Thus far, I’ve avoided commenting on the Autodesk blogger vs. press embargo date fiasco, and I think I will continue doing so. Others have done a good enough job of covering the details and the ramifications, so I’m just going to forget about the gaffe and give Autodesk the benefit of the doubt on its intentions.

And before I get started talking about the new AutoCAD, I need to take a slight detour first, since one of the key elements in how CAD Journal will cover design technology is interaction and interoperability throughout the process, using all the tools that people use in their real jobs—not just the CAD software.

This includes the usual suspects in Microsoft Office: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Publisher, but also those infamous tools from Adobe: Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, and Acrobat. Which brings me to today’s topic, installing Adobe Creative Suite 1.3 Premium.

Opening the box reveals two obvious afterthoughts. The documentation was written before Acrobat 7 was released, so there is an errata stating that all references to Acrobat 6.0 Professional should read Acrobat 7.0 Professional. The second is that while the main Creative Suite case holds 6 CDs, there are actually 7 CDs in the box, so the 7th comes in a normal jewel case. What’s odd is that this CD is “Installer 3″ and the case is unlabeled—making its location separate and non-obvious from the “Installer 1″ and “Installer 2″ discs.

Accorging to the installer, the whole shebang will take 1,575MB. After installation, I can find 970MB of stuff in the Program Files\Adobe folder, so I’m guessing the rest is either Acrobat 7.0 Professional (turns out that’s what lives on “Installer 3″) or squirrled away in the Windows system folder and other secret places. After installing Acrobat, the total comes to 1.49GB, plus another 219MB in the Program Files\Common Files directory.

So now that I’ve got all the typical tools installed that I believe CAD software should be able to interoperate with, I’ll be testing AutoCAD and all the other usual suspects against these expectations.

The Ides of March markes a turning point for Autodesk—one that has been brewing for some time.

If it weren’t already clear that AutoCAD is no longer viewed by Autodesk as its most important product, today’s press releases drive the point home. There are six major releases posted, and though AutoCAD 2005 is the first of those, this, the 20^th release of AutoCAD, is but one of over 25 applications that Autodesk has announced today. Of course, all or nearly all of the vertical market applications that use AutoCAD as the core engine have been updated to the 2006 version, including Architectural Desktop 2006, AutoCAD Mechanical 2006, Civil 3D 2006, Land Desktop 2006

But also noteworthy are the many applications also launched today that do not use AutoCAD as the core engine: Revit 8 and Inventor 10, the company’s preferred products for architects and mechanical engineers; and VIZ 2006, the company’s main engineering visualization product.

In fact, just visiting the Autodesk home page drives the point home. There is no mention of AutoCAD at all—just the “2006 Portfolio”.

In some ways, this shifed focus is a good thing—I have long held the opinion that most people using vanilla AutoCAD really need to be using something more specific to their industry. (My recent attempts to use vanilla AutoCAD for my Field Day 2005 project bears this out.)

But if Autodesk shifts too many development resources from AutoCAD to the vertical products, the result might be fewer innovations, less interoperability, and lower productivity gains in core AutoCAD, and thus for the vast majority of users who are still mainly working in 2D. As important as I feel 3D and the advanced design capabilities the vertical market applications offer are, there are still some very basic features that need to be added to AutoCAD.

I have long been a fan of the Mozilla browser, ever since the Netscape browser nearly died, spinning off the open source Mozilla foundation in the process. Since well before version 1.0, it has been a better browser than Internet Explorer

But the Mozilla Suite will not be developed further. The Mozilla Suite was a hold-over from the days of Netscape communicator, which was focused on being an alternative to Microsoft’s Outlook integrated calendar/E-mail client, and while I and many others loved the integration, it made updating just the browser or just the E-mail features problematic because the whole suite had to be updated, tested, and launched.

With the overwhelming success of the Mozilla Firefox browser—a lean, mean, fighting machine, the Mozilla Foundation developers have decided to put the Suite on life support. Future enhancements will consist of bug fixes, security patches, and perhaps an occasional update of the core rendering engine.

So the main development focus has switched to the stand-alone applications—the Firefox browser, Thunderbird E-mail client, and Sunbird Calendar. There are enough differences in the interface between the integrated suite and the individual applications that I’ll be relearning and lamenting the death of the suite for a little white, but I think the end result will be far better in the end.

In fact, because of the coming integrated support for SVG in version 1.1, I’ll soon be making Firefox the target browser I design this site for. Users of IE and older versions of Mozilla will find some pieces of content missing or duplicated, but it’s time to leave the old browsers in the history books.

Especially for anyone in any of the design industries.

No excuse for the absense, but a nasty cold and a trip to Chicago for Manufacturing Week conspired to keep me silent for a few weeks.

I missed National Manufacturing Week last year, due to my getting sidetracked into writing about video game development after the demise of CADENCE magazine, and was quite surprised at how small the show was compared with my last experience two years ago.

In fact, the whole show was small enough that everything—NDES, the Plant Design and Engineering Show, and everything else—fit into a smaller space than NDES alone used just a few years ago. And the shrinking size of the show has led Reed Exhibitions to move next year’s event out of Chicago to Rosemont, which is closer to O’Hare, is less expensive, and apparently has fewer union hassles.

I’ll have more details about what I saw at the show that was interesting or surprising over the next few weeks, along with, of course, my perspective on AutoCAD 2006 and the blogging goof.

I’m in The City, attending the WordPress 1.5 install event, hosted by the lead developer, Matt. I first started using WP at version 1.2, having been sold on it as soon as I discovered its devotion to Web standards and typography.

From the beginning, it was clear to me that WP was the right tool for this site, but it wasn’t until I started using the 1.5 beta that I really felt sure this was going to be the right long-term solution. Tonight, with the official release of 1.5, is the right time to say a little something about the software.

If you’re handy with XHTML, CSS, and understand PHP even just a little bit, WordPress becomes as customizable and powerful as AutoCAD is once you understand menu scripts, and attribute tags, and know a little bit of AutoLISP.

If you’re blogging with TypePad, MovableType, Blogger, or anything else, WP 1.5 is something you just have to try. Aside from the philosophical difference in WP from other blogging systems—of everything being served dynamically from a database, so that any change is instantly propagated—the new features make WP far easier to use, increase its flexibility, and may change the way you organize your site:

Pages

WP can now manage just about every item on your site, if you wish. Posts are posts—by design meant to be fleeting glimpses that soon get relegated to an archive—but pages are meant to last, with much simpler Web addresses (think CADJournal.com/About, or CADJournal.com/Advertising) that will last forever. They’ll behave just like static pages, but will benefit from all the template and style changes made to the site design, instantly, just like everything else about WP.

Modular Templates

Instead of having monolithic templates for each type of posting that must have everything, including the XHTML wrapper, 1.5 now has modular templates, where the header, footer, sidebar, and main content are separate files, so that a change to the sidebar affects all pages on the site, without having to be copied from the main posting template to the archive template to the individual entry template.

Dashboard

The dashboard always shows you your site’s stats—the most recent post titles, the latest incoming links (trackbacks), and number of posts—along with the latest news from WordPress (except for tonight, when Matt is busy helping people upgrade (a 5-minute process) and and tweak their sites—the official announcement should come tomorrow).

Blogs within Blogs

For me, this is a big thing. You can create additional WP loops that pull content from the database in a different manner than the main blog on any page. I’ll be using this to post the latest news and new product announcements on every page without disrupting the flow of my main blog that covers my trials and travails of using all these cool CAD tools, but with the power of the filters, the possibilities are endless.

It’s obvious by now that blogging has made the Web hip—but WordPress is also making it fun again.

I spent several hours yesterday researching what consumer stereo shutter glasses are still available—I even went down to Fry’s in a fruitless attempt to find them in a retail store. What amazed me was the number of different glasses that have been sold over the years, as well as the number of different methods used to connect the glasses to the computer.

From reading the Stereo3D charts—and just from common sense—it becomes clear that the only sensible interface standard is what this site calls “VESA-3″—the three-pin mini-DIN connector initiated by StereoGraphics and adopted as a standard by VESA.

After finishing that fishing expedition, I decided to visit StereoGraphics’ Web site, to see what they were up to, and discovered a pleasant surprise. The company announced at SolidWorks World that the next version of SolidWorks will be supporting its shutter glasses. This is great news, and tells me that that stereoscopic display is far from dead in the CAD industry.

So with this encouraging news, I’ll be adding stereoscopic support to my list of must-have features that I test with all CAD software.

I was hoping to spend another week or three polishing the rough edges on this site, made sure that commenting was configured to let people in and spam out (it’s probably not), add some more content, and develop my voice a bit more.

I had even instructed the few that had seen it developing in the last few weeks to not link to this site before I was ready, but some guy who runs a site called “Ten Links” blew my cover at 12:42 PDT today, appologizing for letting the cat out of the bag, and writing a few other things that made me blush.

Disclaimer: Roopinder and I used to work together at CADENCE magazine.

Despite being Web-based—or likely because of it—the various USGS facilities for downloading digital images are painful and tedius to use. But a free mapping application makes it easier and quicker.

USAPhotoMaps, written by a retired airline pilot, lets you download images, one tile at a time, from Microsoft’s free TerraServer Web site, creating a seamless image database that you can pan and zoom with, switching between USGS quads, ancient grayscale aerial photos, and for some urban areas, brilliant high-resolution color aeral photos. Although you must install and use a separate command-line utility, you can also export any rectangular region as a JPEG image, along with a matching world file to enable georeferencing.

It may be possible to get a GeoTIFF directly from the USGS site, but it won’t be a pleasant experience.

The SpaceBall 5000 USB that I received at AU impliments the USB HID (Human Interface Device) specification for a “multi-axis controller”, but because no software I have yet tried supports this cross-OS, cross-manufacturer standard for 3D input devices, I must install 3Dconnexion’s system driver and then a sub-driver for each program I’d like to use the controller with—AutoCAD, Photoshop, Office, and so-on.

Sometimes this is a good thing, because not all software vendors may not realize that their 2D application would benefit from a 3D mouse, but in most cases, it makes the configuration of the controller more difficult and less seamless than it would be if the app supported it natively. For any 3D design or viewing program—even the free ones—to not support this natively is as not supporting a 2D mouse natively.

When I first plugged the SpaceBall in, Windows XP informed me that it had found and installed a driver, and that my new hardware was now ready to be used. That should be all I needed to do, and the fact that it isn’t is the fault of CAD software vendors; not 3dconnexion.

With that preface out of the way, let me detail what I found installing the 3dconnexion driver. (Keep in mind that I’ll frequently disable it when testing software, to find out which applications support it natively.)

I was surprised when the installation program complained that Adobe Acrobat was running, and that I must stop it before continuing. At the time, I had no instances of Acrobat running, and the icon was not to be found in the system tray. So I was forced to hit Ctrl-Alt-Del to bring up the Task Manager, re-sort the list by application name, and end the Acrobat.exe process. Yuck.

After dealing with that, I chose the Custom install, and found that it had detected the following software installed and selected the appropriate SpaceBall plug-ins for them: Office, AutoCAD, Acrobat, and Photoshop. It then asked me if it should install and launch the system driver (3DxWare) on startup.

And then it proceeded to direct my browser to the 3Dconnexion Web site and a form asking me to register the product; magically selecting the applications it had found and installed plug-ins for. Unfortunately, it did so without launching a new browser window or tab, so it did so in my current window: this in-progress posting, just about wiping out all my input!

Note to the installation team: Opening new browser windows at the drop of the hat is annoying, but changing the current content of my browser window without permission or warning is far worse!

Launching AutoCAD 2005’s Communications Center for the first time, the configuration screen is disfigured in the same way as the Activation dialog:

After getting past that annoyance, the Communications Center is displayed properly, but presents me with a dilemma. The lightning bolt indicates that a maintainence update is available, and links me to Service Pack 1. Clicking on that link opens up Internet Explorer (not my default browser!) to a page that is blank because it contains “Active Content” that IE has blocked. Unblocking the content requires three mouse clicks, and displays a page that is labeld “Autodesk Live Update” and includes no obvious content that should be blocked.

But SP1 is also listed explicitly at the bottom of the dialog, and it opens to a page that has no such warnings, has no blocked content, and has much more useful information, such as links to all available language versions of SP1, their readme files, and a feedback form at the bottom. Annoyingly, it too opens with IE, even though my system default browser is Mozilla.

I’m further confused by the fact that the links for the actual SP1 download on the two pages are completely different URIs—which one is correct? With the hope that they are actually the same, I’m choosing the second one—the one without the needless “active content” page.