Web/Tech
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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…
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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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Last night, I left the (very fun) party at the X Summit a little early: partly because I knew I was presenting this morning and needed a clear head, but mainly to attend a WebVR meet-up being held at Mozilla. I'm rarely in the Bay Area and it seemed a shame to miss the opportunity to attend the event, especially as it was a chance to hang out with Jim Quanci and Goran Borjesson, a colleague visiting from Gothenberg. I'll describe my experiences of the evening's proceedings, but you can also watch the online recording. It was really an interesting…
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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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I mentioned this event – an excellent opportunity to kickstart your web or mobile application development efforts – late last year. The original submission deadline was last week, but this has been extended to January 17 – the end of this week! If you can put together a proposal (which shouldn't be more than 1,000 words) by then, you may still be able to participate. As a reminder, Autodesk is hosting the 2-week workshop in our downtown San Francisco offices from March 9-20, and will pay the hotel costs for 1-2 people per company. Get more information here.
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Thank you for your readership and support during the last year. It's really the interactions with this blog's readers that motivate me to keep posting after 8½ years. As a small gesture of appreciation, here's a simple HTML card that serves up random posts from this blog's first 1,220 (or so). If you're not interested by the post it shows when it loads, just click on the "Merry Christmas!" banner until you find one you feel like reading. The provided link will launch the post in a separate browser tab. In case you're interested in the implementation details, the shadow…
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I mentioned some weeks ago that I was looking to automate the validation of a bunch of source files I have on disk before uploading them to GitHub. I decided to get started on that, this week, to see what was involved. As mentioned in the previous post, I wanted to programmatically query posts from Typepad, extract any embedded code from them and compare it with what I had on disk, to see which files were already correct and which needed to be created or removed. The first step was to choose a language. The fact this is really an…
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In the last post we saw the process for getting content uploaded to Autodesk storage and translated into the format required by the Autodesk 360 viewer. In this post we're going to show the steps to take that data and embed it in a "simple" HTML page. (Any complex capability in this page it's due to the UI code that Dan Wellman kindly allowed me to borrow for the sample: otherwise what it does is very simple indeed.) There are, of course, more complex samples that the ADN team has developed to demonstrate the richness of the new View &…
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Over the next few posts we're going to take a look at the steps needed to build the Steampunk Morgan Viewer, my first sample using Autodesk's new View & Data API. In today's post we're going to look at the steps needed to host content to be served up to instances of the viewer. In a subsequent post we'll look at the client-side implementation, connecting to and streaming down content and controlling how it gets viewed. So let's start with some basics. The first thing you need to do when working with the new View & Data API is to…
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Sometimes you just need to ease back into work after a few weeks off. So today I decided to have a go at integrating DogeSharp – a programming language on top of of .NET inspired by Dogescript – into AutoCAD. There was absolutely no reason to do so, other than to cause myself some amusement. Which is actually a pretty good reason, now that I think about it. For those of you who – like me – are almost completely unaware of Internet memes such as Doge, this was apparently a big one in 2013 and all started with this…