Through the Interface

Jim Quanci wins the Singlehanded TransPac 2012

This post is to belatedly congratulate Jim Quanci (Director of the Autodesk Developer Network, blogger over at Dances with Elephants and my former manager) for his recent win of the Singlehanded TransPac race from California to Hawaii. Jim sailed his 40ft boat, the Green Buffalo, singlehandedly from San Francisco on June 30th, 2012, arriving in Hanalei Bay, Kauai, on July 13th. The Buffalo crossed the line 3rd – as you can see from the interactive race viewer – but given the handicaps applied to the various classes of boat, Jim won the race by nearly 8 hours. By all... Read more →

Enjoyed England

As I ended up not being able to post during the last week or so, I’ve switched to the past tense now that I’m back in Switzerland. I’ll start back on more technical topics in the coming days, but as I’m still re-adjusting I may as well wrap up my holiday’s travelog, first. :-) After the unexpected highlight of visiting the Shard, I was worried the remainder of our time in the UK might prove a disappointment. Thankfully, my worries were completely unfounded: we had a great trip to London’s Natural History Museum (with a quick stop by Harrods... Read more →

Climbing the Shard

Today’s post was going to be “Enjoying England” – just to complete the series on our European tour – but that’s now going to have to wait. We are indeed enjoying England, but yesterday had a pretty unique and amazing opportunity that deserves a post of its own. Before yesterday, I admittedly didn’t know very much at all about Shard London Bridge (which I’ll refer to from here on as “the Shard”). But then a friend of ours offered us the chance to go to the top, which was pretty unique (he’s been working on the project for the... Read more →

Enjoying Wales

After a great week in Brittany, we took an overnight, cross-channel ferry from Roscoff to Plymouth to begin our fortnight in the UK. The ferry was a pleasant surprise – far removed from the Dover to Calais “booze cruises” I remember from my student days. We had a cabin with a window and breakfast delivered an hour before arrival. All very civilised. On arrival, we headed on up through Devon and Somerset, stopping in Glastonbury for an early morning visit to the Tor. We then decided – somewhat on the spur of the moment, as it was a bit... Read more →

Enjoying Brittany

This year’s Autodesk football tournament was excellent – congratulations to the IPG 1 team, this year’s well-deserving winners! (I’ve included a picture from their 2-1 quarter-final victory over us, below.) Towards the end of our last game of the day (thankfully) I managed to sustain a thigh injury after a collision with Fenton (he was playing for the GS-ISM team, while I was playing for Swiss 2). This made walking around pretty painful for the next few days, and certainly made the drive up to Brittany (with an overnight stay at a fantastic guest-house in Blois to break up... Read more →

Series of posts on mobile Revit model viewing

I’m hopefully sunning myself on the beaches of Brittany, at this point, but here’s some information that Mikako Harada kindly brought to my attention. Adam Nagy has put together a fantastic series of posts on the AEC DevBlog that I think will be of general interest: Revit model viewer for iOS – part 1 Revit model viewer for iOS – part 2 Revit model viewer for iOS – part 3 Adam was apparently inspired by Philippe Leefsma’s Inventor viewer for Android – something I’ll also link to, once I see it’s been published. Read more →

Thinking about AU 2012 (and vacation)

Last week, I received confirmation that I’ll be presenting a few different classes at AU 2012, which will be held at the Mandalay Bay Hotel in Las Vegas from November 27-28. My main sessions, this year, are in some way focused on cloud & mobile technologies. The subject matter of the first lecture is the recently completed cloud & mobile series, where we’ll look at moving desktop functionality to the cloud and using it from a variety of mobile environments: CP1914 – Moving code to the cloud – it’s easier than you think! It has a companion roundtable session... Read more →

Finding out about changes to AutoCAD layers via the Bindable Object Layer using .NET

In the last few posts on this topic, we saw some examples of getting information from and controlling AutoCAD via its Bindable Object Layer. In this post, we’re going to look at a way to find out when changes are made to AutoCAD’s layer table: when layers are added, changed or removed. There are certainly other ways to do this: you can use Database.ObjectAppended(), ObjectModified() and ObjectErased() to find out about changes to LayerTableRecords, for instance, but this is an alternative approach that may be interesting to some people. In this implementation, we attach some event handlers to keep... Read more →

API wishlist surveys for Autodesk’s M&E products

As Cyrille has announced over on his blog, the following API wishlist surveys are now live for two of our Media & Entertainment products: Autodesk Maya Autodesk 3ds Max The surveys will stay open until July 25th, 2012. Read more →