Through the Interface

Handling both mouse and touch events in Forge viewer applications

To follow up on the last post – where we talked about adding a custom tool to provide better support for pinch gestures – today we’re going to talk about some other possibilities for supporting touch in the Forge viewer. Once again we’re using Autodesk.Viewing.ToolController & ToolInterface. The Forge viewer uses Hammer.js internally to support touch, so that’s one good place to look for clues on how things work. (Groan – I’ve just realised why it’s called “Hammer”… “you CAN touch this!” :-) I was looking into how to support both “touch-capable” (i.e. they also have mouse & keyboard... Read more →

Jigsawify.com goes mobile-friendly

After going down the path of making this blog responsive, it made sense to do the same for Jigsawify.com: I think it’s a really nice illustration of the potential for AutoCAD I/O to use the web-site from your mobile phone to generate a DWG in the cloud. The site itself was functional enough on mobile: the issue related more to making the UI usable without having to zoom in and out all the time both to see the results and then use the various UI elements. The “responsive” technology underpinning the Typepad template I used for this blog is... Read more →

Last few days to apply for the Autodesk Cloud Accelerator

I mentioned this event – an excellent opportunity to kickstart your web or mobile application development efforts – late last year. The original submission deadline was last week, but this has been extended to January 17 – the end of this week! If you can put together a proposal (which shouldn’t be more than 1,000 words) by then, you may still be able to participate. As a reminder, Autodesk is hosting the 2-week workshop in our downtown San Francisco offices from March 9-20, and will pay the hotel costs for 1-2 people per company. Get more information here. Read more →

AU 2012 class recordings now available online

This week has so far had an AU theme to it, just as last week we talked exclusively about Leap Motion and AutoCAD. Perhaps I’m sub-consciously shifting this blog to a weekly-themed format? Hmm. Like many of you, I’m sure, I received an email over the weekend to let me know that the recorded sessions from Autodesk University 2012 are now available online (for anyone with a valid AU online account). I wasn’t sure which of my sessions had made it up there from this last year’s event (thank goodness I rarely have to write cheques anymore), and so... Read more →

Updated version of WinRT Apollonian Viewer for Windows 8 RTM

As part of my preparation for AU 2012, I’ve been working on updating the various Windows 8 samples I’ll be showing to work with the RTM version of the OS. The first to be migrated was the Apollonian Viewer for WinRT, which is part of the cloud & mobile series from earlier in the year. The project was easy enough to get working: I mostly had to update to version 2.3.0 (or 2.3.1, as this was the latest available) of SharpDX and made a few minor code changes (there was previously a SafeDispose() function that seems to have disappeared... Read more →

Debugging an OpenGL ES 2.0 application using a virtual Android device

With my AUv recording out of the way, I’ve been starting to think more seriously about my AU sessions, over the last few days. The “big one” (with 100+ registered attendees and counting) is about moving code from a desktop application to the cloud, and will basically summarise the process I followed in my “cloud & mobile” series of earlier in the year. Which means I’ll go through the process of pulling some code out of a desktop-based application and placing it behind a web-service, before calling the service from a variety of platforms/environments (AutoCAD via .NET, iOS, Android,... 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 →

Cloud & Mobile DevBlog

To complement the DevBlogs for AutoCAD, Infrastructure Modeling, AEC and Manufacturing (and in case you missed them, here are their respective announcements), the ADN team has now launched a DevBlog focused on Cloud & Mobile development. You might consider this another “horizontal” blog, in the sense that over time it will prove to be a valuable resource for people using our products (and, I suspect, many people who don’t) in all the industries we serve. I’ll drop a note to Gopi, to suggest he adds a link to my own cloud & mobile series, for future reference. It seems... Read more →

Cloud & mobile series summary

As we reach the end of this long series of posts on moving code to the cloud – and a look at ways to use the functionality from a wide variety of applications, many of them on mobile devices – I felt it was worth putting together a quick summary post to reinforce the overall message (which may have been a bit lost in the sheer volume of information). Firstly, here are the posts in this series, including those looking at the original creation of the “desktop” application functionality: Creating the core desktop functionality Circle packing in AutoCAD: creating... Read more →

Creating a 3D viewer for our Apollonian service using iOS – Part 3

After starting the sub-series focused on iOS, I held off completing it until I could actually test the code on a physical iOS device. A big thanks to Andy Chang from our Toronto office for getting me set up with the ADP membership and my iPad 2 added to the list of usable development devices. I won’t talk about the steps needed to provision apps for iOS devices – there seems to be enough information available on the web for that – but I will say it ended up being less complicated than I expected. That’s not to say... Read more →

Creating a 3D viewer for our Apollonian service using HTML5 – Part 2

In the last post, we created another, basic 3D viewer for the data from our Apollonian web-service – this time using HTML5 via Three.js. In this post, we’ll extend the code to listen for keyboard events and manipulate the model according to user-input, as well as enabling feature detection of WebGL (allowing the same implementation to call into the canvas rendering code when WebGL isn’t present). We’re introducing keyboard-based commands to enable zoom, rotate (meaning spin, although not continuously) and the change of levels: + Zoom in - Zoom out , or % Rotate left . or / Rotate... Read more →

Creating a 3D viewer for our Apollonian service using HTML5 – Part 1

After looking at how to bring data from our Apollonian web-service into Unity3D, Android and iOS over the last few weeks, it seemed natural to extend this series to cover HTML. A big thanks to Jeff Geer for suggesting Three.js, which is the HTML5-based framework I ended up adopting for this project. I like Three.js for a number of reasons: just as jQuery (another library I’ve used in this project, to good effect) attempts to abstract away the messiness inherent in supporting multiple browsers, Three.js does the same for the world of browser-resident 3D. The other main reason I... Read more →

Creating a 3D viewer for our Apollonian service using iOS – Part 2

In the last post, we saw some code to implement a simple 3D viewer of data coming from our Apollonian web-service on iOS. In this post, we’ll add support for touch gestures, as well as a simple message box announcing when the web-service is unavailable. When compared with Android, iOS provides much higher-level gesture information via its UIKit framework: you basically get callbacks to indicate when the screen has been tapped or swiped, or when pinch or rotate gestures have been performed. This is all very helpful, in the sense that you don’t have to do so much low-level... Read more →

Creating a 3D viewer for our Apollonian service using iOS – Part 1

Last week, it was all about Android. This week, I’ve started taking the plunge into the world of iOS. I’ve been using a Mac for some time – mainly to wean myself away from being so Windows-centric, but also with a view to working more with AutoCAD for Mac from a development perspective – but this was the first time I’d actually forced myself to write anything for either OS X or iOS. It all came as a bit of a shock, initially, even though I was generally aware of the strangeness of Objective-C with respect to its message-passing... Read more →

Creating a 3D viewer for our Apollonian service using Android – Part 3

I hadn’t actually planned a 3rd part to this series, but Dennis Ippel kindly spent some time looking at the code posted in the last post, to see where optimisations might be made to increase the sphere count. Consequently, Dennis made some changes to the Rajawali framework to support batch rendering of objects, as well as suggesting some client-side changes that make use of object cloning to avoid the need for replicated vertex buffers, index buffers, textures, etc. – all properties/dependent objects that the code was previously creating per sphere. The results were stunning: with really a modest change... Read more →

Creating a 3D viewer for our Apollonian service using Android – Part 2

In the last post, we took a quick look at some basics around developing application for Android, while today we’re going to see the code for our Apollonian Viewer application. Or, as my 5 year-old likes to call it, the “sweetie planet” app :-). Last time, I mentioned Dennis Ippel as the author of the Rajawali framework I’ve used in this app. What I didn’t mention is how helpful he has been with getting this app working: Dennis gave hints that unblocked my efforts on a number of occasions, and even implemented new capabilities in Rajawali to enable several... Read more →

Creating a 3D viewer for our Apollonian service using Android – Part 1

In the last post, we looked at an approach for bringing data from our Apollonian web-service into a Unity3D scene. Our next “off piste” look at consuming data from this web-service is on the Android platform. This is my first serious attempt at mobile development (ignoring some fooling around I did with Embedded Visual C++ for Windows Mobile, way back when) although I have spent some time looking at WinRT (which basically means I’ve now built a Windows Phone 8 app, I suspect :-). So why did I choose Android, rather than iOS? No real reason: I have both... Read more →

Calling a web-service from a Unity3D scene

As mentioned in the last post, today we’re going to have some fun pulling data from our recently-implemented, cloud-based web-service into the Unity3D game engine. My intention, here, is to reinforce the fact that exposing web-service APIs really does give you broader reach with your technology. In this case, we’ll be calling our web-service – implemented using F#, which we could not have included in our Unity3D project – inside a game engine that could be hosted on any one of a wide variety of operating systems. A few words on Unity3D: according to its web-site, Unity3D is “a... Read more →