SaaS
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Well, it's finally been announced. After months (probably even more) of intense speculation, Autodesk has just announced that after a break of several (perhaps 15, depending on how you count them) releases, we're planning to deliver a version of AutoCAD that once again works natively on Mac machines. [For some history regarding the original Mac port of AutoCAD, see the first part of my interview with John Walker – you'll need to scroll way down or just search for "Macintosh".] To clarify something about this release, it is not AutoCAD LT – it has full 3D editing capabilities and support…
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In this previous post I showed some code which uploads photos to Photofly and pulls down and imports the resultant point cloud into AutoCAD 2011. The application relies on a special executable from the Photofly team which was built from code extracted from Photo Scene Editor that uploads photos to Photofly and asks for them to be stitched together into a scene on the server. While we're working to tidy this little executable up for publishing, I realised that a good portion of the application could be used as it stands: rather than uploading the photos directly from AutoCAD to…
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Thanks to Jim Quanci for helping with the title of this post. My working title was "Pulling the wings off Project Butterfly" (ouch) but that clearly wasn't going to fly (groan :-). A few weeks ago I had a long discussion with Tal Weiss, one of the co-founders of the company Autodesk recently acquired along with the technology that has become Project Butterfly. Tal provided me with some very interesting background information as to Butterfly's architecture, which I thought I'd share with you. Tal tells me that Jonathan Seroussi, who also joined Autodesk with the acquisition, has been the chief…
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Project Draw 0.7.6 is now available, and this release includes the ability to obtain an API key via the web. All you need to do is go to a website, log in to your Autodesk Labs account and fill out the required information: When I submitted my request I received the key back immediately, inside the browser, completely automatically. The documentation page includes some brief developer documentation, as well as a couple of samples (one server-side Java sample and a client-side VB.NET sample). Another cool feature of this release is the ability to connect Project Draw designs with Project Freewheel.…
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Just a quick post... I've been (and am still) on vacation this week (not doing anything very exciting, mostly cutting hedges and other miscellaneous garden work), but I queued up a few posts in order to keep things moving along while I was offline. One of the posts I put together was regarding the API to Project Draw, and it turned into quite an interesting chain of events. Here's a quick timeline, to explain what happened and when: Monday June 23 - I spend some time looking at Project Draw's API, and draft an introductory post. I send it across…
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Last week David Falck, over at the Autodesk Labs team, provided me with an API key to have a play with the API to Project Draw. This post documents what I did, and how it all worked. Note: I'm not actually doing any coding whatsoever in this post: I used the handy API test page provided by the Autodesk Labs team, and so didn't need to write a single line of code. So, first of all, you'll need an API key. Here's the one I got from the Draw team: th1SIsnOTreAlLyMyapIkeyOfCourSE Just kidding. I've changed the above key for the…
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I touched on this subject a few weeks ago in part 2 of my DWF-related AU handout, but thought I'd come back and describe in more depth some of the fun (although a more accurate word might be "difficulty" 🙂 I had solving this problem. I've been playing around with web services and XML since SaaS was still known as ASP, and have tried to stay up-to-date with the technology as best I can. I'm really a client-side programmer, all things considered: I've created some server-side code, but have mostly involved myself with desktop-oriented programming and creation of samples that…
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[This post continues from part 1 of this series. The source for the below applications is available here: DWF Toolkit application source, Design Review application source & Freewheel application source.] Mining the data with the DWF Toolkit Now we're going to look at using the DWF Toolkit – the freely available, cross platform toolkit for creating and reading DWF files – to extract the "identity" and "material" metadata associated with our geometry. The DWF Toolkit is a C++ toolkit, so we have two components to our project: A C++ DLL that uses the DWF Toolkit to read a DWF, storing…
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I decided to go ahead and put a test page together for the DWFRender Web Service. It still wasn't feasible to make it part of the blog itself, given the issues with scripting, particularly, but I've included the files here for you to download and run locally: Download freewheel_web_service_test.zip There are three web methods called by this code: pdkVersion - gets the version of the PDK on the server (a string value) pageCount - gets the number of pages for a particular DWF file (an integer value) load - gets more detailed information about each page in a DWF (a…
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Project Freewheel is a project that was recently launched via Autodesk Labs. It's a technology preview that allows you to share DWF files without the need for installing a client application that includes an ActiveX control for DWF display (such as the DWF Viewer or Design Review). There are three main features of Project Freewheel that are of interest to developers. Let's take a look at them below. Embedding a navigable DWF It's now really simple to embed a DWF file in your web page without forcing a download of the DWF Viewer application. As long as your DWF file…