Behind the Scenes at the AutoCAD 2010 Webcast Launch

Autodesk has finally announced their release of AutoCAD 2010. I have been fortunate enough to be a part of the Alpha and Beta teams testing it. I also created some new dynamic blocks, templates, and example files for AutoCAD 2010. Some of these will come with AutoCAD 2010, while the rest (the example files) will eventually be available to download from Autodesk’s website.

I spent Thursday, February 5th at Autodesk’s office in San Francisco to be present at the live webcast! What a treat. I was able to meet several people from Autodesk as well as several of my fellow bloggers. It was very nice to finally meet these wonderful people, even though I have known many of them for a long time. I even got to work with several of the A’deskers while I was on the example files project. Autodesk understands the value of bloggers, their perspective, and passion. I know because they told us. They said we were special, just like my mom always said!

Now that I am allowed to talk about AutoCAD 2010, I plan to! There are so many new features, enhancements, and improvements that I don’t know where to start. I feel that AutoCAD 2010 is one of the best releases yet. I will get into it soon. Autodesk also sat down with us to discuss many topics, what we liked, didn’t like, what needed more work, what was just right. They also gave us some insight into their philosophy in implementing AutoCAD, how they perceive its roll especially when compared to the many verticals that Autodesk produces.

Over the next few days I plan on discussing all of these topics. I would have posted sooner but I didn’t bring my laptop into the event so that I could blog right from there. Well, I wasn’t the only “dork” amongst the bloggers, there were about one or two others that didn’t bring their computer either. But wow, what a great time we had. We were just a bunch of enthusiastic CAD users and bloggers from so many different industries and countries hanging out at Autodesk. What a total geek fest!! But we are the cool geeks if I say so myself.

Some of the bloggers that were there are: Robin Capper, RK McSwain, Todd Shackelford (the original Lazy Drafter), David Cohn, Donnie Gladfelter, Melanie Perry, Ellen Finkelstein, Mark Douglas, and Steve Johnson. There were ten of us, not to mention some Autodesk bloggers that were there, Shaan Hurley, Lynn Allen, and Heidi Hewett.

Besides the bloggers, we also met with Eric Stover the AutoCAD Product Line Manager. We also met with Kathy O’connell, Guilermo Melantoni, and Diane Li. These three individuals are the AutoCAD Product Managers and were very eager to hear our opinions both good and bad. They loved to hear the good things we had to say of course but were honestly more concerned with what we didn’t fully like. Imagine that, Autodesk wanting to make their product better!! I posted a few days ago asking if you thought Autodesk did a good job of listening to its users. Well, from my experience they are trying. They have over 9 million users and it is difficult to hear all of those voices. That is one reason they have turned to the bloggers. They know that each of us work with AutoCAD and its verticals every day. They know that we hear from our readers what issues you are having, so they are embracing this new “media” in an attempt to better their product. Good idea.

I almost forgot, we also spoke with several of the programmers that actually wrote the code for AutoCAD 2010! Cool!! I totally geeked out. Some of the programmers we spoke with were Yan Schover, Mellissa Dawe, Shekahar Kledekar, Mat Stein (the Ribbon guy), and Jon Page. On top of that we also spoke and interviewed Abhijit Oak, Ravi K., and John Schmier. These gentlemen are on the product engineering team. We also met with John Schmier. John is the Sr. Engineer & Evangelist for Autodesk Labs. We had a tremendous amount of fun seeing and playing with all sorts of gizmos that Autodesk Labs is producing and studying.

I am going to blog about the meetings we had, the topics we covered and what it all means for AutoCAD users. I will also start going over the many new features in AutoCAD 2010. I can’t wait; I have so much to share.

Does Autodesk Listen to its Customers? Part -2

I asked on a previous post if you thought Autodesk listened to its customers. I just spent a day at the Autodesk office in San Francisco taking with several people from Autodesk. I was also able to spend some time with fellow blogger Steve Johnson. He took the time to interview three key people at Autodesk. They were: Shaan Hurley, Eric Stover, and Jon Page. I wanted to make sure you had to opportunity to watch Steve's video interview. There are two of them and they provide a detailed response to this question.

Video 1

Video 2

Thank you Steve for conducting these interviews and for providing us with this valuable info. Great job as always Steve.

AutoCAD 2010 Online Videos

Autodesk has released several online resources for AutoCAD 2010. Now I know it doesn't release until March some time, but you can start learning about it and it's features.

Autodesk has released a preview guide and some demo videos. There was also a live webcast on February 5th announcing its release. They archived that webcast for us to view.

Live Webcast

AutoCAD 2010 Videos

I hope you find these online videos useful. Before you know it, subscription members will start receiving their copies of AutoCAD 2010.

Graphtec Wide Formet Scanner-Review

I have written a review article for Cadalyst Magazine. This review article take a look at Graphtec's CSX300-09HDplus Wide-Format Scanner. This scanner is meant for firms that need full color scanning but do not have a hehavy load. This reduces the initial cost so that the company will have access to color scanning. It does a great job of scanning, it's just slow. The black and white scanning abilities are up to par and allows companys to archive paper drawings.

Check out the full article at Cadalyst.

AutoCAD 2010 Revealed

I went to the Autodesk office in San Francisco on February 5th to take part in an even that revolved around the live web cast of Autodesk’s announcement of the release of the latest version of AutoCAD, AutoCAD 2010. Ten bloggers that were involved in beta testing AutoCAD 2010 were present. You may know some of them. If not, you should really put their RSS feeds in your reader. The bloggers were: Robin Capper, RK McSwain, Todd Shackelford, David Cohn, Donnie Gladfelter, Melanie Perry, Ellen Finkelstein, Mark Douglas, and Steve Johnson. All of these bloggers have been using AutoCAD and other Autodesk products for a very long time and are well versed in its use. We had a great time getting know each other face to face instead of through a message board. Many of us have met before at Autodesk University, while others (like myself) had never met anyone live in person. Let me tell you, no one looks like their avatars!! But some of us do have pictures of ourselves on our blogs, so I was able to recognize several of my fellow bloggers.

Most of us arrived the day before and gathered together at a local watering hole. We introduced ourselves to each other and several Autodesk employees that were also there. I was able to speak with Eric Stover, the guy in charge of AutoCAD, and several other managers, directors and programmers.

The next day was the event. We started off with an introduction and discussion of many of the new features and enhancements within AutoCAD 2010. They were very eager to hear what they got right. But they were equally, if not more, eager to hear what still needed work. I came from this event feeling that Autodesk really does care what its users want and need. They final made it so we could reference PDF’s as an underlay within AutoCAD. And, you can snap to it too!

Later on we had the opportunity to sit with certain people from Autodesk and interview them. These interviews will be posted on Autodesk’s website. I will provide a link when they are available. I was able to speak with two members of the product engineering team in AutoCAD, Abhijit Oak and Ravi K. They were involved in laying down the main structure for the basis of many of the new features.

AutoCAD 2010 has freeform modeling in it. It can use meshes, solids and surfaces. The modeling in AutoCAD 2010 is now organic! These two gentlemen told me that they used Maya to help lay down the code for AutoCAD. Users of Maya will find that the mesh work and gizmos in AutoCAD 2010 are similar in nature. They also helped to lay the foundation of the new Parametric and Geometric Constraints that are in AutoCAD 2010. They again went to an Autodesk product to develop these new tools; Inventor. Inventor users will find the constraints in AutoCAD very similar. In fact, Lynn Allen, AutoCAD and Inventor Evangelist for Autodesk, said that she even tried to perform an Inventor example of constraints in AutoCAD 2010 and was able to get quite far. AutoCAD constraints aren’t on the same level as Inventor, but they are very close and work in a similar fashion.

These are the main new features in AutoCAD 2010, but there are several others that are far less flashy, but make the user’s experience much more efficient.