Steve J. posted an article on blog nauseam - Nov 1, 2011, 10:17 pm
As reported by multiple on-line news outlets, Autodesk just announced that it is increasing its research and development budget (having slashed it last year), and increasing the percentage of that budget on the Cloud. Carl Bass: When there are technology transitions in place, you better be more min...
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Steve J. posted an article on blog nauseam - Oct 31, 2011, 7:53 pm
It’s about time I posted about something other than the Cloud, or even CAD. Every year, there are four national-level fencing competitions in Australia. As they are almost all held on the other side of the continent, I don’t get to compete in them as often as I’d like. However, a couple of mo...
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Steve J. posted an article on blog nauseam - Oct 31, 2011, 12:44 am
One of the major attractions of the Cloud for vendors is that it ties in customers, providing a reasonably consistent revenue stream. It is an effective anti-competitive strategy. There are various technical and other methods that can be used to ensure that it’s difficult or even impossible for cu...
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Steve J. posted an article on blog nauseam - Oct 26, 2011, 9:37 pm
A few days ago, John McCarthy died at the age of 84. He didn’t make a fortune selling gadgets, he just profoundly affected the world of computing. He will be remembered mainly as the father of LISP, without which it is quite possible that AutoCAD and Autodesk would not have survived beyond the 80s...
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Steve J. posted an article on blog nauseam - Oct 26, 2011, 8:47 pm
In May 2010 I took part in a phone conference with several Autodesk people about the Cloud. Part of that discussion was in the form of an interview, which I will publish in later posts. Another part was in the form of a verbal presentation from Autodesk’s Tal Weiss, concentrating on what was then ...
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Steve J. posted an article on blog nauseam - Oct 26, 2011, 8:51 am
OK, this one’s a biggie. For many, security is the biggest Cloud turn-off. Drawings are valuable property, and the thought of putting them up on the Internet is enough to give some people nervous twitches. I see two major worries: Is my property safe from destruction? Is it safe from unauthorised...
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Steve J. posted an article on blog nauseam - Oct 26, 2011, 1:57 am
I guess most of this blog’s readers also read WorldCAD Access and upFront.eZine, so it probably hasn’t escaped your notice that in the latest upFront.eZine, Ralph had procalimed “The Cloud is Dead” and referred to some of my recent posts here as supporting evidence. I’d just like to point ...
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Steve J. posted an article on blog nauseam - Oct 21, 2011, 11:35 pm
One argument that CAD in the Cloud supporters sometimes make is that the Cloud is taking over regardless of what anybody thinks, so we might as well just embrace it and reap the benefits. Nice try, Nostradamus, but I’ve been around computers long enough to see many Next Big Things come to nothing ...
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Steve J. posted an article on blog nauseam - Oct 21, 2011, 6:24 am
A frequently stated advantage of CAD on the Cloud is the access to large amounts of processing power. Instead of relying on your lowly local processor to perform complex tasks, you can instead zap the job up to the Cloud where vast numbers of processors churn away in massively parallel fashion and ...
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Steve J. posted an article on blog nauseam - Oct 19, 2011, 11:06 pm
In the post Cloud benefits – collaboration, I asked for people’s real-life experiences using, or attempting to use AutoCAD WS. In particular, I’d like to hear about you using its features to collaborate with others, which is a major selling point of the Cloud. As the other post hasn’t seen a...
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Steve J. posted an article on blog nauseam - Oct 19, 2011, 2:22 am
One concern with any SaaS (Software as a Service) product is the potential for downtime. Is this really an issue? After all, big Cloud vendors have multiple server farms as part of their huge infrastructure investment. This provides redundancy to keep things going even in the event of a major local ...
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Steve J. posted an article on blog nauseam - Oct 17, 2011, 9:51 pm
The “other” C word – collaboration – was super-trendy in a mildly amusing way a couple of years ago, so I hesitate to use it here. But it seems to me that it represents a real potential benefit of CAD on the Cloud. Not just potential, because it’s already here, free for anyone, thanks to A...
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Steve J. posted an article on blog nauseam - Oct 14, 2011, 9:57 am
I just used Autodesk Cloud Documents for the first time, and was asked to confirm my acceptance of the Terms of Service. Fair enough. But just what is in those terms, and what do they mean to you if you are dubious about using the Cloud? Will you be reassured by what you find there? Maybe not. Here ...
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Steve J. posted an article on blog nauseam - Oct 13, 2011, 3:05 am
Using AutoCAD 2012 for Mac? Don’t use special characters such as # in your folder names, because AutoCAD will, under certain circumstances, delete whole folders worth of files when you open a drawing. See here and here for more detailed information.
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Steve J. posted an article on blog nauseam - Oct 10, 2011, 1:33 am
Early last year, I ran a poll to gauge your feelings about CAD in the Cloud. Here are the results of that poll: As you can see, the poll response bell curve was clearly biased toward the frightened end of the spectrum, and there was little in the way of excitement at the Cloudy prospects for CAD. A...
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Steve J. posted an article on blog nauseam - Oct 10, 2011, 12:18 am
One of the more interesting things about running a blog that is visited by a reasonable number of people is the fan mail. My immense modesty prevents me from keeping visible the thousands of positive comments that are posted here, but I thought I would give you an idea of the sort of praise I receiv...
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Steve J. posted an article on blog nauseam - Oct 3, 2011, 4:28 am
Using your suggestions and a few of my own, I have added two polls for you to select what are, in your opinion, the best and worst features ever added to AutoCAD. To help us find The Answer, there are 42 items in each poll, from which you can choose up to three. A few items (e.g. Action Recorder) ...
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Steve J. posted an article on blog nauseam - Sep 30, 2011, 1:00 am
Autodesk recently made a big announcement about its Cloud initiatives, and reactions have been all over the place. Some people can barely contain their breathless excitement while others are outraged to the point of passing out the pitchforks. Why? It’s pretty much business as usual. It’s nothi...
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Steve J. posted an article on blog nauseam - Sep 19, 2011, 10:44 am
Audience participation time, I think. A comment on one of AutoCAD 2012′s new features recently set me thinking about what were the worst features ever introduced to AutoCAD. That in turn got me thinking about what were the best. I’ll keep my opinions to myself for a while, as I’d like your in...
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Steve J. posted an article on blog nauseam - Sep 12, 2011, 11:16 pm
Thanks to Kean Walmsley’s post on his Through the Interface blog, I have learned something that would have been handy to know for the last decade or so, but which somehow escaped my knowledge. I learned how to increase the size of AutoCAD’s command line history cache. It defaults to 400 lines, w...
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Steve J. posted an article on blog nauseam - Sep 12, 2011, 1:06 am
The observant among you may have noticed that for many years, Autodesk’s free patches, service packs and updates haven’t added any new functionality. Bugs may get fixed, severe performance issues may be addressed, but design errors generally have to wait for the next release (at the earliest), ...
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Steve J. posted an article on blog nauseam - Sep 9, 2011, 3:17 am
The first update for AutoCAD 2012 is now available on the Autodesk site. As usual, read the readme first and exercise the usual paranoia. Make sure you install the right version (32 or 64 bit). The update is also available for AutoCAD LT 2012. There is no news yet on equivalent updates for vertical ...
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Steve J. posted an article on blog nauseam - Aug 5, 2011, 3:37 am
I have been somewhat neglectful of this blog lately, including a failure to mention that my ClassicArray™ plug-in for AutoCAD 2012 has been shipping since 1 May 2011. Thank you to those people from various places around the world who have been prepared to go to the effort of registering and paying...
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Steve J. posted an article on blog nauseam - Jun 26, 2011, 11:28 pm
In AutoCAD 2012 and products based on it, saving the drawing while in the block editor can result in your whole drawing being replaced by the block you’re editing. As this can be somewhat inconvenient, it’s probably a good idea to download and install Autodesk’s hotfix for this problem. As alw...
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Steve J. posted an article on blog nauseam - Jun 1, 2011, 12:27 am
One of the more painful aspects of dealing with installations of recent releases of AutoCAD and related products is that although you might run a single setup routine to install what you think is a single application, the end result is a mass of different components being installed. Each of these c...
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Steve J. posted an article on blog nauseam - May 30, 2011, 4:32 am
Here’s a trick you can use in AutoCAD 2012 to fill an area with any objects you like. It’s not actually hatching, but it has several advantages over the real thing: You aren’t restricted to straight line segments as you are with real hatching. Circles, splines, even solid objects, you name it...
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Steve J. posted an article on blog nauseam - May 26, 2011, 11:33 pm
In a recent comment, I was asked how to make Ctrl+C perform a Cancel. Before I get onto that, here’s a bit of history. Back in the Dark Ages of DOS, the way to cancel a command was by holding down Ctrl and pressing C. The last release to work like this by default was Release 13 for DOS, released ...
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Steve J. posted an article on blog nauseam - May 13, 2011, 4:04 am
Lynn Allen produces a handy tips booklet for each new release of AutoCAD, giving an easy-to-read summary of the main new features. She has made the AutoCAD 2012 online version available on her blog here.
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Steve J. posted an article on blog nauseam - May 13, 2011, 12:01 am
If you download AutoCAD or other Autodesk products from either the trial or Subscription sites, the executable you get (e.g. AutoCAD_2012_English_Win_32bit.exe) is actually a self-extracting archive rather than a real installer. When you run it, you are prompted for a destination folder, with a defa...
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Steve J. posted an article on blog nauseam - Apr 28, 2011, 11:09 pm
Do you have a 3DConnexion device (3D ‘mouse’) and use it in AutoCAD or AutoCAD-based products? What do you think of the way it works in the most recent releases of AutoCAD? From AutoCAD 2011 on, Autodesk provided built-in support for these devices. Has that made things better or worse than in e...
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Steve J. posted an article on blog nauseam - Apr 21, 2011, 8:53 am
As you have probably noticed, I have changed the theme used on this blog. You may see some more minor changes to the layout over the next few days. If there’s anything you don’t like about the new theme, please say so.
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Steve J. posted an article on blog nauseam - Apr 20, 2011, 5:29 am
One of the less obvious features introduced by AutoCAD 2012 is the Autoloader mechanism that has been provided to make installation of plug-ins (current standard Autodeskspeak for add-ons, apps, utilities, routines, etc.) easier for both developers and users. It may not be immediately obvious, but i...
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Steve J. posted an article on blog nauseam - Apr 14, 2011, 9:28 am
The most popular post on this blog, in terms of both hits and comments, is AutoCAD 2009 – Putting things back to “normal”. This is followed by AutoCAD 2010 – Putting things back to “normal”, with AutoCAD 2011 – Putting things back to “normal” not too far behind. As it seems many pe...
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Steve J. posted an article on blog nauseam - Apr 14, 2011, 1:11 am
I have now posted the second Release Candidate of ClassicArray™ (version number 0.7.0). The main changes from the first Release Candidate (0.6.0) are: Help documentation, which you can also view here, now describes how to resolve an AutoCAD CUIx loading problem. (The problem is not specific to Cl...
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Steve J. posted an article on blog nauseam - Apr 8, 2011, 11:23 pm
I have just posted the Release Candidate of ClassicArray™ (version number 0.6.0). The main changes from Beta 2 (0.5.0) are: Setup executables have been provided to provide easier installation and uninstallation. Pretty comprehensive Help documentation is now in place, which you can also view here...
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Steve J. posted an article on blog nauseam - Apr 3, 2011, 10:38 pm
One of the things that most pleases me about this blog is the amount of comments it gets. I’m sure there are several AutoCAD-related blogs that are much more frequently visited than this one, especially the Autodesk ones. However, I’m not aware of another AutoCAD blog with the volume of comments...
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Steve J. posted an article on blog nauseam - Mar 31, 2011, 11:47 pm
Note: this post is not an April fool’s joke. It may be ridiculous and hard to believe, but unfortunately it’s all true. After I managed to overcome Autodesk’s obstructive download manger and download AutoCAD 2012, it became available on the Subscription site (when that site wasn’t running ...
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Steve J. posted an article on blog nauseam - Mar 31, 2011, 10:50 pm
As reported on Without a Net, there is a second update for AutoCAD 2011 for Mac. This will be welcome news to those of you who have discovered that AutoCAD crashes when using Copy/Paste after installing the 10.6.7 OS X update. If you haven’t applied Update 1 yet, you will need to do that first. A...
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Steve J. posted an article on blog nauseam - Mar 29, 2011, 1:49 am
If you preselect some objects in AutoCAD 2012 and hold down, then the objects will move a bit if you hit an arrow key. Great, cool! Exactly how far do they move? Let’s try it, shall we. First time, the move was about 4.5565 units. Zoom around a bit and try again. This time, it’s about 11.6677 u...
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Steve J. posted an article on blog nauseam - Mar 28, 2011, 10:19 pm
I am considering the following pricing model for ClassicArray™ when it’s released: Individual licenses: $12 Up to 20-user license: $100 Up to 50-user license: $200 Up to 100-user license: $300 Unlimited site license: $500 Prices in US$, payment by PayPal, delivery by download only. Austral...
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Steve J. posted an article on blog nauseam - Mar 28, 2011, 10:30 am
I have just posted the second public Beta of ClassicArray™ (version number 0.5.0). There are some documentation updates (still no Help, though), and the main changes are: Bugs fixed with rectangular arrays where single-row and/or column arrays confused AutoCAD. The command now remembers its setti...
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Steve J. posted an article on blog nauseam - Mar 25, 2011, 12:51 am
You may have noticed that the much-derided AutoCAD 2011 Help has had something of an update for AutoCAD 2012, integrating it with something called Autodesk Exchange. Rather than critique this myself, I’ll hand it over to you. What do you think of AutoCAD 2012′s Help? Is it all better now? Is it...
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Steve J. posted an article on blog nauseam - Mar 25, 2011, 12:26 am
People have already started to notice that AutoCAD 2012 has killed the dialog box interface for the Array command, and not everybody is happy about it. So I guess it’s time to launch ClassicArray™ Beta. ClassicArray is an add-on for AutoCAD 2012 for Windows that allows the creation of arrays ...
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Steve J. posted an article on blog nauseam - Mar 24, 2011, 10:31 am
The Array dialog box isn’t the only thing you might notice by its absence in AutoCAD 2012. I’ll do a proper “Putting things back to normal” post later, but here’s a quick one for those of you wondering what happened to a few things that appear to be AWOL in 2012. Are you missing your aeri...
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Steve J. posted an article on blog nauseam - Mar 23, 2011, 7:46 am
Let’s say you’re trying to download some software and it insists on first installing some intermediary download manager. Do you think, “Great, this will make my life easier, things are bound to go quickly and smoothly now”? No, didn’t think so. How about when it’s by Akamai? Does that ma...
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Steve J. posted an article on blog nauseam - Mar 22, 2011, 11:35 am
For many users, the most useful new feature in AutoCAD 2012 is going to be the updated Array command. It adds a great deal of very welcome new functionality that will provide a potential productivity boost for 2D and 3D users. But it’s from an Autodesk wedded to its infernal 12-month product cycle...
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Steve J. posted an article on blog nauseam - Mar 2, 2011, 9:24 pm
Autodesk is conducting a survey about 3D work in AutoCAD. Here is the announcement: Do you use 3D in your AutoCAD work? We want to learn from you! If you are familiar with 3D modeling, lighting, rendering, or visual styles, either in AutoCAD or in other software, we’re interested in finding out...
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Steve J. posted an article on blog nauseam - Oct 19, 2010, 11:11 pm
Autodesk has issued another survey, this time asking questions about AutoCAD customisation, migration and deployment. Anybody who has to manage AutoCAD or its variants knows that these areas contain some major pain points and have needed serious attention for some years. It looks like Autodesk is fi...
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Steve J. posted an article on blog nauseam - Oct 17, 2010, 9:59 pm
Congratulations to Ralph Grabowski, winner of my AutoCAD WS contest. His entry of Workspace was chosen by the greatest number of voters as the hidden meaning behind the WS in AutoCAD WS. Ralph, your prize awaits! Just visit the App Store and you’ll soon be running a real live AutoCAD on your iPod...
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Steve J. posted an article on blog nauseam - Oct 16, 2010, 9:57 pm
You may remember my pre-release speculation about what was likely to be missing from the Mac version of AutoCAD 2011. It turns out that my list was pretty accurate as far as it went, but very incomplete. In a move that I can only applaud, Autodesk has now published its own list of missing Mac featu...
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