Although the implementation of the mobile Web and cell phones has been badly bungled, last night’s Mobile Monday event, focused on Location-Based Services (LBS) in San Francisco was proof that the mobile Web seems likely to succeed despite the cell phone vendors’ and carriers’ bumbling. Not only was attendance large (about 225 people), several of the speakers were from very large companies. Autodesk ($1.2B annual revenue) and Tele Atlas (€127M annual revenue) are both big players in the mapping business, and their presence helps to validate market potential, while the smaller firms that spoke, such as Bones in Motion, demonstrated the basis for innovation that the co-mingling of mobile technologies can provide.

Autodesk’s Chuck Cone outlined the company’s role in the mobile Web; that of infrastructure and foundation APIs. In addition to providing some of the carriers with back-end technology that enables them to calculate and transport location-based information (from mobile phones with aGPS receivers), they also have partnerships with most of the major carriers to provide mobile application developers with a BREW or J2ME API that is used to retrieve the mobile phone’s location. As is the case with Autodesk’s original AutoCAD developer program, there is no charge for the API or support of it. Autodesk is making its money from the carriers, usually by taking a part of the “dips”, as each GPS location fix is called. If you’re looking to get in on the ground floor of a new industry, now is the time to start trying out the capabilities that LBS will bring to mobile phones and other devices. Currently, the only mobile phone providers with good LBS services are those using CDMA (Sprint/Nextel and Verizon). Cingular and T-Mobile have apparently given up on network-based (TDOA) LBS (except for 911 calls), and will be rolling out aGPS services eventually.
Perhaps the coolest use for LBS I have seen recently was demonstrated by Bones in Motion’s Spencer Nassar. With a small team of just five people, they are developing a location logging tool designed for casual athletes. If you like to hike, bike, or run, their software will let you log your travels and transfer a log to your computer when done, so that you can keep track of your time and distance traveled, post images of your route (on street maps or topographic maps), and perform other analysis on your exercise routines.

Tele Atlas’s talk by was also interesting. Although this company is based in the Netherlands, it has acquired two major U.S.-based navigation companies since 2000–ETAK and GDT. The combination makes them one of the two major players in navigation systems (along with Chicago-based NAVTEQ).

The best laid plans of mice and men…. If you have been wondering what became of me, I have spent the last six months on a completely perpendicular course to what I had set out to take when starting this Journal. I was offered the chance to work for a small ham radio manufacturing and retail firm; an opportunity that combined my desires to be an entrepreneur with my favorite hobby.

While the gig was interesting for a while, it had became clear that it was distracting me from the CAD industry I have spent my career involved in. Despite the frustration with it I found, the experiences were enough to reinforce my beliefs that much of today’s technology is frustratingly inadequate for the smooth and efficient operation of business, and in particular those involved in design and manufacturing. While writing from an ivory tower of sorts at CADENCE magazine, I was often worried that my bitching at hardware and software that didn’t work as easily as I thought it should was much more easily dealt with by those of you in the “real world”.

Having experienced even more frustration in not being able to get all the applications the business uses to work well together (or sometimes, even by themselves) than I ever found conducting product reviews, I have a renewed sense of purpose, and a primary goal of focusing on usability, interoperability, and overall capability in returning to my original goal of creating a new sort of technology journalism.
Now, however, I’m off to Mobile Monday, to find out what Autodesk and others are up to in location-based services. A full report to follow tomorrow, along with an exposé on how the mobile web industry screwed up their browsers big time.

—73

I had a chance friday to speak with the CEO of Real D, Joshua Greer, whose company acquired StereoGraphics back in February, hoping to get a good idea of how comitted the new company was to maintaining its support of the CAD and scientific markets.

Given the hardcore entertainment background of Joshua Greer and the other co-founder of Real D (Greer worked with James Cameron on the filmmaker’s Ghosts of the Abyss 3D film), I was concerned that the new company’s focus would be switching mostly in that direction.

But during our conversation, I came to realize that Greer is as passionate about the vibrance and reality a stereoscopic view of both entertainment and technical content, and that he was particularly proud of the company’s recent announcement that SolidWorks would be including support for the StereoGraphics products in the next version of its software.

If you thought stereoscopic 3D was dead or stagnant—for both CAD and the movies—guess again. This is just one of several recent stereo product announcements that I think portend a resurgence of this 150-year-old technology. I’ll tell you about the latest stereoscopic display system I saw at National Manufacturing Week later this week.

I’ve accomplished another step in installing the eDiemnsional stereo shutter glasses, unintentionally. I installed the latest NVIDIA display driver, and once that was done, an eDimensional installation tool that was still waiting in the background (after many reboots) noticed the new driver, and proceeded to install the NVIDIA stereo driver.

But still, even with the NVIDIA stereo driver installed and adding stereo settings to the NVIDIA-specific control panel, I can not get the stereo mode to work. Turning stereo mode on displays a test image that shows two strange-looking patterns, one on the left and one on the right. This appears to be the type of image meant for display systems that split the stereo pair on the left and right side of the screen, and then redisplay them via LCD goggles or something else.

But that’s not the frame-sequential method that the eDimensional glasses use, so it’s going to take some more sleuthing to figure out if I’ve got all the correct pieces installed.

Playing a hunch that the order of the devices in between my PC and monitor might make a difference, I plugged the eDimensional stereoscopic shutter glasses adapter directly into my computer, and the KVM switch into the adapter, and was pleasantly greeted with the image I expected on the CRT.

So, with that problem solved, I proceeded to install the eDimensional software and driver, and was troubled by several steps in the process. First was a warning that this install was only for Windows 2000 and Windows XP, and that I should quit and find the Windows 98/Windows Me installer in a different directory on the CD-ROM. I’m running Windows Media Center Edition 2004, which is based on Windows XP Professional, so it should not have given me this warning.

The second problem was that since I told it I had an NVIDIA graphics card, it wanted to install NVIDIA drivers, overwriting my existing driver. The last thing an application should ever have to do is to overwrite a system driver like this. And since I have no idea which driver this is, or if it’s compatible with Media Center, I have refused to install it, which I presume will make using the glasses problematic.

So I’ll be calling eDimensional tech support, to find out why this driver replacement is necessary.

The pair of eDimensional stereoscopic glasses I ordered yesterday arrived this morning, even though I had only paid for the 3-day FedEx shipping.

Unfortunately, when I plugged the interface box inbetween my KVM switch and my CRT display, the computer’s image failed to reach the monitor. I’m guessing that the use of two power-stealing devices is just too much for the poor-old VGA standard, and that I’ll have to ditch my KVM switch and find another way to get access to the other computers under my desk…

I’ve long advocated the stereoscopic viewing of CAD designs, as it greatly enhances the understanding of a design by non-technical reviewers, as well as the productivity of designers because it allows one to instantly see the real geometric relationships in 3D without having to spin the model around to orient one’s view of the model.

To test the consumer-level technology, I’ve just ordered a pair of E-D Wireless Glasses from eDimensional. This company appears to be the last company with a consumer gaming/entertainment focus selling stereo shutter glasses, so even though I’m not convinced their hardware uses the VESA standard 3-pin Mini DIN connector for stereo sync, I’ve decided that it’s the appropriate device to expect CAD visualization software to support. They can be had in a wired model for $70, little enough that governments and design clients alike could afford them for reviewing your designs.

But despite the benefits, the use of stereoscopic visualization in the CAD market has been little enough that the longest stalwart—StereoGraphics—has been acquired by REAL D—a startup with its sights directly on the entertainment market.

I can’t imagine REAL D will leave behind StereoGraphics’ existing customers in the automotive, aerospace, and scientific fields, but whether the new company expends significant efforts in these markets remains to be seen. In any case, if they do, any harmonization between the entertainment and design markets could increase the likelihood of stereoscopic content becoming successful.

I traveled up to IMSI’s Novato offices Friday, to get a demo of its latest product—TurboCAD 11 Professional. Like Ralph Grabowski, I was quite impressed with the new auto-dimensioning feature and the addition of 2D constraints that are actually quite easy to use.

I’ll be taking a closer look at TurboCAD once I receive the product in a week or so, but I was impressed with some of the innovative thinking that went into the new feature set. Most interesting was the ability to add transparency to solid area fills. Mauritz Botha showed me a detail drawing where this was applied to a framing hanger to show how a 2×4 nestled into it far better than could be done with hidden lines or other old-fashioned traditions. Even after several years of finally supporting 24-bit color, not even AutoCAD 2006 has support for transparency. Yet it’s so useful, as this feature demonstrates, that it should be in every CAD package.

Bear with me for a minute. I know this won’t seem like it’s CAD-related at first, but it is.

I bought a lucite sign holder with a pocket for tri-fold brochures at Staples yesterday, and while they had only the less-desirable one of the three variations in size and layout I was interested in, I bought it anyway, as I need a sample to begin prototyping a brochure presentation for one of the amateur radio events I’m involved with.
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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.