Through the Interface

Floppy Friday #22

I was researching a blog post for next week when I came across a nice surprise. John Walker – the founder and former CEO of Autodesk, whom I had the pleasure of interviewing for this blog more than a decade ago – published some programs he wrote for the Commodore 64 and 128 when he was exploring the capabilities of this platform back in the late 1980s. John had published two of them, Key Clicker and Rainy Day Moon – in Compute! and Commodore Magazine respectively – but the third, BrainSim, was just too far ahead of its time.... Read more →

Autodesk University 2021 Call for Proposals opens on March 30th

I’ve just heard that the Call for Proposals for Autodesk University 2021 goes out next week on March 30th. The CFP period is short – it runs until April 30th – so it’s already time to don your thinking caps and consider what topic or topics you’d like to talk about at this year’s AU. Community voting will be possible as soon as the CFP starts, and will run until May 12th. I’m probably going to submit something related to Dasher and /or Project Hyperion, but I need to plan out what that would look like over the coming... Read more →

Floppy Friday #21

In today’s episode of Floppy Friday I’m happy to say that we’re back on floppies after a couple of weeks focused on cartridge games and unboxing. We play three games, this week: Predator (a trainer for it, anyway), Barry McGuigan World Championship Boxing and Ghosts ‘n Goblins. These games were really chosen at random – and not played beforehand – so I missed a few important details, such as the fact that the protagonist in Ghosts ‘n Goblins was a knight rather than a mummy. Sigh. Here are their reviews from Zzap!64 magazine… Predator Barry McGuigan World Championship Boxing... Read more →

Introducing the LMV Developer Tools (and LMV Ninja)

A few weeks ago I came across an internal link to a new Chrome extension that greatly simplifies the act of working with the Forge viewer (which we refer to inside Autodesk as LMV, or the Large Model Viewer). Earlier this week its developer, Amit Diamant (who some of you may remember from the Big Room Hackathon project) reached out to let me know it was being made public. This was really good news, as these Developer Tools contain some features I know will benefit the community (as I’m already using them myself). The first killer feature is the... Read more →

AI in AEC 2021

Next week the Finnish Association of Civil Engineers (RIL) is holding a virtual conference on the use of Artificial Intelligence in Architecture, Engineering and Construction called AI in AEC 2021. The agenda looks really compelling. These are the presentation tracks, to give you a sense for the topics covered: Data Driven Design Generative Design Impactful AI Project Management Natural Language Processing Smart Buildings Circular Economy Data Analytics Quality Control & Verification Autonomous Construction There are three keynote presentations: two at the opening of the conference at 10am CET on March 24th, while the third (which I’ve been asked to... Read more →

Floppy Friday #20

Ready Player One! This week’s Floppy Friday once again doesn’t show a single floppy disk (sorry!), but focuses on the epic console showcased at the end of Ernest Cline’s retro-lovers’ Bible (not sorry ;-). In this episode we start by unboxing an Atari 2600 console (a “Jr.” version from 1986) bought via an online auction. At the beginning of the episode I had no expectation that we’d be able to tune my basement TV to view the signals output by the console, but by the end we’d played games from all four cartridges that came with the auction lot.... Read more →

International Women’s Day

Like many of you, I have the immense privilege of having incredible women in my life. For me, today is about recognising this privilege, but also remembering that despite more than a century having passed since the original suffragettes started their organised fight against sex-based discrimination, there’s still important work to be done. (In fact I genuinely feel that in recent years we’ve seen a regression in some women’s rights, something that I desperately want to see corrected over the coming years.) It’s important for me to see our daughters (and yes, especially my own beloved daughter, of course)... Read more →

Floppy Friday #19

We’ve reached the end of a much-needed week off up in the mountains. I’ve actually spent a bunch of time fooling around with getting RetroPie working on a Raspberry Pi 400 I bought for the kids (ahem). We’ve been having lots of fun playing Zelda on the NES and Super-NES, Sonic on the Megadrive, and Runn ‘n’ Gunn on the C64. Before leaving to come up, I did record an additional episode of Floppy Friday, although in fairness no floppy was harmed (or used) in the making of this particular episode: we take a look at three C64 games... Read more →

DevDays Online and another "Build Your Own Dasher" Forge Accelerator

I’m currently up in the mountains with my family, enjoying the annual school closure for the kids’ “ski week”. I recognise we’re especially lucky, this year, given that a) Swiss ski resorts are open and b) our kids are at school physically rather than remotely. Spring seems to be hitting early, this year, but even if the snow’s a little soft, the sun is very welcome. Here’s a shot where we’re sitting at the top of a run as a rescue helicopter takes off (this is never good to see, but it is often impressive): Yesterday we went to... Read more →

Floppy Friday #18

This is a big week for 1980s computing. Wednesday marked the 40th birthday of the BBC Microcomputer, the machine that helped launch thousands of software development careers (including mine) in the UK. This was such an important machine, in so many ways: it was really well engineered, with great performance, but also – due to government subsidies – available in the majority of schools in the UK. For my Computer Science A-level I used some networked Beebs to automate a hypothetical fast food restaurant: from touchpad-driven ordering by customers to printing of receipts and stock control. Here’s an image... Read more →

Enhancing exploration of sensor data inside Dasher

I added a “simple” feature to Project Dasher (although it’s not live just yet) the other day, that I think is worth sharing some information about – especially as from a UX perspective it’s completely hidden and amounts to an Easter egg. For a particular project I’ve been searching through sensor data for time periods that tell an interesting story. In Dasher the simplest way to explore the data for one or more sensors (as you can add multiple sensors to a single chart by holding down the Shift key when you click on a sensor) is to use... Read more →

Floppy Friday #17

In this week’s Floppy Friday – a short one, weighing in at under 10 minutes – we look at a couple of games: Bionic Commando and Zaga (sorry – the best article I could find on this game is in Italian). I found a couple of old reviews online for today’s games. The first – for Bionic Commando – is from Zzap! 64 magazine: The second – for Zaga – is from Anirog: As mentioned in today’s episode – and a post from earlier in the week – I have another bundle of retro computing joy about to be... Read more →

Animating stacked heatmaps in Dasher

Last week I mentioned some feedback I’d received from our HCI & Visualization team regarding the possibility of animating the heatmaps in the Types By Level UI. (Prior to this the Types By Level feature has really just been a legend for quick access to per-level heatmaps: I stopped short of attempting to animate the individual heatmaps while the timeline is playing.) For some background, the Types By Level feature is a stack of “cards” that each displays data from a particular sensor type for a specific floor using a 2D heatmap. These cards are rendered as individual textures... Read more →

Technology wars

I’ve been thinking a lot about “technology wars”, of late. Some of this has been driven by my foolings around with Floppy Fridays – thinking about the competition between 8-bit computing platforms, back in the day – but other musings have been prompted by links I’ve been sent in various newsletters. For instance, here’s an article on Quora by Dave Whittle that takes a look at the fascinating history between OS/2 and Windows, and why the latter won the battle for the graphical desktop OS. In a JavaScript newsletter I received a link to this excellent 3-hour (!) podcast... Read more →

Floppy Friday #16

This week’s Floppy Friday is all about Indiana Jones games. Well, two of them, anyway. First we look at Indiana Jones in the Lost Kingdom from 1985 and then we play Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade – The Action Game from 1989. They’re very different games, which I’m sure you’ll see from this episode. I think I’ve managed to fix the focus-related issue from last week (this happened when there was a major change in luminosity with the screen), so hopefully that’s better. Feedback welcome! I’ve also made some progress with repairing the second of my two “breadbin”... Read more →

Adding dividers to Dasher’s Types By Level UI

Last week I had a valuable discussion with members of our talented HCI and Visualization research team. They had reached out with the offer to perform “live science” review session for other teams’ research projects – with a particular focus on Human Computer Interaction and Visualization, of course – and I jumped at the opportunity. We sat down and talked through some of the recent work that had been done in Project Dasher to implement a multi-level UX that allows users to go from a top-level summary view to bring up individual 2D heatmap panels and a central 3D... Read more →

Floppy Friday #15

In this week’s episode we look at two games: one from 1986 and one from 2021. That’s right: we’re playing Super Cycle from the 80s and Runn ‘n’ Gunn which was just released last week. How crazy is that? I did what I could to adjust the settings on my TV and on my phone to get better colours from the screen recording (thanks to Fernando Malard for the YouTube link!) but I do see there was some auto-focus strangeness. I’ll try to get that fixed for episode #16. Both games shown in today’s episode were lots of fun... Read more →

DevDays Online 2021

At the beginning of March our Developer Advocacy and Support team will be running its annual series of DevDays Online events. The first week will focus on public information – mainly news related to the Forge platform – while the second week will be for Autodesk Developer Network members, and focus mainly on our desktop products and APIs. You can find more complete information here, and register via the links below: For everyone March 2 – DevDays Keynotes – Jim Quanci March 3 – Forge API update – Augusto Goncalves March 4 – Autodesk Construction Cloud and API update... Read more →

Floppy Friday #14

In today’s episode of Floppy Friday we use a Commodore 128D – with integrated, double-sided floppy drive! – to play some classic arcade games. Many thanks to Daniel from Bern for parting with the C= 128D via an online auction: this was his family’s home computer growing up. It even came with a Seikosha SP-1200VC, which I’m dying to try out. (I grew up with an Epson FX-80, and I just love the raw – sometimes harsh – music of a dot matrix printer.) So why play classic arcade games on an early “personal” (rather than “home”) computer? It... Read more →

COVID Office Occupancy: a Dynamo mega-graph and blog series

I posted, back in May, about the work we’d been doing to explore the possibility of using the Space Analysis package for Dynamo to plan for post-COVID office layouts. Soon after that post our research relating to the pandemic shifted focus towards a longer-term plan of creating a “living lab” that would allow us not only to explore how design decisions might impact viral transmission, but to have these decisions based on data measured from a functioning ventilation system. Expect to hear more about that research in a future post. We handed over the work that had been done... Read more →