Through the Interface

15 years of this blog

If you’re going to forget an anniversary, let it be the one for your first engagement with social media. The very definition of a victimless crime. I just remembered that it was back in June 2006 when I started this blog (the welcome post was on June 19th, 2006, so I didn’t miss it by much). It’s been quite the ride… 2021 posts over 15 years, at an average of about 2.6 posts per week, rain or shine. I always set myself the goal of 3 posts per week, but in recent years that’s dropped back to 2 or... Read more →

How to embed videos from the new Autodesk University website

This post goes out to my blogging brethren (and sistren) around the world… I’m sure more than a few of you have tried this, yourselves, so hopefully it’ll be of some help to people. I recently looked back at a post of mine embedding Autodesk University 2018 videos and noticed that they no longer worked: I was sure they did when I wrote the post, but it seemed that something had changed, probably with the viewer component being used. I gnashed my teeth for a while and then posted to the Ooyala developer forum to see if anyone there... Read more →

A new way to visit this blog: keanw.com

When I first started this blog, back in 2006, I used our (back then) Autodesk-recommended blogging platform, Typepad. When configuring the blog I had in the back of my mind that I’d end up putting it on a custom domain of some kind (perhaps Shaan Hurley’s autodesk.blogs.com), so I chose to use a blog-specific subfolder (through_the_interface) beneath the main through-the-interface.typepad.com site. I did this for a good reason, but it did result in pretty monstrous URLs for this blog. And I didn’t end up using a custom domain, after all, so we all ended up being stuck with big... Read more →

A new Forge developer blog

The Forge team (many of whom I worked with back when I was part of the Autodesk Developer Network organisation) have created a new developer blog focused on all things Forge. You’ll find a lot of the usual suspects who contributed to the Cloud & Mobile DevBlog (in fact that particular blog’s content has already been migrated across to the new site with the Forge branding). I expect lots of helpful information will be posted during the coming weeks/months/years. Be sure to bookmark it and check back regularly. Now if only I could find out how to search the... Read more →

10 years of Through the Interface

Last week this blog sailed through the 10th anniversary of its first post. I can’t believe how time has flown… posting 3 times a week for a decade has resulted in 1,448 posts, accumulating more than 6.2 million pageviews. I suppose when something’s so much fun you don’t really see time passing. Visually, the blog has changed a few times, over the years… (There’s a 4th theme that is still in the works, but I’ve hit a bit of a wall with the content transfer… I’ve noticed that backslashes have been filtered from the various code samples. I need... Read more →

A blog by Autodesk’s AEC Generative Design group

I’ve been spending more time looking at generative design in recent months (although this is a relative thing… I’ve still only posted once about Dynamo, for instance). So far a big chunk of my research has been understanding what’s going on in different parts of the company with respect to generative design. As part of this effort, several months ago I chatted with Anthony Hauck who heads up a team focused on generative design in the AEC space. He talked to me about Project Akaba – an early generative tool for space planning – and its successor, Project Fractal.... Read more →

Yet another blog design on its way

Over the holiday break I decided to create a new home for Through the Interface, one based on self-hosted WordPress. While I’ve invested many hours in my use of Typepad, over the years – some fruitfully, others less so – I really felt it was time for a change. This decision isn’t without its challenges: I had nearly 1,400 posts to transfer, plus external links that need to be re-directed (which can only really be done by keeping the Typepad site alive… they don’t allow people to create their own 301 redirects, which means I’ll have to do use... Read more →

The AU 2015 Blogger Social

Now that the dust has finally settled on Autodesk University 2015, I thought I’d write a couple of posts about some fun I had on Wednesday and Thursday. At this year’s event I had classes to deliver on both Tuesday and Wednesday mornings (at 8am and 10am, respectively). This is probably due to the fact I’d requested 90-minute timeslots and they quite sensibly schedule the longer sessions before noon and shorter sessions after it. Which all makes perfect sense. But it also meant that I didn’t “let my hair down” properly until Wednesday night, by which point I’d finished... Read more →

9 years

It’s insane how the years tick past. Today marks the 9th anniversary of Through the Interface. For a bit of fun, I’ve added an Easter Egg (well, actually it’s more like a Birthday Cake) to Vrok.it: Choose the “Cake” button on the left to view a Birthday Cake modelled completely using AutoCAD. If you connect to the session using the QR code, you can see the birthday cake in stereoscopic 3D on your smartphone using Google Cardboard. Or without it, if you’re good at squinting. In case you’re interested, the mechanics of creating the 3D text in AutoCAD were... Read more →

Through the Interface goes “responsive”

As promised (threatened?) back in February, this blog has finally received a much-needed design refresh. I had hoped to get our internal creative team to help with this, but that unfortunately didn’t pan out: all issues that you come across are therefore the responsibility of yours truly. Here are the key changes in this refresh: Based on Typepad’s “Snap” responsive design template Switched to new fonts: Lato for titles and headings, Open Sans for body text Displays excerpts rather than full posts on the home page and post indices/archives The intention is that the blog be much more readable... Read more →

Reading from mobile devices: time for a redesign

It’s been several years since this blog received a redesign. I’ve tweaked the format from time to time, adding social buttons and various other widgets, but it’s starting to show its age, especially as more and more people are browsing from devices with smaller form factors. And this blog does look pretty bad on mobile devices… The good news is that Typepad does have a number of responsive design templates which apparently look good on a variety of devices with a variety of form factors/resolutions. I’ve submitted a request to our creative team for an updated design, asking that... Read more →

Time to go Git

I’ve been chewing on this for some time, now, but I’ve decided it’s time to act. Well, as soon as AU is over I’ll act, anyway. Which I expect means it’ll morph into a New Year’s resolution for 2015. :-) Back when this blog was launched, the Git project was still relatively young. But it’s clearly become the version control technology to use, especially when putting code out there in the open. And this blog is all about putting stuff out there in the open, after all. Autodesk is using GitHub for our PaaS samples – which for now... Read more →

8 years

I woke up this morning thinking “it’s about that time of year”. Sure enough, it was eight years ago today that I made the first post to this blog. [This reminds me that the blog really could use a face-lift, if only for my photograph: I keep meaning to get a new profile snap taken, as I now have significantly more facial hair… nothing too crazy, just a small part of my ongoing southerly follicular migration ;-). And as I’m bound to look older – especially as I’ll forgo the Photoshopping my photographer friend insisted on, last time around... Read more →

Creating an index of blog posts to launch Windows Live Writer

This one’s mainly for my fellow bloggers – especially those using the Typepad blogging platform – to help address a problem related to editing old blog posts using Windows Live Writer, a tool I can honestly say I can no longer blog without. Incidentally I’m now working with Live Writer 2012. With that said, it may also be of interest for people who want to programmatically query their favourite blogs and create offline indices into their posts. Maybe. :-) I use Live Writer primarily to author blog posts – which it allows me to do offline, something I find... Read more →

Per-post sharing and Disqus comments

Some of you may have noticed a few changes that have been made to this blog over the last week or so. Firstly, I finally got around to implementing per-page sharing – for now via Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn – for individual blog posts. This took me longer than I’d have liked because I use Typepad Advanced Templates (which means I do a lot of hand-hacking of HTML to implement new features, giving more flexibility but requiring more work to do anything significant). If there are other social networks you’d like to share to – Pinterest, anyone? –... Read more →

1K

This is the 1,000th post to “Through the Interface” – a milestone I mentioned was coming up a few weeks ago. Which means I’m hitting about 142 posts per year, which is pretty much on target (I aim for 3 posts a week, so that’s about right). Something that occurred to me, over the weekend, is that it’s often not very easy to discover content contained in the blog: there’s search (which usually seems to work well, but even I have trouble finding posts I’m sure I’ve written, from time to time) and the post indices (“Post Index” and... 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 →

Around the Corner: a new M&E developer blog

A long-time friend, colleague and worldwide M&E Manager for ADN, Cyrille Fauvel, has started Around the Corner, a blog focused on developing with Autodesk Maya, MotionBuilder, Mudbox and FBX. A member of Cyrille’s team, Kristine Middlemiss, who co-authors the popular Maya Station blog, will also be co-authoring this new blog. For anyone interested in developing with Autodesk’s Media and Entertainment products, this is going to be an extremely valuable resource: these two really know their stuff. Welcome to the blogosphere, Cyrille, and well done for contributing to a second blog, Kristine! :-) Read more →

Manufacturing DevBlog

Some time ago I mentioned the launch of ADN's DevBlogs, and followed up, last week, with the announcement that the AEC version had launched. Now that we have DevBlogs covering AutoCAD, Infrastructure Modeling and our AEC products, it’s only natural that we launch a Manufacturing DevBlog. Brian has mentioned it, over on his blog, too. Those of you working with Inventor, in particular, should be sure to bookmark Brian & Wayne’s Mod the Machine blog as well as the Manufacturing DevBlog (after a period of relatively low activity, things have definitely picked up over at MtM). It’s great to... Read more →

AEC DevBlog & a month to go until DevCamps

As announced previously on this blog, the Autodesk Developer Network (ADN) team is in the process of launching a series of DevBlogs, publishing material publicly that would previously only have been made available to ADN members. I see some fantastic material being posted there: more than I can keep up with, personally, but I expect that will settle down once the team has created posts from the bulk of the DevNotes published on the ADN web-site. Following the availability of those for AutoCAD and Infrastructure Modeling, I’m pleased to announce the AEC DevBlog is now live. If you’re [considering]... Read more →