AutoCAD WS Mobile in Apple App store for free

AutoCAD WS Mobile is now in the Apple App store for free at autocadws.com/mobile

AutoCAD WS mobile app for Apple iPhone, iPod, and iPad makes it possible to view, edit, and share AutoCAD drawings on the go using a mobile or tablet device. Something that can be useful when you cannot bring your laptop with you.

  

 

AutoCAD WS Mobile key features :

• Open your DWG files on your mobile device with full support of Xrefs, layers and fonts.
• Edit and annotate drawings using using an intuitive touch and gesture interface.
• Add familiar AutoCAD objects such as polyline, circle, text and cloud.
• Draw and edit accurately using units display, snap and orthogonal support.
• Work in different view modes, switch between model view and grayscale display.
• Share and collaborate on drawings with other AutoCAD WS web and mobile users. Edit a drawing with another user in real time using two mobile devices or a mobile device and a PC or MAC.
• Changes are automatically saved in your online storage and can be downloaded back to DWG format.

AutoCAD WS plugin for AutoCAD and more subscription packs

There are a lot of news from Autodesk. Take a look and see if you find something you find useful.

The plugin for AutoCAD WS is available to all having 2011 version of AutoCAD, AutoCAD LT, and AutoCAD verticals and is available at www.autocadws.com/downloads and with a FAQ.

Subscription Advantage Pack for AutoCAD 2011 Products

The Autodesk® Subscription Advantage Pack for AutoCAD® 2011 products improves collaboration by extending AutoCAD® software to web and mobile platforms, and provides new tools for converting and sharing DWG™ and IGES files. 

Key features include:

• AutoCAD® WS plug-in for AutoCAD software—View, edit, and share your DWG files seamlessly on web browsers or mobile devices.*

• DWG conversion tool—Convert DWG files in batches to easily share newer drawings with colleagues using previous versions of the software, or quickly bring older file libraries up to date.
• IGES import/export—Import and export IGES drawing files to share 3D content with clients, colleagues, and partners.

*The AutoCAD WS plug-in for AutoCAD software is available to all AutoCAD customers and is not exclusive to AutoCAD subscribers.

This Subscription Advantage Pack works with all 2011 AutoCAD-based products, including AutoCAD®, AutoCAD® Mechanical, AutoCAD® Architecture, AutoCAD® MEP, AutoCAD® Civil 3D®, AutoCAD® Map 3D, AutoCAD® Plant 3D, AutoCAD® P&ID, AutoCAD® Electrical, AutoCAD® ecscad, and AutoCAD® Structural Detailing software.

I’ve been trying the DWG conversion tool and found that I was not able to use it on drawings located in my document folder. I got an error like this and the only workaround is to move the files to another location first.

Conversion Errors
Unconverted files:
The files listed below could not be saved due to a sharing violation or disk write problem.
C:\Users\JTB\Documents\Drawing2.dwg

Subscription Advantage Pack for AutoCAD Architecture 2011 and AutoCAD MEP 2011

This one provides access to the Autodesk® Green Building Studio® web service for whole building energy analysis. Perform whole building analysis, optimize energy efficiency, and work toward carbon neutrality earlier in the design process by exporting AutoCAD® Architecture software files via gbXML to Autodesk Green Building Studio web-based energy analysis service. No download is required. Simply use your Subscription Center user ID and password to access Green Building Studio during the term of your Subscription.

Subscription Advantage Pack for Autodesk Revit Architecture 2011

Autodesk Revit Server Extension:
More easily collaborate on projects with geographically dispersed teams. Web-based services help keep teams coordinated as they work on a single project from separate locations.

Autodesk Revit Conceptual Energy Analysis:
Make informed early design decisions by better understanding the impact of proposed designs on sustainability. Convert concept models into energy models for analysis, and more quickly compare design options in Autodesk® Revit® Architecture 2011 software.

Revit Extensions for Autodesk Revit Architecture 2011:
Extend the capabilities of Revit Architecture 2011 in key areas, including modeling, coordination, and documentation. Frame Generator Extension—More rapidly define and generate simple 3D frame models. The resulting structural elements (such as columns, beams, bracing, and purlins) are created from general frame and geometric parameters of the structure.

Subscription Advantage Pack for Autodesk Revit MEP 2011

Extend the capabilities of Revit MEP 2011 in key areas, including coordination and documentation.

Subscription Advantage Pack for Autodesk Revit Structure 2011

Extend the capabilities of Autodesk® Revit® Structure 2011 software in key areas, including structural analysis, modeling, concrete reinforcement, interoperability, and construction documentation.

• Floor vibration analysis—Assess vibration characteristics to help meet requirements of the AISC Design Guide 11 (United States).
• Gravity column analysis—Design steel columns based on the AISC 360-05 design code (United States).
• SDNF import/export—Import or export SDNF file format.
• SS3 link—Link data bidirectionally between Revit Structure and SS3 so that engineers can use structural data from SS3 to create coordinated drawings and collaborate with Autodesk® Revit® Architecture software users (Japan).
• Member section schedule—Automatically generate member section schedules (Japan).
• CSV element generator—Link to other structural analysis applications to automatically generate the structural model, including the rebar model, in Revit Structure using the CSV file format (Japan).

Subscription Advantage Pack for Autodesk Navisworks 2011

New avatars, appearance profiler add-in, and interoperability with the most current file formats help to improve communication and integration across project teams.

Key features include:

• New avatars—Select from an extended range of third-person avatars to better explore project models and communicate stakeholder perspectives.
• Appearance profiler add-in—Override the appearance of multiple/all objects within the model based on user-defined classifications. Color-code property information to differentiate system types and visually identify status.
• Existing applications and formats—Keep workflows current with support for Primavera P6 v7, Google™ SketchUp™ v7, and Autodesk® Inventor® products.
• New format­—Improve object quality and access to property information through direct file support with PTC’s Pro/ENGINEER® parametric file format.

Here are all products with recent Subscription Advantage Pack released: Autodesk 3ds Max 2011, Autodesk MotionBuilder 2011, Autodesk Maya 2011, Autodesk Revit Structure 2011, Autodesk 3ds Max Design 2011, AutoCAD 2011 Products, AutoCAD MEP 2011, Autodesk Mudbox 2011, AutoCAD Architecture 2011, AutoCAD Electrical 2011, Autodesk Inventor 2011, AutoCAD Map 3D 2011, AutoCAD Civil 3D 2011, Autodesk Navisworks 2011, Autodesk Revit MEP 2011, Autodesk Revit Architecture 2011, AutoCAD Mechanical 2011

AutoCAD Architecture 2011 Update 1

Knowledge Base document AutoCAD Architecture 2011 Update 1 has all details.

The following AutoCAD Architecture defects have been fixed:

3D Modeling

• Components whose display has been turned off are shown on converting an AEC object to a 3D Solid.

Curtain Walls

• Custom model components in a curtain wall may display incorrect material assignments in different display configurations in 3D views.

Dimensions

• Associative dimensions may not update when walls are moved.

Drawing Management

• Redefining an existing model space view causes AutoCAD Architecture to crash.

General UI

• AutoCAD Architecture may crash on launching the Style Manager.

Help

• Third-party applications based on AutoCAD Architecture cannot access their Help files through the application.

IFC

• Some roofs may change position after executing the IFCEXPORT command.

Materials

• The MATERIALLIST command reports the volume of only the first object in a multiple selection.

Modify

• AutoCAD Architecture may crash while trimming entities.

Performance

• Sometimes memory usage increases when switching back and forth between the tabs of the Properties Palette.

Renovation

• A wall with display overrides displays incorrectly when modified in the renovation mode.

Sections

• Creating a horizontal section may cause AutoCAD Architecture to crash.

Slabs

• No style information is available in the Properties Palette for a slab created by applying the properties of the Slab tool to linework and walls.

Walls

• Trimming a wall may cause doors and windows in the wall to move or disappear.

• Walls that clean up correctly in a previous version may not clean up correctly in AutoCAD Architecture 2011.

• Wall cleanup EIP functions such as Merge, Subtract, Fillet, and Chamfer do not work in a custom UCS.

General AutoCAD updates are also included as specified in AutoCAD 2011 Update 1 that eventually became AutoCAD 2011 Update 1.1

Other updates are: AutoCAD MEP 2011 Update 1, AutoCAD Map 3D 2011 Update 1 and AutoCAD Civil 3D 2011 Update 1.

SSMPropEditor 4.1 released – Sheet Set Manager complement

If you are frustrated with limitations of AutoCAD’s Sheet Set Manager and want to for example edit Sheet properties on multiple Sheets at one time SSMPropEditor is for you.

New features in version 4.1 are the ability to export out sheet and property data that can be edited in Excel or a text file and then imported back. This can be useful if you need to do a Find and Replace for example.

Now it is also possible to optionally rename the actual drawing file associated with the sheet when changing the file name.

Visit the SSMPropEditor site for more details and if you want a free trial.

Open old posts in Windows Live Writer

Have you ever wanted to edit older posts in Windows Live Writer than the 500 most recent? I have and rather edit the post in WLW than in Bloggers editor.

An Italian programmer with the blog A Ovest di Paperino.COM (West of Donald Duck) made a solution for the problem. Windows Live Writer Post Download Plugin. I tried it out but found that it didn’t work for me so together we worked it out and now there is a new version available that works for the Blogger platform as well. Now I can even edit posts from 2004 within WLW if I wanted to.

Here is one way to open up any blog post in WLW.

Open up the post in your web browser.

Then replace http with wlw and press Enter.

Here is how to modify the Quick Edit icon if you use Blogger.

Locate this part in the HTML template source. Remember to expand widget templates.

<a expr:href='data:post.editUrl' expr:title='data:top.editPostMsg'>
  <img alt='' class='icon-action' height='18' src='http://img2.blogblog.com/img/icon18_edit_allbkg.gif' width='18'/>
</a>

Then replace it with this code. Or you can add it below and use another icon for it.

<script type='text/javascript'>
  var str=&quot;<data:post.url/>&quot;;
  document.write(&#39;&lt;a href=&quot;&#39; + str.replace(&quot;http&quot;, &quot;wlw&quot;) + &#39;&quot;&gt;&lt;img alt=&quot;&quot; class=&quot;icon-action&quot; height=&quot;18&quot; src=&quot;http://img2.blogblog.com/img/icon18_edit_allbkg.gif&quot; width=&quot;18&quot;/&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#39;);
</script>

When I’m logged in to Blogger I can just click on the icons to either edit the post in Blogger or WLW.

Windows Live Writer 2009 has a problem where the post that is posted shows up twice in Recently posted list. (I can live with that)

I tried with the WLW that is part of Windows Live Essentials beta 2010 and it didn’t have this problem. In the 2010 version it is possible to open posts older than the 500 most recent but it takes a lot of time to retrieve the posts so this plugin is a real time saver.

JTB FlexReport 6.1 released – Software Asset Reporting

Software Asset Management (SAM) can be required by management, reduce license costs, needed to comply with license policies and much more.

JTB FlexReport can help companies to better and easier manage their licenses and to find the best balance between used and available licenses as well as find out how much their users are using different products. Both network licenses based on FlexNet (FLEXlm), IBM LUM, SPLM (SmartPlant), Primavera, 12D as well as single licenses can be monitored with JTB FlexReport.

JTB FlexReport 6.1 is now released. Existing customers are encouraged to install this new version with several new features and a bunch of bug fixes. For those interested in trying JTB FlexReport we offer a free trial including support.

Remove items from Windows Control Panel

Have you ever wanted to delete or hide items from Windows Control Panel? Under Hardware and Sound in Windows 7 I find for example Autodesk Plot Style Manager and Autodesk Plotter Manager that are added after installing AutoCAD.

Delete or move these files and reopen the Control panel and the items are gone.

"C:\Windows\System32\plotman.cpl"
"C:\Windows\System32\styleman.cpl"

You can also hide items using the Registry editor or Group Policy Editor (look for Hide specified Control Panel items and List of disallowed Control Panel items) as it is easier if you want to do it on many computers and some items cannot easily be deleted like the two in the example above.

Windows Live Writer 2011 beta and IE9 beta test

With this blog post I’m trying to see if also Live Writer 2011 beta has problems with image alt and title being empty.

Writing this post made me find another issue, bug or change. Note that the sorting of the categories is case sensitive.

Update: The bug is also in Live Writer 2011 beta or I would say that the bug is in Internet Explorer beta as it breaks previously working functionality. Note the title tooltip.

And here is the HTML with title and alt added even though they should be empty.

Update: There are also other issues that can happen as seen on Aaron’s Live Writer Blog.

Internet Explorer 9 beta test drive

I have tried IE9 beta and here are some notes on my experience.

News in IE9

Updated icon as seen above.

Here is the top of the frame. Much slimmer than IE8 and there is no text or icon at the very top of frame.

The status bar at the bottom is disabled as default and to enable it right click where you see the home and favorite icons.

The back button is enlarged as it is the most used button and to get the recent pages to go back and forth right click on either arrow.

Drop down menu with tools

Address bar and search bar are consolidated into one box.

Internet Explorer 9 makes HD video smoother, colors truer, graphics clearer, and websites more responsive. New JavaScript engine.

No Windows XP support.

Evaluate how add-ons affect performance and disable them easily.

Pin a web page, by grabbing the tab in the browser and drag it down to the taskbar.

Note how the look of the top frame is changed when www.jtbworld.com is pinned.

If you drag and drop to the desktop it becomes a pinned site as default with .website file extension instead of .url. To change from a Pinned Site Shortcut to an internet shortcut or the other way around just change the file extension. To create a shortcut hold down shift before dragging the favicon to the desktop or right click on the page and select Create Shortcut.

Right click on the pinned site and you see the favorites and tasks added.

Here is how it was done using some <meta> tags and JavaScript after the <head> tag.

<!--- Start IE9 Settings -->
<meta name="application-name" content="JTB World" />
<meta name="msapplication-tooltip" content="JTB World software development" />
<meta name="msapplication-window" content="width=1024;height=768" />
<meta name="msapplication-task" content="name=Contact JTB World;action-uri=http://www.jtbworld.com/contact.htm;icon-uri=/images/mail_32.ico" />
<meta name="msapplication-navbutton-color" content="#2B4564" /><meta name="msapplication-starturl" content="./" />
<script type='text/javascript'>
try {
window.external.msSiteModeCreateJumplist('JTB World Favorites');
window.external.msSiteModeAddJumpListItem 
    ('JTB World Software' , 
     'http://www.jtbworld.com/software.htm',
     'http://www.jtbworld.com/jtbworld.ico');
window.external.msSiteModeAddJumpListItem 
    ('JTB World on Twitter' , 
     'http://twitter.com/jtbworld',
     'http://www.jtbworld.com/images/favicontwitter.ico');
window.external.msSiteModeAddJumpListItem 
    ('JTB World\'s Blog' , 
     'http://blog.jtbworld.com/',
     'http://www.jtbworld.com/jtbworld.ico');
} catch (ex) {
}
</script>
<!-- End IE9 Settings -->

This also works when pinned to the start menu.

You can click here to try the API to add a website to the Start menu.

<a onclick="window.external.msAddSiteMode();" href="#">Add Website</a><br />

Jump List Commands makes it possible to customize your site to give access to commonly used destinations (nouns) and tasks (verbs) of an application or site.

Thumbnail toolbar commands allows you to interact directly with the site from thumbnail toolbar buttons, without having the browser window in the foreground.

Tabs can be dragged out to a separate window. I like that!

HTML5 support.

H.264 video support.

TIFF and JPEG XR images are supported. Example

Acid3 test is at 95/100 in the first public beta (and also in IE9 RC) compared to 20/100 in IE8.

What is Working and a Bug

Most things are working and I think the performance is much better.

The online banking sites I use works fine, PayPal and even the IE7pro plugin works. I’ve not seen any problems with AutoCAD, Revit, Visual Studio and a lot of other programs.

With Windows Live Writer I got a problem when wanting the alternate text on images to be empty. This forced this change to the tag title="title" alt="alt" making it not possible to have the alternate text cleared.

Resources

At http://www.beautyoftheweb.com you can download IE 9 beta and at http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/ there is a Flash Player preview release with enhanced support for Microsoft Internet Explorer 9 beta.

Flash Player "Square" preview takes advantage of hardware accelerated graphics in Internet Explorer 9 Beta, utilizing hardware rendering surfaces to improve graphics performance and enable seamless composition.

Pinned Sites: Windows 7 Desktop Integration with Internet Explorer 9

When IE9 is installed you can visit this test drive site.

Webinar: Improving teamwork in product development

Could your product development team work together better? Are decisions being made that aren’t being communicated immediately to the entire team? Does your team have any nagging issues with the project (how’s that for a leading question? )

If so, you will want to join us to see how Vuuch can solve these problems.

Please join us on Tuesday, September 14 at noon ET, 9am PT, 16:00 GMT for an introduction to Vuuch. Register for our webinar at http://www.vuuch.com/webinar. In less than an hour, you will learn how social technology can revolutionize teamwork in product development projects.

Oh, and this week’s webinar will be the world premier of Vuuch 3.0.

We hope you will be able to join us. Register here.

Repost from: Webinar: Improving teamwork in product development

Vuuch is available for AutoCAD too. Visit Vuuch for AutoCAD for details.

Raster Design 2011 Image Transparency Bug and Workaround

Background transparency toggle button should get same result, no matter rotate image or not but a defect in Raster Design 2011 makes transparency not possible to turn off as expected when the image is rotated.

A reader contacted me about this issue and Autodesk quickly confirmed the bug and provided a workaround I wanted to share.

Workaround: Invoke Transparent Color dialog again and click OK button. (Don’t change color, keep it as previous.) The transparent color will go back to normal.

Another workaround is: Since the bitmap uses Indexed color, redefine transparency (may need a third party image editing software) and reload the image into AutoCAD will fix this problem.

AutoCAD 2011 Update 1.1

Autodesk has re-released Update 1 as Update 1.1 for AutoCAD 2011 and AutoCAD LT 2011. Update 1.1 replaces Update 1 and includes the fix that was released in the previous hotfix. 32-bit and 64-bit versions of this update can be found at the following links: AutoCAD 2011 Update 1.1 and AutoCAD LT 2011 Update 1.1.

About info: Product Version E.115.0.0, AutoCAD 2011 - English Version 2.1

_VERNUM = "E.115.0.0 (UNICODE)”

If the About info says “Product Version E.115.0.0, AutoCAD 2011 - English Version 2” then you have Update 1 and need to add the hotfix or uninstall Update 1 and install Update 1.1.

Virtual memory monitor gadget for AutoCAD

Autodesk releases its first Windows gadget.

Use the Autodesk Performance Monitor to gauge the virtual memory utilized by running versions of AutoCAD and AutoCAD-based vertical products.

The Performance Monitor is a Windows desktop gadget that provides a color-coded status bar indicating the level of usage of virtual memory by AutoCAD products (AutoCAD 2009-2011 and some verticals). When large amounts of virtual memory are in use, the running process may become unstable.

For obvious reasons this will only work on Vista and Windows 7 systems.

Free Download of Performance Monitor for AutoCAD via Autodesk Labs (in a limited number of countries)

Test comments:

The location after installing the gadget was half way outside the screen.

Using the Close drawing button did close the drawing but put AutoCAD in a Not Responding state.

DwgNotes released

A new small and cheap (5 EUR or less) product DwgNotes is now available.

Add notes or comments in AutoCAD DWG files and optionally be notified if there are notes when the drawing is opened.

One or multiple notes can be added, edited or deleted.

You can use these notes for yourself or within a team to remind others what needs to be done with the drawing.

AutoCAD and verticals from version 2000 up to newest release (today 2011) are supported. It works for Bricscad 10 and it might even work on upcoming AutoCAD for Mac.

Download a trial, read more or purchase at www.jtbworld.com/DwgNotes.htm