Through the Interface

Freewheel fun

I'm currently working on the handouts for my AU classes: two are sessions I delivered last year, so much of the work for those has been to go through make sure everything works on the latest product versions (and to update the screenshots, as they do look much nicer now that I'm running Vista, it has to be said :-). As part of the update process for my "Enrich your DWF" session I've been looking at the new capabilities of the Project Freewheel API. The best way to see the capabilities of the new Javascript API to Project Freewheel... Read more →

A tale of tight turnaround

Just a quick post... I've been (and am still) on vacation this week (not doing anything very exciting, mostly cutting hedges and other miscellaneous garden work), but I queued up a few posts in order to keep things moving along while I was offline. One of the posts I put together was regarding the API to Project Draw, and it turned into quite an interesting chain of events. Here's a quick timeline, to explain what happened and when: Monday June 23 - I spend some time looking at Project Draw's API, and draft an introductory post. I send it... Read more →

Autodesk Freewheel developer contest

As Scott Sheppard has posted on It's Alive in the Lab, a developer contest for the most innovative Autodesk Freewheel application was launched at AU: http://freewheel.autodesk.com/contest To get a head-start, you might want to check out the source code I've posted here. Good luck! :-) Read more →

Using AJAX to generate pages hosting Freewheel views

I touched on this subject a few weeks ago in part 2 of my DWF-related AU handout, but thought I'd come back and describe in more depth some of the fun (although a more accurate word might be "difficulty" :-) I had solving this problem. I've been playing around with web services and XML since SaaS was still known as ASP, and have tried to stay up-to-date with the technology as best I can. I'm really a client-side programmer, all things considered: I've created some server-side code, but have mostly involved myself with desktop-oriented programming and creation of samples... Read more →

AU Handouts: Enriching Your DWF™ - Part 2

[This post continues from part 1 of this series. The source for the below applications is available here: DWF Toolkit application source, Design Review application source & Freewheel application source.] Mining the data with the DWF Toolkit Now we’re going to look at using the DWF Toolkit – the freely available, cross platform toolkit for creating and reading DWF files – to extract the “identity” and “material” metadata associated with our geometry. The DWF Toolkit is a C++ toolkit, so we have two components to our project: A C++ DLL that uses the DWF Toolkit to read a DWF,... Read more →