite as far as creating the puzzles, themselves, but rather the DWG or DWF files that can be used to drive a laser cutter to do the work. The premise…