ODA Cracks DWG 2010

Today the ODA let its members know that they could download DWGdirect 3.0.0, the alpha release of the new version of the DWGdirect SDK that can read and write the DWG 2010 format.

The new SDK supports DWG as well as DXF files created by AutoCAD 2010. However, some new objects introduced in AutoCAD 2010 such as AcDbGeoData, AcDbSubDMesh and constraint related objects are loaded as proxies. But I guess that will change in due course of time.

When I met Neil Peterson, the CTO of the ODA, at the ODA World Conference in Leiden, Holland, I asked him how DWG 2010 was treating him. "Not too bad", was his reply. He went on to explain his plan. "We will first release a version of the SDK that reads and writes the current set of entities so that our members can add initial DWG and DXF support to their products. Thereafter we will add native support for the new entities and other stuff that has been added to the DWG 2010 format." Seems like things are going according to plan. Full support for DWG 2010 is expected at the end of year.

I have always wondered why Autodesk has this self imposed three year cycle for the DWG format. Since it takes about a year for the ODA to completely reverse engineer a new DWG format, if Autodesk changed the DWG format every year, that would keep the ODA on its toes all year round. And that would give it less time and resources to do other stuff like building an alternative DWG based CAD platform, which is far more damaging to Autodesk than a reverse engineered DWG read/write SDK. In fact, I once posed this question to a senior Autodesk executive. His reply was noble, to say the least. "We do not believe in troubling our customers more than we need to. We understand that file format changes can create a lot of inconvenience to our customers and affect the way they collaborate with other people. That is the reason why we have decided to change the DWG format every three years."

But he wasn't quite ready for what I asked him next. "That's great", I said. "But then why do you change the Inventor format every year?" Needless to say, he did not have a noble answer to that one.

I guess Inventor customers have a higher capacity for pain.

Alibre Design V12 Sneak Peek

Max Freeman of Alibre has a video showing some of the new stuff to be released in the next version of Alibre Design - V12. However, I should warn you that the video is 40 minutes long. But it does show a lot of stuff in great detail.

If you are an existing Alibre Design user, the video will serve as a quick (no pun intended) tour of the stuff waiting for you. If you are a 2D user (AutoCAD or otherwise) who is toying with the idea of going 3D, I suggest you take a look as well. Now is as good a time to get a "complete 3D design, verification and drafting" system for a three digit dollar figure. I am not kidding. You can get Alibre Design Standard at NOVEDGE for $799. A reseller here in India is offering two licenses for the price of one. Too bad they are still promoting V9.2 and V10 on their web site when the current version if V11.

There are a lot of small enhancements and useful features added to V12. But in my view the most important one seems to be the significant improvements that Alibre claims to have made in handling large assemblies. Previously, Alibre Design's graphics pipeline used to render portions of the scene even if they were out of view. This led to a significant reduction in the amount of 3D data that it could handle. The V12 graphics pipeline renders only the portions of the model that are visible to the user as he navigates around the scene, thereby significantly increasing performance.

In the video Max loads a close to 2000 part assembly with around 500 unique parts and effortlessly navigates around the model. Incidentally, I first saw something that closely resembles that particular large assembly on the splash screen of SolidWorks. The one that you can see here. I take it that Max is trying to make a point here. I also noticed that the newly redesigned Alibre web site does resemble that of SolidWorks to an extent.

And by the way, the "OBJImport" menu item you see on the Alibre Design menu is not part of V12. It has been added by OBJ Import for Alibre Design, SYCODE's Wavefront OBJ file import add-in for Alibre Design.

The Search for an AutoCAD Alternative Ends

Four months ago an architect, who has 5 licenses of AutoCAD LT 2006 and 2 licenses of AutoCAD 2006, posted a question on the IntelliCAD.net forum wondering whether it was worth switching to an AutoCAD clone. Autodesk was due to retire AutoCAD 2006 and he was not too happy with the fact that he was being forced to upgrade, especially since AutoCAD 2006 was more than enough for his work. In his words, "This force upgradation after every three releases by Autodesk is really sucking my hard earned money."

What followed was a lively discussion with other members offering advice and sharing their experiences with various AutoCAD clones. Today the architect arrived at some sort of conclusion. He wrote, "IMHO there is no AutoCAD Clone at present which is as fast as AutoCAD. ...[snip]... I have come to a point where I am willing to pay the price of AutoCAD for its stability and speed. It is really unfortunate that no clone can do this (speed as well as stability). Since recently I am also fed up trying out every other AutoCAD Clone. I am now once for all settled for AutoCAD!"

They say quality comes at a price. The question is whether you can afford it. An equally important question is whether you have a viable option.

As far as this reluctant Autodesk customer is concerned, the search for an AutoCAD alternative has come to an end, not in the way he hoped it would.

Wanted - Kind-Hearted Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire 1.0 User

At SYCODE, we are doing the final testing of our Pro/ENGINEER data exchange plug-ins. I have Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire 1.0 (actually it was called just Wildfire), 2.0, 3.0, 4.0 and 5.0 Preproduction on my development and testing computers in office. My problem is that for some weird reason Wildfire 1.0 crashes on startup. I am trying to resolve this issue with PTC technical support. I just spent two and a half hours on the phone with a PTC technical support engineer. I gave him control over my computer via WebEx, he changed all the possible settings he could think of and then finally reinstalled Wildfire 1.0. No joy. We are going to have another go at it tomorrow.

I would like to believe that we have built our plug-in DLLs so that they work in Wildfire 1.0. But I cannot be sure as we have no way of testing them. So I am looking for someone who has Wildfire 1.0 on his computer and who would be kind enough to test one of our plug-ins. If you happen to be that kind person please download "STL Import for Pro/ENGINEER" from here. This is our Stereolithography STL file import plug-in for Pro/ENGINEER.

After installing the plug-in, please read the ReadMe file carefully for plug-in loading instructions. Unlike other CAD systems, Pro/ENGINEER has an antiquated method of loading plug-ins, which involves locating or creating a text file in a specific folder and specyfing the exact path of the plug-in DLL for your version of Pro/ENGINEER, among other things. Its a bit complicated, unlike other CAD systems wherein the plug-in installer does everything and you simply fire up the program and start using the plug-in.

After loading the plug-in you will see new menu added to Pro/ENGINEER called "STLImport".

Click the "Import" menu item and select a STL file to import. If you need one, a sample STL file is copied into the "Samples" folder.

I just need to know if the plug-in loads properly into Wildfire 1.0 and successfully imports a STL file. If any other Pro/ENGINEER user with a later version of Wildfire wants to test our plug-in, that would be great. We have plug-in DLLs for Wildfire 2.0, 3.0, 4.0 and 5.0 Preproduction as well.

You can drop me a line at deelip (at) sycode (dot) com. Thanks in advance and have a great weekend.

Autodesk Authorized Developer Logo

In an earlier post I wondered how GreatStar, an ITC member, could put up the "Autodesk Authorized Developer" logo on their web site, especially since I could not find any mention about them in the Autodesk Partner Index. An anonymous comment pointed me to this page on the Autodesk web site. The page is the Autodesk partner page for CADAddOn.com, an Autodesk Authorized Developer, headquartered in Plano, Texas.

What's interesting is that CADAddOn.com is a division of GreatStar, and not surprisingly, CADAddOn.com's product AutoXls Table is listed as one of GreatStar's products as well. So it appears that GreatStar took the liberty of using the Autodesk logo meant for CADAddOn.com on its web site and decided to call itself an Autodesk Authorized Developer.

Autodesk lawyers are busy dragging the ODA to court in their fight against SolidWorks dealing with orange squares and a three letter acronym. Here is company pissing all over the Autodesk logo and it appears that their high flying lawyers cannot do a damn thing about it. Looks like they charge Autodesk large sums of money and end up picking the easy fights.

All said and done, the people who actually end up paying the price are laid off Autodesk employees and Autodesk customers.

Inventor Fusion on Design News

Beth Stackpole, a Contributing Editor to Design News, has written an article on Inventor Fusion titled "Autodesk Labs Serves up a Taste of Fusion". So why am I linking to it here? Click the link and you will know why ;-)

A Lost Sale

At SYCODE, we get our fair share of weird emails. The other day we got one from a prospective customer wanting to buy one of our AutoCAD plug-ins. We helped him with his initial queries, successfully ran his data through our plug-in and showed him the results. Today the prospect was kind enough to let us know that he would not be purchasing our plug-in. Why? Because he could not find a "working crack" for AutoCAD.

Apparently, he could just about afford our $195 plug-in, but not AutoCAD.

The 15 Minute Lockout

This post is a humble request to all Pro/ENGINEER developers out there to help me solve an extremely irritating problem. First let me begin by explaining my problem.

Unlike most CAD vendors, PTC does not give away their SDK (Software Development Kit) for free. So if you want to customize Pro/ENGINEER by means of plug-ins you need to purchase a license of something known as Pro/TOOLKIT, basically a C API used to develop what PTC calls auxiliary applications, or plug-ins. As a PTC partner I have a Pro/ENGINEER and Pro/TOOLKIT license on my development computer and only a Pro/ENGINEER license on a second testing computer. Now the thing is that plug-ins that I develop on my development computer will work only on a computer that has a Pro/TOOLKIT license. In order that they work on the testing computer, or for that matter, any other computer with just a Pro/ENGINEER license, I need to "unlock" the plug-in DLL. No other CAD vendor I know has such a system, but I guess PTC has a good reason for doing so. One obvious reason for locking the plug-ins is that someone without a Pro/TOOLKIT license should not be able to develop plug-ins.

My problem is that the unlocking program works in a weird way. When you start the program and supply it with a DLL file name to unlock at the command line, it just sits there for 15 mins and does nothing. After 15 full minutes, it unlocks the DLL within a fraction of a second. Yes, you read that right. But I will repeat anyways. The unlocking program sits idle for 15 (fifteen) minutes before it eventually unlocks the DLL. So if I make a change in my plug-in and want to see how it works on the testing computer, I need to wait 15 minutes between each and every change I make. Also, if I have ten plug-ins (I am developing 14 actually), I need to spend a total of two and a half hours doing nothing before I can unlock all of them and proceed to build my installers.

Obviously, developers found this extremely irritating and probably let PTC know about it. I say this because in Wildfire 3.0 or 4.0 (not sure), PTC changed the way the unlocking program worked. Now the program immediately unlocks the plug-in DLL, but ties up the Pro/TOOLKIT license for 15 minutes thereafter, thereby preventing another unlocking operation for the next 15 minutes. Same difference. The only advantage here is that the person testing the plug-in can do so immediately, and not have to wait 15 minutes. But he will still have to wait 15 minutes before testing the next change to the plug-in.

In my opinion, this new arrangement has the same nuisance value as the earlier one. A plug-in that I was developing was working perfectly fine on my development computer (they normally do) but was crashing on the testing computer. So while debugging I had to wait 15 minutes before I could change my code to see if the change that I made stopped the crash on the testing computer. I took three hours to find and fix the bug, something which would have been done in ten minutes had this weird 15 minute lockout not been there.

So why exactly does this 15 minute lockout exist? I have no damn clue! When PTC changed the unlocking program they also added a feature whereby you could supply multiple plug-in DLLs to unlock at once. Earlier you could unlock only one DLL at a time. So if I have a thousand plug-in DLLs, I can now have them all unlocked at one go in a few minutes. Of course, I will not be able to unlock another DLL for the next 15 minutes. But that does not really matter anymore because I could have added it to the list of thousand DLL's that I had just previously unlocked. So if the reason for the 15 minute lockout was to limit the number of DLL's that could be unlocked in an hour, a day or some time interval, the new unlocking program offers a way of bypassing that limitation. But as I found out the hard way, tying up the Pro/TOOLKIT license for 15 minutes after every unlocking operation poses serious problems while debugging a plug-in.

Instead of speculating I decided to ask PTC for the reason for the 15 minute lockout. When I was at their headquarters in Needham, I put the question across to a few people there. To my surprise none of them knew the reason for the 15 minute lockout. So maybe I was asking the wrong people. After I returned to India I logged a technical support call. The engineer who responded to my call was frank enough to admit that he did not know the reason either, but promised to find out and let me know. I never ever heard back from him. I have since asked a few other developers but none of them know the reason.

I have resigned to the fact that as a Pro/ENGINEER plug-in developer I have to live with the 15 minute lockout. What I cannot live with is not knowing why the lockout exists in the first place, especially since it can be such a pain while debugging. I would be extremely grateful to the person who enlightens me with the reason for the 15 minute lockout. Its killing me not to know.

I hope that there is a very good reason for the 15 minute lockout and not that some wise guy put it there decades ago and now nobody knows why it is still needed.

Are Printed Publications Relevant in an Online World?

The other day the first anniversary issue of DEVELOP3D landed in my office. As a rule they usually do not ship to India, but I guess there are few exceptions to that rule. I took the magazine home to read and as I did I started asking myself whether printed publications actually have a place in a world that increasingly getting online. In recent times we have seen more and more print publications winding up or going online, and not always out of choice.

This is the way I look at it. In my view, printed publications, such as magazines, have little value when it comes to news. For example, DEVELOP3D's first item in the news section read "PTC's Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire 5.0 to deliver real time model regeneration". I didn't read a word of it. Why? Because that news is a month old. Ironically, one of the first places I read about it was at DEVELOP3D's own blog. The situation with the other news items in the magazine was no different. I get the daily news delivered straight to my inbox by the the Tenlinks Daily email newsletter. For breaking news I have bloggers reporting from live events which gets picked up by my feed reader instantly. And of course there is Twitter. What's more, I don't even need the press to interpret what a company said in a press release. I simply add the company's press release RSS feed to my feed reader and I get to hear it straight from the horse's mouth, and that too instantly.

Having said all of the above, I feel that printed magazines have something that the online world has been trying to get for many years now - the complete and undivided attention of the reader. And that is precisely what gives them an edge over online publications. I need to explain this a little. For that I need to take you to my world.

From the moment I enter office, all that my brain can think of doing is getting my body to work - in my case, write C++ code. In fact, my brain is already organizing my day while I am still in the car. So as soon as I sit at my desk, I start Outlook and reply to my emails as fast as I can. The emails that need time to reply are saved as drafts to be attented to later in the day. I then quickly scan what my feed reader has accumulated for me. This is the time when one half of my brain is fighting with the other over whether I should spend my time reading something or not. If the headline or the first few words do not interest me in a big way, I find my finger click the mouse on the next item in the list. If I have not spent a significant amount of time in my feed reader, my brain may allow me the time to check on what the people I follow on Twitter are saying. After this last excercise my brain heaves a sigh of relief and wastes no time in putting itself in programming mode. While I am programming, the infighting in my brain stops completely and both halves think about nothing else but C++.

Now compare this to how I read the issue of DEVELOP3D. I read the cover story on Marin Bikes after dinner while relaxing on my couch after my boys were tucked away in bed. I read the Autodesk Inventor 2010 review the next morning sitting on my easy chair, on the front porch of my house, with a cup of tea at my side, while birds chirped above me. The only thing disturbing me was my dog licking my toes. I read the Solid Edge ST2 review that evening, again on the front porch. This time my dog figured that playing fetch with my five year old son in the garden was more interesting than licking his master's toes. And to top it all, I read the uPrint 3D printer review while crapping. My point is that for every word that I read and every image I saw, both halves of my brain were in total harmony and I ended up giving total and undivided attention to the author or advertiser. To be brutally frank, if the cover story on Marin Bikes had appeared on the DEVELOP3D blog, I would never have read it. But I read each and every word of it on the DEVELOP3D printed magazine.

And this brings me to another equally important point, that of advertising. Advertising is the thing that makes a publication possible, whether it is printed or online. Thanks to all these years of looking into a web browser, my brain (both halves) has mastered the art of blocking out everything except the thing that I want to read. I can look at a web page with a million ads, brightly colored, animated or whatever, but my brain will only show me the words that I have come to read. I have almost never clicked on a Google ad, mainly because my brain filters it out for me, even though Google ads look quite similar to the text that I am reading. My brain treats a web ad as part of a universe that does not interest me. My brain takes the entire HTML content of a web page, isolates the portions that interest me and strips out the remaining. Ironically, this is exactly what my feed reader does. It shows me only the text and images that are referenced by the text. Everything else is gone.

I guess I am not the only one whose brain has evolved in such a way. I say this because there are online publications that inject ads right in the middle of the text that a reader has come to read. I think this is a desperate attempt to get the attention of the reader. I also believe that this is the most stupid way of doing it. Come one, do they actually think that the reader will stop reading the article, completely derail his line of thought, read the ad, understand and appreciate its content and then get back to reading the article. I definately would not. And I definitely do not. Such ads can only add up to nuisance value, nothing else.

On the other hand, I actually took the time out to look at every advertisement that appeared in the DEVELOP3D printed magazine. Page 6 contained a full page ad of SolidSolutions, a SolidWorks reseller, showing an ice carving of a motor cycle. I remember looking at every detail of the carving and then reading each and every word that followed it. I did that because my brain was at ease and did not have something hastenning it to get on with the next thing. I don't believe I have seen a printed magazine that injects advertisements in the middle of an article. They don't need to. The ads are either full page ads or are neatly tucked away in a corner of side of a page. They know that even though the reader is in the middle of reading an article, eventually the ad will come to his attention, quite simply because he has all the time in the world to look at it.

As an advertiser, if I want to advertise my brand or product, I would prefer putting in a place and time when my target audience is in the best position and state of mind to read and understand my message. Shoving something in front of a reader's eyes when he is reading something that interests him is like a nagging wife constantly interupting you when you are watching your favorite sport on TV.

I have never picked up a magazine to read it in a hurry. The very act of picking up a magazine indicates that my mind is at ease. Neither have I picked up ten magazines and rifled though the pages to read only the articles. Yet, this is exactly what I do with online publications every day.

There is something else that I don't understand about online publications. Some have now started to offer RSS feeds for their content. That is plain and simple crazy. Its like taking a printed magazine, tearing out all the pages that contain ads and then sending it to readers. Why the bloody hell would a company want to advertise on an online publication that offers RSS feeds? This is like the filtering that my brain does when it see ads on a web page, just that my brain does not need to take the trouble any more. The content is already filtered by the RSS feed. Somebody please explain this to me.

So to answer the question "Are printed publications relevant in an online world?", I would say that they most definitely are. In fact, I would go further and say that their relevance increases in a world that getting more and more online. Its sad to see that an increasing number of them are closing down or taking the online route.

Maybe after they grow up my kids will read the local newspaper in their web browser. But I will always read it on my front porch with my dog licking my toes. I just cannot bring myself to read it any other way.

AutoCAD Scale Nightmare

Having recently built my house using AutoCAD as one of the CAD systems, I can relate to this story. A UK couple who are building their 1 million pound dream home are fighting a battle with authorities who are looking to tear it down - all because the blue prints were automatically scaled down by 4 percent to fit the page.

"When the plans have been printed out, we didn't realise the printer had reduced them by 4 per cent and these were the plans that were passed", said Colin Walker, the 50 year old owner of the house. "The trouble is that the plans were drawn up with AutoCAD and it's dangerous to use a scale ruler because printers often have these discrepancies with computer aided design. This is why the plans clearly state that all the dimensions should be checked or measured on site and not scaled from the drawing. However, plans containing full dimensions were subsequently submitted to West Lancs building control."

Unfortunately, the plans approved were the original scaled down drawings and the authorities are now taking the stand that Walker is building a house 4 percent larger than what they approved. Walker has already lost an appeal against the enforcement notice and now hopes that the High Court will stop the demolition of his four bedroom home. Apart from the scale problem, there are 15 other discrepancies between the approved plans and the currently built structure. I wish him luck.

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