Autodesk criticised by 35 named architects (2020) | Hacker News Reader

Autodesk criticised by 35 named architects (2020)

extranetevolution.com

230 pointsnsoonhui109 comments

I'd rather see firms chuck some money to perhaps Blender or something to get a viable alternative developed than send angry letters to the featureless monolith that is Autodesk. They're the market leader. They don't care. They already have firms by the metaphorical balls with astronomical licensing fees and know people will pay because they set the standards across many industries.

In architecture, anyway, the problem seems to be that generally BIM programs just suck. Nobody I know likes Revit, although they admit it's powerful, and a lot of firms think Archicad isn't industry ready.

I've used Archicad myself, at least, and it's very painful. The workflow flows poorly, and there's not much consideration for what people are going to be doing a lot of, so you're constantly wrestling with it to get the function you want. It's got a lot of good and interesting ideas in it, but sadly they're just hampered by feeling bolted on and not well integrated.

Blender is really nice but it isn't super easy to always get non-destructive/permanent modifications (but there might always be a way).

They're starting to lean into it now. Add-ons like HardOps have shown it's definitely possible, and I think there's a lot of interest in that space so they can rope in the parametric modelling guys.

A parametric sketch add-on (CAD Sketcher) is being developed. It won't replace Fusion or anything (and it's not intended to) but it convinced me to relearn polygon modeling after being away for 15 years.

That's great

Try Vectorworks. They had BIM years before Revit was a twinkle in AutoCAD's eye. Perhaps they fell behind for a few years but now but now more than viable and so much more stable code.

Vectorworks is still in the thousands. It would be nice if some of the people willing to pay that cost decided to support the BIM developments in Blender instead. Blender have recently shown that they can adapt and change faster than any of their commercial competitors in the 3D modelling space. I'm pretty sure they can leap-frog Autodesk and Vectorworks in a couple of years if they had the funding.

When was the quality turning point for Vectorworks? My wife uses it and still experiences regular crashes, though to be fair she avoids upgrading because she doesn't want to learn a new set of bugs to work around.

About 4 years ago we started noticing it really started improving. What version is she on?

Supporting FreeCAD [1] would be IMHO the way to go as they already provide both interfaces to BIM [2] and Blender [3].

Would be great if there were more architects or structural engineering companies that invest in open source. Maybe then universities would follow instead on building on education licenses that after graduation become very expensive.

[1] https://wiki.freecadweb.org/Donate

[2] https://wiki.freecadweb.org/BIM_Workbench

[3] https://wiki.freecadweb.org/Tutorial_Render_with_Blender

Yeah, definitely. Blender is a shining example of what's possible, and people are starting to take notice, particularly in the cinema space.

I wonder whether that has its downsides though - with Google, Apple etc. being involved in development I wonder whether that hollows out the core of participating developers and functionally makes the project dependent on paid employees.

I dont think its downside that devs get paid, thats how it should be and I think Ton is handling blender foundation very well.

Blender has been dependent on paid employees for quite a while. Not 100% but the majority of the grunt work (stuff that isn’t all that much fun) is through devs funded by the Blender Institute/Foundation.

Why would you conflate the benefits of open source with a requirement for the devs to not make money?

My vision is completely the opposite, the more money we pump into open source the better. We have to get out of this idea that open source is only good (and pure) when it's some dev slaving away after hours.

Open source was never about being against commercial activity anyway.

> Why would you conflate the benefits of open source with a requirement for the devs to not make money?

I don't think s/he meant that open source developers shouldn't make money. Just that sometime projects can be hijacked by those who pay the money. One genuine concern I can think of is if BigTech slowly pivots and slowly convert such projects into web applications that they can then rent as a service. Sure, one could fork it. But without the core developers to provide insights into the codebase, it would be a tough job.

That is why AGPL license is very important for some of us.

> That is why AGPL license is very important for some of us.

+1 on this (and maybe also forced-anonymous donations?). I'd like to think in the 21st century we have solutions to the "whoever holds the purse strings" paradigm. And maybe corporate strategy will begin to recognize the benefits in following them. Open tools for everyone means open (cheap) tools for businesses after all

Corporations which contribute code to Blender have mostly contributed patches for supporting their hardware. AMD and Apple are the ones I know for sure have done that, Intel and NVidia may have done it as well.

Ton Roosendaal also knows what he is doing. As he explained at the 2019 Blender conference keynote, the message to corporations is not "how can Blender help you" but "join us in Blender's mission". [1]

[1] https://youtu.be/Jcl3--cbULk?t=397

Have you actually used free cad for professional work?

Not me. However, my wife tried 2 years ago but failed to sync the BIM layers with dlubal RFEM. However, it seems some progress was made. So I think it it might not be there yet.

FWIW I've enjoyed using Rhino with VisualARQ for architectural work.

Funny, I almost never see Rhino mentioned in these discussions. Yeah its 999$ but comes with Grasshopper, crazy insane parametric node based drawing (and simulation, batch exporting, and python support). Plus, it’s not Autodesk (yet) which I stopped using since I tried Fusion 360; After using it once (auto run after install) I could not find the binary next time. Apparently it installed itself in non standard directories on mac (outside spotlights scope), ouch. Not sure if thats still the case, but this malpractice not only put me off, I literally could not run it again besides reinstalling hahha

Rhino also has really affordable lifetime licenses. It makes it an easy decision to buy bulk for a org and dole out as needed.

> a lot of firms think Archicad isn't industry ready

It's similar in many other industries. Take InDesign, the current market leader in DTP. Say you are working on a book that has multiple indexes: index of places, index of people and so on. Well InDesign doesn't support that! This is not some fancy feature - you will find multiple indexes in many non-trivial books. But for some reason the most popular and supposedly advanced DTP solution on the planet doesn't support that and people need to use workarounds.

It's because once a company is a market leader, it isn't anymore about "What feature is useful", but about "What will increase our revenue by x%?". Will adding a multiple index feature add anything to revenue? I doubt it.

It's more about PMs thinking "Which feature will make it look like I'm doing something useful?"

Photoshop has been quietly getting worse for years now. Certain annoyances haven't been touched for decades, but new features - like the one that forces you to save a copy for certain formats even when you don't want to - are so unwelcome and pointless they've have to add a switch in the preferences which allows you to turn them off.

When a product matures and has monopoly lock-in it's essentially frozen. The core workflow will stop improving and updates will usually add unwelcome friction-inducing cruft around the edges.

Yep, Quark Express was the king of DTP until they suddenly weren't. It doesn't take long for the landscape to change.

InDesign is for layout, it's not for books. FrameMaker is for books.https://www.adobe.com/products/framemaker.html

When you're the market leader, you get to define what's reasonable. If you're the industry-leading solution and your users struggle to do a simple, common task, then it becomes conventional wisdom that the task is "difficult." If you are the second-place solution and users struggle to do a simple, common task, then your software is not ready for serious work. If you are in second place and have elegant solutions for cases that the industry leader struggles with, then overall that is an advantage, but you'd be surprised how many people write off your innovations as not being really useful precisely because so many people using the industry leader get work done without them.

See: Jira versus every single one of their competitors.

Tried codebook?

For those others that wonder and want to save a Google query:

BIM = Building Information Management

There's a Blender addon under development for BIM called https://blenderbim.org/ they're looking for funding

Blender's user interface is fully scriptable in Python, which means you can really adapt to your personal workflows or that of the company

BlenderBIM accomplished a lot in about a year, but I guess we're all aware of what kind of monumental undertaking this is.

(I work on a related library)

Autodesk have jumped the shark with their recent cloud pricing options. New users will be priced out of the software, and will use anything else other than the Autodesk family of products. This may take a generation, but Autodesk have made a conscious decision to be less and less relevant over the next decade or so.

Adobe are on the same path, but not quite so aggressively. They may still see the writing on the wall and back out before they become history.

Yeah, I don't understand how these firms (especially Adobe) are so completely oblivious to what actually made them successful.

One of the main reasons Photoshop and Illustrator became widely used, is that every eleven-year-old with an interest in design or photo editing would torrent these products and learn the workflows inside out.

Autodesk seems to have somewhat figured this out, with Fusion360 having a free hobbyist license for instance.

The subscription model for Adobe actually makes photoshop more affordable for students than before, though. (Even if they pay more in the end)

1. Students didn’t upgrade every version. So the cost was amortized over many years.

2. The above point is moot because I, and every student I knew, used a school copy on a lab computer or… obtained a copy without paying

Photoshop CS6 is $700 ($1000 Extended), subscription is $10/month including Lightroom. So you'd need a lot of 'amortization' to make the standalone version a better choice.

I think your second point is moot personally, forcing students to break the law to obtain Photoshop is not a solution.

I don't like subscriptions personally, but most people do not care and it has definitely made Photoshop more affordable for the average person. This is reflected in Adobe' stock price.

I’m certain this is what Adobe marketing managers tell themselves so they can sleep better at night.

They're not oblivious, at all.

The switch to subscriptions has been a giant success for Adobe.

Their stock went from hovering around 30$ for a decade from 2000 to 2011-2012, to skyrocketing every year since they introduced the subscription model (in 2011-2012), now being at roughly 450$.

Anyone who doesn't think that's a giant success is living in an alternate reality.

As usual, it’s success at the cost of increased user hostility. The company doesn’t care, because increasing the stock price is the only thing that matters to them, their board, and their shareholders. But it does make the lives of users worse. Companies get locked into licensing fees, students are put under ever increasing financial pressure.

It’s just another example of “only stock price matters, we don’t care if users like us.” It’s a wild success if you own Adobe stock, and feels exploitative if you don’t.

You realize the stock price is a reflection of people... paying for Adobe's services?

It's a free market - go and use competing products that 'care'. Or if none of them 'care', maybe the problem is human nature, at which point, feel free to shake your fist at the sky and converse with whatever God figures you think are in charge :)

You’re missing the broader point of this thread — no one is denying Adobe etc are currently financially successful. They are predicting that, in time, the way they are becoming financially successful will eventually cause a significant decrease in their success.

Put another way: if I was a 15 year old just starting out, Adobe and AutoCAD would have nothing for me, and therefore I would start using other products out of necessity.

Apple got one thing right from the very start back in the late 1970’s: hooking the kids early was important. They are your future users.

Don't worry. The purchassing departament will wake up. They have targets too.

Microsoft did the same, but they totally stopped caring about the product since Windows 8. When the M1 Macbook Pro came out, I bought it instantly, and I couldn't go back to Windows' inconsistency, even though I miss the consistency of Windows keybindings from older Windows versions a lot.

Firms like NVidia, AMD, Facebook, Amazon, Unity, Epic Mega Grants, Adobe, Microsoft, Intel, and Apple chucking money at Blender is a hell of a lot better for users and society and education and industry than the featureless monolith that is Autodesk chucking plaster at Ton Roosendaal. ;)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJwG-qt-sgk

>... of public interest, we have to act in that sense. I can't simply say, "Oh, I'm going to support Autodesk from now on". And then, you can't. You can bring me to court and I will most certainly lose this. Plus, what people don't know maybe, but the Blender code is not owned by the Blender Foundation. [CRASH RUMBLE THUD] What??! That was Autodesk!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJEWOTZnFeg

>"Money doesn't interest me" - Ton Roosendaal interview. Interview with Ton Roosendaal, the man behind the open source 3D software Blender!

46:52: [Q: What do you think of Autodesk?]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJEWOTZnFeg&t=46m53s

>A: They're my best friends! Yah ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!

>[...52:46] Nobody reads those licenses. Nobody. [And this one is quite bad, isn't it?] It's horrible. [Yeah.] They can visit you at home if you use Autodesk, and check your computer, what's on it. [That's a good quote.]

>Some people ask me, hey Ton, if I use Blender, the art I make, is that my property, can I do whatever I like with it? Of course! That's open, the Free Software Foundation philosophy, right? We are making free software. Do whatever you do with the content.

>Autodesk, on the other hand, they also have their educational versions. In the license it says that everything you make with educational software is NOT your property. You can NOT do whatever you like with it. It is RESTRICTED. You can only do a little bit with it, you can not do other things with it. So basically Autodesk controls the content for that. [Ooooh...]

>Especially for commercial use, or use inside of companies, or if you want to sell something. You can only use it to learn the software, but not to do anything with the content.

>And they complain about Blender having an evil license. But I've got -- everybody... [Wait, who says that?] Aaaah, like I've got that kind of emails. It's got less, but even today, a business meeting with a studio, and they say, "Yeah, yeah, we are thinking about Blender, but the license, you know?" and then "If we start using Blender, then we might get sued, or a patent problem. And is the content ours? If we use Blender, is it really ours? Because we get free software? Because the content is then yours."

>I said "NO!!!". [Ha ha ha ha!] I do hear rumors that Autodesk is spreading that story. [What??!] Yeah! [Ooooh!] Autodesk tells people... [That's conspiracy talk!] ...they go to companies and say "Ah, don't use Blender, but you see now, Open Source, the content you make has to be open too, so you have to share it, or everything." They spread those rumors. [Gasp!] So shame on you, Autodesk. [Ha ha ha ha ha! Allegedly. Or not even allegedly. Rumored.] I heard. But I heard it from people who heard it from Autodesk. [Ok!] So, show me [?] and in between, right, and it's with an [?] as a witness, right? It's like, you could tell me, and then it's too hard to believe you, right? [Yes, yes.]

>Especially studios in Europe, and also Australia, and Indonesia. They get visitors from Autodesk. And if they say, "Ah, we are using Blender", then ESPECIALLY they get visitors from Autodesk. "Knock knock. Hey, I am your Autodesk sales representative. I see you're using Blender. I have something much better. Let's talk. Maybe we can give you nice discounts, or things to make sure you are kicking Blender out."

>[Woah, this sounds very...] This really happens. [Really?] Yeah! [It sounds very nineteen-eighty...] It's normal business. Why's that nasty? They made money with it. It's what they have to do. I don't make money with it, so I don't care. If they want to use Maya, then they should use Maya [Yeah.] right?

>[So you believe the product should speak for itself, right? Like if it's better, you use the better one.] Yeah, everybody should decide that for themselves.

https://www.blenderbasecamp.com/where-does-blender-get-all-t...

>Where Does Blender Get All Their Money From?

>Which Companies Are Sponsors Of The Blender Foundation?

>Why Do Some Of These Companies Invest In Blender?

>What Are The Different Tier Systems That Blender Uses For Donations?

>What Are The Different Ways In Which I Can Donate To Blender?

>Can Anyone Donate To The Blender Foundation To Support The Software?

You can't, Autodesk owns the software patents and massive amounts of IP. You impliment their features, you're sued to non existence. Remove software patents, we will have competition again.

Remove software patents and we'll have megacorps absorbing smaller businesses for free through theft of IP instead of acquisitions, and all the antitrust protection (as limited as it may be) instantly evaporates.

It is copyright law, not patent law, which prevents the scenario you describe.

Patents are useless to small businesses unless you are in the business of patent-trolling. Try to sue a big corporation and they will just countersue.

It is extremely naive to think that ServiceNow would be able to steal a feature from e.g. the PM part of GitLab. The reason why their products are even more obnoxious than paper bureaucracy is definitely not that noone ever told them what they are doing wrong. Same applies for MSFT, Oracle and as of recently Google and Facebook too.

The recent change from unlimited local simulations to pay-per-use cloud simulations was far worse than a mere price hike. It transformed a known, manageable cost into a variable cost that is going to impact users’ workflow as they learn to control it.

If I were the architecture industry, I’d be rapidly forming an industry consortium to develop an alternative. Otherwise, this supplier’s monopoly will continue to optimize pricing until all the industry’s profits flow to them.

Is there any (non software)industry consortium that developed any usable software? I wouldn't bet on that effort, and even if it is done perfectly it will still take at least 5 years to match the complexity and feature completeness of AutoCAD. Instead they should force themselves to boycott AutoDesk and use something like FreeCAD and fund the development. Yes, there would be some loss in productivity, still much more probable that it will work out in long term.

It's serving me source code...

    public function build_time_query( $column, $compare, $hour = null, $minute = null, $second = null ) {
        global $wpdb;
  
        // Have to have at least one.
        if ( ! isset( $hour ) && ! isset( $minute ) && ! isset( $second ) ) {
            return false;
        }

What sort of failure mode causes a website to just dump the backend source? Oh it's PHP...

Actually it's ~~apache~~ Litespeed

It has got nothing to do with PHP whatsoever...

Its PHP

It's everything BUT php. The mysql server on the site is too slow and crashed, the HTTP server somehow broke and served source code. PHP is the only thing that works there, and it tells you that mysql connection is not available.

The HTTP server is serving source code because of the braindead system of HTTP routing that PHP encouraged (because it's "easy") whereby scripts are stored in the root path amongst resources, and the file system is used for routing. In other languages the HTTP server doesn't even know where the source code is.

> scripts are stored in the root path amongst resources

that has been a known and documented bad practice for _at least_ 10 years.

First, thank you for hating PHP, i'd hate to see it ending up like javascript, especially when ppl misunderstand basic things like this. This 'braindead' system is how the web has been designed from the start. And that issue can easily be mitigated by having using an index.php that simply does require('../app/app.php'). Serving files as text really has nothing to do with PHP since PHP interpreter isnt even invoked at all.

Huh? This particular bug has everything to do with PHP. PHP is reasonably unique in the model of “treat everything like a standard webserver serving up files from the filesystem, except they’re PHP scripts/templates that get evaluated to produce content, vs a true static file.” But misconfigure your web server, and it’ll just serve up the source code instead. This wouldn’t happen in almost any other language.

And as always, archive today (or an alternative) saves the day: https://archive.ph/hHiCJ

Autodesk's behavior has long been acknowledged as despicable, marked by such offenses as attacking instructional fan sites and managing to get some ignorant judge to rule in favor of their rip-off licensing scam. They claim that when you buy their software, you only buy a "perpetual license"; so if you find that you can't use the software, you can't sell it to someone else. If you tried to sell an unopened, new copy of their software on eBay, for example, their lawyers would threaten eBay and have your auction canceled. Yes, they did this for ONE copy.

Can't innovate anymore? Just behave like assholes.

Really? Software sold in a box, can't resell it? Tell me more.

Not unusual. MS used to do the same thing.

Not excusing either party, just pointing out it's not that uncommon in high-end corporate software.

You're not buying a thing in a box, you're buying a license with associated terms. Which may include prohibiting resale.

If the US had credible anti-trust laws this kind of thing would be taken apart in court. But it doesn't, so here we are.

Like if you don't even open it? Isn't the license shit only in the software when you start it up? Or do they ask for your social and link it to the box? The for sure want to.

That became an issue in Australia. There is an extensive article here:

http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/journals/PrecedentAULA/2009/97....

Great article, very informative. So apparently you can always buy a box and give it back as is--though stores selling them were typically reluctant to provide refunds in general. Except with the shrink-wrap license: provided the shrink-wrap is intact, by all means you can return the box. That clarifies many things.

What more do you want to know? I just told you what they did. I put a shrink-wrapped box of Autodesk software on eBay and they threatened eBay in order to have it taken down.

One potential source of disruption here (though I’m sure many folks will likewise feel it is frustrating to be locked into a SaaS model), is we are starting to see several intriguing startups building browser-based CAD software that are serious contenders for “the Figma of Architecture/BIM” crown, with the likes of:

Arcol (http://arcol.io), Infurnia (https://www.infurnia.com/), Qonic (https://www.qonic.com/), and Snaptrude (https://www.snaptrude.com).

Here’s nice little write-up about this emerging space from upFront: https://www.upfrontezine.com/2022/04/upf-1128-1.html

It remains to be seen if they will manage to out-compete the Goliath that is Autodesk or simply get acquired/assimilated, but it is exciting to see some fervent activity in this space.

Better yet if several of them take a “freemium” approach and students/hobbyists/freelancers are able to use a polished, user-friendly packaging of this incredible CAD technology for free (as in beer).

I love free software, open source, and amazing projects like Blender (it is a true anomaly & gem in the OSS world, re: professional-grade end-user applications), but sometimes the profit motive goes a long way towards creating delightful and approachable user experiences that empower people.

(Though I’m likewise rooting for an open source offering in this space to really take off!)

Why is "browser-based" a selling point here?

If it's anything like onshape (the only browser based CAD I know of), browser based means: everyone uses the same version of the software, you don't have to wrestle your it department for installation rights, you can login and work on your designs from anywhere with any average laptop, there are no files (houseV3finalfinal), probably proper baked in version control with branching and merging... everything software developers take for granted that we poor CAD designers only can dream of.

A browser based collaborative CAD tool appears to be a great idea. Rendering is now longer the bottleneck in computation and Nurbs data is actually lightweight. Computation heavy tasks like the geometry engine could be done locally. However developing a geometry engine or nurbs kernel is quite a challenge- harder than any game engine.

> Autodesk or simply get acquired/assimilated

This is not even a question, there is no room to wonder. Autodesk WILL buy and KILL whatever software that threatens its own.

Even in 2008, they just bought and killed one of their competitor in VFX, Softimage. Assuring everyone they wont kill it. This was a big deal. And ofc they killed it, basically telling their customers to go learn Max or Maya.

What happens if an open source alternative starts to exist? You can't buy open source.

I think it's an immense hurdle. Sweating all of the tiny details, and encoding arcane domain knowledge, requires a staggering amount of labor.

Also, the users don't care. I work with a lot of engineers. Outside of actual programmers, most people are ambivalent about open source, or still even think the whole idea is weird.

They're not paying for it themselves. If their employer, and competing employers, are willing to pay for it, they're happy. Also, it creates an entry barrier that protects their value.

Changing to a different app is a hardship -- they even hate it when a new version gets installed and breaks all of their work flows, many of which are carefully documented. The top feature request of all institutional software users is: "Please don't change anything."

You can buy the core contributors.

> Better yet if several of them take a “freemium” approach and students/hobbyists/freelancers are able to use a polished, user-friendly packaging of this incredible CAD technology for free (as in beer).

This was pretty much Fusion 360’s approach. These unsustainable businesses models inevitably lead to a bait and switch.

The software you link to is nice but BIM is not CAD/CAM.

Agreed, the "Figma for BIM" space is exciting. We're lucky to be backed by Dylan and some awesome AEC folks as we at Arcol try to re-think building design.

Yes, there's definitely a lot to be said for open source software, we're big supporters of it at Arcol and hope we're able to contribute to some of those projects in a meaningful way over the next few years.

Database error.

Archive.org copy of article.[1]

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20200804005125/http://extranetev...

I wonder how this will continue. Because it's not just so simple for these people, right ... phase 1:

1) software eats the world (this is far from complete, even in CAD)

which leads to phase 2:

2) a growing part of the knowledge of how industry X works (in this case construction, and of course fighter jet design) gets transferred into software (both into software companies, and directly into software) ... and forgotten by actual practitioners

3) software, to an extent, leaves those practitioners behind (first by needing much fewer of them), then it outright destroys them by demanding an ever greater share of the profits of industry X

4) autodesk ... please inform me what phase 4 is.

FreeCAD is getting nearly $500/week from Liberapay. Let’s see if we can get this up to $1000 to support an OS alternative.

https://liberapay.com/FreeCAD

I’m going to contribute.

Same, I just canceled my Fusion subscription for different reasons (they were spamming launchdarkely 2 MILLION + times because I had little snitch blocking it), shifting some of that 60USD per month seems worth it.

From person experience working inside Autodesk, they don’t care. They make so much money while being so dysfunctional that it will take strong competition for them to do anything.

I think Adobe and Autodesk should buy each other.

Oracle should buy both and ruin them.

I for one would love it if industry that produces real things collaborated to produce their own best of breed tooling rather than let SV aimlessly generate endless supply of half assed crap to capture worker agency as part of its game to control the economy.

Industrial designs from buildings to cars, heavy equipment, and manufacturing equipment, could chip in enough to effectively end Autodesk.

Movie studios could ruin Adobe.

My friends in chip business are giving me hope; more and more logic is being embedded in chips, requiring less and less software to cover up usability and bugs in hardware.

I look forward to the day pretentious cut-n-paste engineering (software) is relegated to an eccentric hobby.

Adobe should come up with a competitor. QuarkXpress abused its customers badly with high license fees and hardware dongles and all sorts of stuff like that. When Adobe came out with InDesign, everyone switched and Quark lost its dominant position. Same thing happened to Microsoft in Mobile. People were so sick of their monopolistic behavior that they lost totally to Apple and Google when they came out with a competitive product.

Summoning Adobe to fix a monopoly feels... Perverse.

At a technical level, they might have the chops to build something from scratch, but they've more than abused their market position over the last two decades. We don't need another standard without interop.

Put the engineering into open source or open standards. We can't continue with software society relies on being locked in like this.

"An enemy of an enemy is a friend."

I prefer The Scorpion and the Frog.

When like likes of Adobe and Autodesk sting their users, everyone is angry but nobody is surprised. It's just their nature.

It reminds me about a story by Philip K. Dick - Autofab. It's a story about postapocaliptic world with automated factories that do not stop to work after the work causing trouble for people. People decide to make the factories fight with each other. Let's just say it doesn't end in a good way.

Great point, and great story, with a terrible ending that illustrates the point about Adobe and Autodesk.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autofac

Philip K. Dick's Electric Dreams Episode 8 (Autofac)

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6902176/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vCLlXrn840M

We're grading on a curve here.

The main thing also is that the interface of Indesign was year ahead of Quark for a small price. There wasn’t everything (at first typesetting a big book was hard), and it was lacking a lot of feature regarding copy editor cooperation. And no Git was not and his still not a solution for revision :) incopy is using text though, so…

But to be completely honest regarding indesign it took year to be enough for lot of shops.

There's always Affinity Publisher.

https://affinity.serif.com/en-gb/publisher/

I’d love it if Serif got in the CAD game, but they’ve got their hands full finishing that last 20% on their design apps. I use only Designer and Photo now, but there’s always a couple of features I miss, like gradient mesh or duotone.

Pagemaker had been a fairly popular alternative before it became indesign

This is a wish just waiting to be granted by a creepy mummified monkey’s paw if I ever heard one.

In the discussion, no one mentioned Renga. It seems that this is one of the new solutions for BIM, with a new interesting approach to work. Now this local solution is widespread in the countries of the former USSR, but if it became an international project, Autodesk would have to think again about the development of Revit, and not just financial reports. Especially if they make the real-time collaboration functionality they promised (next year). Renga is the Figma of BIM.

I can’t read this article, but I tried to get one of our students onto Fusion 360. For 9 months they futzed about, blaming our network, blaming the student, blaming the third party company who verified student age…

After month 9, I managed to find the email of the EA to the CEO and politely asked if she could help with a 9 month support issue.

Fixed in 48 hours.

Autodesk is slack.

Architects aren’t the only ones that use AutoCAD. I’ve been out of it for a few decades, R14 was the last one I used, but it’s also used for machine diagrams and surveying plans like cable drops, cable terminals, etc.

This is only tangentially related, but former Autodesk CEO Carl Bass did an interview on Guy Raz' podcast Wisdom from the Top. The monopoly issue doesn't come up, but it could still be interesting to get a sense of the guy.

https://www.npr.org/2022/08/08/1116377413/autodesk-carl-bass

Big companies usually don't innovate. And when they lose customer focus, they create opportunity for new companies to bring new & better products to market. For example, https://www.modumate.com is from a startup in SF, founded by a young architect.

I can’t access the article. However, AD tried to recruit me, and it was just embarrassing. They used to be one of those companies that wanted you to build an alpha of their app and then you might get hired. This was a requirement to get to the first interview. Not like any pro is going to put a week into a maybe-project.

Well kids. That’s why you don’t want an uncached CMS. Error establishing database connection…

I still love to design on my drawing board with pencil and eraser, who still does that?

I never used pencils, but mechanical pen and t-square and friends. I remain convinced that engaging the entire body in the design process is superior to the experience of CAD. What may be interesting is updating the drafting table itself to be an active surface. It may be worth a business plan and getting funding for a startup.

Getting a database error

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