Through the Interface

Celebrating at a distance

We’ve just finished celebrating the 20th anniversary of a dear friend and colleague, Clayton Hotson, joining Autodesk. We were in the same team, way back when Clayton joined, both working from our San Rafael office. Over the years we’ve ended up doing other things, but in the last few months have happily found ourselves back together in the Research Engineering team (the awesome group that was responsible for incubating Dreamcatcher…. it’s a serious honour to be working with this team). Anyway, today we got together and had a surprise celebration for Clayton. We dug up some photos of Clayton... Read more →

A significant update to Dasher is on the way

For the last week or so I’ve been busy making sure Dasher works well with multiple themes. You can see the progress across these posts. I’m not quite ready for a full unveiling, but it should go live at some point in the next week, give or take. In the meantime, here are some screenshots of the main page (you’ll be able to select the theme either as you enter Dasher via the front page or from within the application’s settings UI, which is integrated into the Forge viewer’s). One of the big-ticket items in this coming release will... Read more →

Thoughts on our new situation

I’m sure we’ve all been thinking lots about the developing situation we’re living through at the moment. Between markets crashing, social distancing, school closures and home-working, the world looks very different than it did a few short weeks ago. The below poem came through my inbox, this morning (thanks, Mum!) and it definitely resonated with some hopes I’ve had about the crisis. IN THE TIME OF PANDEMIC And the people stayed home. And they read books, and listened, and rested, and exercised, and made art, and played games, and learned new ways of being, and were still. And they... Read more →

Changing HIG themes at runtime in a Forge application

Despite the unfolding horror of the situation with Covid-19 – and stuff is really starting to hit the fan, here in Switzerland, with schools and non-essential commerces being closed and rumours of an enforced sequestration being considered – I’m at least getting some quality time to work on Dasher. Last week we saw how it was possible to support both dark and light themes from the Autodesk HIG in a Forge viewer application. I mentioned both times my desire to allow Dasher’s theme to be selected by the user at runtime. After searching fruitlessly on the internet for some... Read more →

Using the HIG to implement a light mode in a Forge application

Last time we saw how it’s possible to use Autodesk’s HIG to add different visual themes to a Forge viewer application. When I first started down this path, I thought I’d probably just stop at implementing another dark theme inside Dasher: I suspected it would be a lot of work to implement a light theme. It turns out I was wrong: towards the end of last year I’d spent a few days rationalising our use of styles inside Dasher, by eradicating every use of “hardcoded” colours inside CSS styles and have them stored in SCSS variables. It felt like... Read more →

Supporting multiple visual themes in a Forge application using the Autodesk Human Interface Guidelines

I mentioned in the last post that I’ve been working on integrating a new timeline component into Dasher. By default the component supports a different visual theme than the one we’ve been using in Dasher: in order to make the look & feel consistent, I had to include Autodesk’s HIG toolkit in the Dasher project. HIG stands for Human Interface Guidelines, and it’s Autodesk’s effort to increase visual consistency across our products (especially those that are web-based). And the best thing is, it’s open source and available for anyone to integrate in their projects via npm or yarn. And... Read more →

Knowing when operations are complete in the Forge viewer

We have a feature in Dasher called “kiosk mode”. It basically takes control of the browser to run a sequence of operations that show people how Dasher works. I published a series of posts a couple of years ago that explain a bit about how we implemented it. One of the issues in kiosk mode is knowing when Forge viewer operations – such as view transitions or state restorations – are complete. Until recently the code just checked the viewer’s progressbar property, to see whether its value was close to 100 or not. This wasn’t ever a very good... Read more →

The BAC Mono 2020 and its generatively designed wheels

As I mentioned in my last post, I was due to spend the day today at the Geneva Motor Show. It’s been 6 years since I participated in the event: I was there with Morgan back in 2014 (and then as a guest in 2015). Over the weekend, however, Switzerland’s Federal Council made the (hard, but probably correct) decision to ban events with 1,000 or more attendees. Which of course included the Geneva Motor Show. It’s a very strange feeling to see all these events – including many smaller gatherings – being cancelled due to concerns about Covid-19. I... Read more →