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As I’ve already discussed, one of the areas where CAD on the Cloud shows potential is in handling specific tasks that require performing intensive calculations that are suitable for sharing among many processors. That sounds great in theory, and a lot of Cloud marketing (e.g. Virtually Infinite Computing) emphasises that point. OK, that sounds [...]  16 November 2011, 12:38 pm |  2 comments | Tags: Alex Bausk, Carl Bass, Cloud, Feedback, Hype, Labs, Project Storm | Category: Autodesk, Cloud, Fail, Other Autodesk Products, Other Blogs, Performance, Review, Spin, Web Stuff I have closed the Which of these is most evil? poll, which had been running from 20 February 2009. It attracted 2,351 voters, each of whom could distribute up to three votes among thirteen (yes, that number was deliberate) candidates. Here are the ranked results: Satan (36%, 846 Votes) Microsoft (31%, 721 Votes) Apple (26%, 614 Votes) [...] 14 November 2011, 1:53 pm |  One comment | Tags: Apple, Autodesk, Big Content, Brown list, Dell, Disney, Evil, Gaahl, Google, Microsoft, Miley Cyrus, RIAA/IFPI/MPAA, Satan, Sony, Spam, The Pirate Bay | Category: Apple, Autodesk, Fail, Fun, Hardware, Microsoft, Music, Polls, Rant, Thoughts …the Ribbon, according to your selections in the What are the worst features ever added to AutoCAD? poll. As in the best ever poll, the winner (loser?) in this race had no serious competition. I’ve listed eleven top (bottom?) features here rather than ten, partly because the popular (unpopular?) choice Memory Overuse isn’t exactly a [...] 9 November 2011, 12:45 pm | 13 comments | Tags: Action Recorder, Help, Ribbon, User Interface | Category: AutoCAD, AutoCAD 2009, Cloud, Development, Fail, Nostalgia, Polls, Rant Akamai is an Internet/Cloud infrastructure company, used extensively by Autodesk. To be polite, my experiences using its services over several years have been somewhat negative. Back in March, when trying to download the AutoCAD 2012 trial, I went through the usual Akamai download manager struggles before being informed of the wonderful Opera workaround (thanks [...] 3 November 2011, 10:19 am | 4 comments | Tags: Akamai, Cloud | Category: Autodesk, Cloud, Customer Service, Fail, Rant, Web Stuff Audience participation time, I think. A comment on one of AutoCAD 2012′s new features recently set me thinking about what were the worst features ever introduced to AutoCAD. That in turn got me thinking about what were the best. I’ll keep my opinions to myself for a while, as I’d like your input and [...] Note: this post is not an April fool’s joke. It may be ridiculous and hard to believe, but unfortunately it’s all true. After I managed to overcome Autodesk’s obstructive download manger and download AutoCAD 2012, it became available on the Subscription site (when that site wasn’t running unusably slowly). Or it became kind-of available. Here’s [...] 1 April 2011, 11:47 am | 4 comments | Tags: Bloat, Download, Fail, Geography | Category: AutoCAD, AutoCAD 2012, Autodesk, Customer Service, Fail, Performance, Rant, Subscription If you preselect some objects in AutoCAD 2012 and hold down [Ctrl], then the objects will move a bit if you hit an arrow key. Great, cool! Exactly how far do they move? Let’s try it, shall we. First time, the move was about 4.5565 units. Zoom around a bit and try again. This [...] 29 March 2011, 1:49 pm | 12 comments | Tags: Nudge, Precision | Category: AutoCAD, AutoCAD 2012, Fail Let’s say you’re trying to download some software and it insists on first installing some intermediary download manager. Do you think, “Great, this will make my life easier, things are bound to go quickly and smoothly now”? No, didn’t think so. How about when it’s by Akamai? Does that make you feel more confident? [...] 23 March 2011, 7:46 pm | 21 comments | Tags: Akamai, Download | Category: AutoCAD, AutoCAD 2012, Autodesk, Fail, Rant, Subscription, Web Stuff You may remember my pre-release speculation about what was likely to be missing from the Mac version of AutoCAD 2011. It turns out that my list was pretty accurate as far as it went, but very incomplete. In a move that I can only applaud, Autodesk has now published its own list of missing [...] 17 October 2010, 9:57 am | 19 comments | Tags: AutoCAD for Mac | Category: Apple, AutoCAD, AutoCAD 2011, Customisation, DCL, Development, Fail As I have stated before, I believe Autodesk to be in the right (morally, not legally) in its battle to prevent Vernor’s resale of old, upgraded copies of Release 14. In the latest installment, Autodesk has won its appeal to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. There will be be further legal moves yet, [...] 15 September 2010, 5:16 pm | 13 comments | Tags: EULA, Licensing, Vernor | Category: AutoCAD, Autodesk, Fail, Legal, Other Blogs, Other Sites, Rant Good news! Autodesk has announced an app that will link iPads and iPhones to Project Butterfly. This provides viewing, markup and limited editing facilities. Bad news! Autodesk has decide to call it AutoCAD WS, which is bordering on the fraudulent. It’s not AutoCAD, is nothing like it, and is unlikely to ever be anything like [...] 3 September 2010, 5:28 pm | 2 comments | Tags: Flash, He's going to save every one of us, Lulz, WTF? | Category: Apple, AutoCAD, Autodesk, Cloud, Fail, Interoperability, Other Autodesk Products, Spin, Web Stuff Following on from the AutoCAD 2011 productivity study I critiqued earlier, there is now an LT version. Do the same credibility problems apply to this study too? Yes, and then some. In addition to the drawings and operations being deliberately hand-picked to demonstrate new features, no direct comparison is performed at all between the [...] 25 August 2010, 1:23 pm | 4 comments | Tags: Autodesk, Fail, Spin | Category: AutoCAD LT, Autodesk, Fail, Rant, Spin Here in Australia, we’re in election mode, so I have even more reasons to avoid watching TV. On those occasions when I do watch it, I am often annoyed by what I see. This is not a novel observation, but one of the things that annoys me about many politicians is their habit of [...] 13 August 2010, 12:23 pm | 17 comments | Tags: Callan Carpenter, Interview, Spin, Subscription | Category: Autodesk, Fail, Interview, Spin, Subscription Heidi Hewett just reported the following on her blog, about a productivity study: According to a recent independent study, AutoCAD® 2011 can help you work up to 44% faster with the latest productivity enhancements. I have a couple of problems with that sentence. First, it’s not an independent study. It’s a study conducted by [...] 4 August 2010, 4:04 pm | 8 comments | Tags: David Cohn, Heidi Hewett, Performance, Productivity, Spin | Category: AutoCAD, AutoCAD 2008, AutoCAD 2011, Autodesk, Fail, Other Blogs, Rant, Spin, Thoughts In a thread in the Feedback & Questions about the Discussion Groups section of the Autodesk discussion groups, somebody called ACADuser contributed what I thought was a highly amusing bar graph as a test image. Inspired by this, I contributed a couple of test images of my own. A few hours later, the whole [...] 30 July 2010, 4:36 pm | 2 comments | Tags: Censorship, Discussion groups, Fail, Streisand effect | Category: Autodesk, Fail, Fun, Image manipulation, Web Stuff Any Internet resource that allows public comment has to deal with spam. Fortunately, Akismet takes care of the vast majority of the spam on this blog so I don’t have to worry about it. Most spam is just moronic and I’m saddened that there are still some people around who are clueless enough to [...] If you install Civil 3D 2011 using the ANZ (Australia/New Zealand) profile, when you start it up for the first time, you will see a large warning indicating that the drawing requires an Asian language pack to be installed. It also warns that this is a symptom of the acad.vlx virus: Now I [...] 19 July 2010, 4:06 pm | 6 comments | Tags: Civil 3D, Civil 3D 2011, Language Pack, Virus | Category: Bug, Customer Service, Customisation, Development, Fail, Interoperability, Other Autodesk Products I will be airing my own views on the Autodesk discussion group changes in a future post. In the meantime, I have collected some reactions from other users. For the record, there has been only a little censorship in this area. Here are some of the comments that made it through unhindered: I’ve given it a fair shake [...] 30 June 2010, 12:36 pm | Leave a comment | Tags: Discussion groups, Fail, User Interface, User Reaction | Category: Autodesk, Customer Service, Fail, Rant, Web Stuff |
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Best and worst AutoCAD features ever – polls
Using your suggestions and a few of my own, I have added two polls for you to select what are, in your opinion, the best and worst features ever added to AutoCAD. To help us find The Answer, there are 42 items in each poll, from which you can choose up to three.
A few [...]