WorldCAD Access

Our Customers Tell Us...

In talks with marketing people about new software features, they sometimes use a phrase that runs along the lines of "Our users told us..." or "Responding to requests from our users...". It irritates me, because I know it's not true. Several hundred thousand people can't even agree on the time of day, let alone on improvements to software.

Today I finally came across a good way to describe the flaw in the "Our users" phrase: it is a case of "alleged consensus." In the high school English class in which we studied various forms of propaganda, I figure "Our users" falls into the category of "Join the Bandwagon" propaganda.

But there is the question of why. Why do marketing people feel the need to create the illusion that their entire customer base of 10,000 or 250,000 or 6 million are of one mind? I don't know the answer, but I wonder, why not just tell the truth: "These are the new features that our programmers came up with in time to make it into this release."

PTC Q2: Down 10%

Saved by maintenance (subscriptions). Even though PTC's revenues were down 10%, things could've been much bleaker, since revenue from software licenses were down 44%. It was revenues from maintenance that made the drop a mere 10% -- understandable when maintenance amounts to 80% of the company's income + it actually increased. 

'Course, that puts PTC at extreme risk should customers decide that paying several hundred dollars per seat per year just isn't all that important right now. 

Revenue estimates for 2009 are now $940 million -- down another $20 million.

Gotta love this line from the press release: "Currency was a $3 million headwind relative to Q2 revenue guidance." Translation: exchange rates cost the company $3 million in lower revenue than previously forecast.

Source.

Photos from The Netherlands - 2

Arnold van der Wiede's wife organized two days of tours for "the wives" of attendees. My daughter went along, and here are some of her 187 photos of the Keukenhof gardens near Leiden, where our conference is taking place. The 80 acres of flowers are pretty overwhelming, she reports.

My daughter during a moment when it wasn't raining. As Randal Newton tweeted, "In Amsterdam the rain falls mainly on the tourists."

Open Design Alliance Conference - Day 2.5

During the break, CADMagazine editor Rob Sman and I were commenting on the lack of MCAD apps in the IntelliCAD-ODA orb. After the break, we were corrected by the next presentations.

Mr Sman told me that his magazine is able to survive in print form, because his advertisers prefer the longivity of ads in print publications -- unlike Web banners that appear and disappear. The magazine is distributed in Holland only.

Ledas

Wow! I just loved the presentation by Dmitry Ushakov of Ledas describing his company's variational direct modeler. You can read more about it from www.Ledas.com/group/white_papers

IMSI/design

We tend to think of IMSI selling TurboCAD for cheap, but they have being doing a lot of work behind the scenes to support many file formats and workflows. Maurtiz Botha showed us his company's constraint technology. For example, TurboCAD has an auto-constrain mode that works like this: you draw a rectangle; TurboCAD explodes it, and then adds constraints logically that keep it as a rectangle. (Keep snap off when drawing with constraints, he recommenced.) 

"This is the way AutoCAD will develop in the next several years," he predicted, as he showed how TurboCAD uses 2D parametrics to drive 3D models, and then generate sections for use as detail drawings. (AutoCAD has had some of this, but does it through the command-line -- much more painful than TurboCAD's drag'n drop of sectioned 2D views that are automatically scaled, complete with fragmented, differently-scaled, fully-associative details.)

The key for non-CAD users, he said, is to export TurboCAD drawings in SVG [scaleabgle vector graphics] format in Adobe Illustrator (on the Mac). Then the non-CAD user can pretty-up the drawing. Thus, he showed the workflow from rough sketch, parameterized made into 3D in TurboCAD, extracted as 2D views, and then exported to an Adobe product.

He showed another workflow of starting in SketchUp, imported into TurboCAD -- including layers, textures, SketchUp-generated views (imported as paper space), and SketchUp components (converted to blocks). He generated 2D and 3D sections of the imported model, and then exported as SVG.

Of interest: TurboCAD's ability to selectively expose parameters of blocks (symbols). For instance, you can toggle the bend feature of a sheet metal part. Or toggle exploded view of an office desk.

Additional Coverage

For more on the ODA conference, check out Deelip Menezes' blog at ODA World Conference - Day 1 - Development Status.

Twitter Hater

Randall Newton wants to have a no-punches withheld debate on the uselessness of Twitter (ie, he considers it useful, the fool.)

At it's core, Twitter is the equivalent of passing notes during class -- in elementary school. "Tee hee hee. We're fooling the teacher with out discrete communication system."

At the psychological level, Twitter is like a drug pump that injects endorphins each time you get a hit -- er, a Tweet. "Thank goodness somebody still likes me."

Here's the part I find saddest -- when Randall is thrilled to show me he got one more follower in the past 24  hours. That's not thrilling, that's depressing. One is the loneliest number, philosophized Three Dog Night. 

I did have a chuckle when he complained the Twitter search system wouldn't let people find his twitty comments. Oh dear.

Here he is, twitting instead of listening... ("I'm reporting," he sputters.)

 

Join Twitter and follow Vektorrum (a now-dead Danish god) -- Randall's CB handle.

Open Design Alliance Conference - Day 2

Techsoft 3D, the HOOPS people, are showing us the kinds of advanced visualizations that they make possible. Right now they are demo'ing a 3D section plane -- think of the three-sided corner of the room kind of shape, but transparent -- cutting through a 3D model. You see a rectangular cutout.

Randall Newton is asking why they created the 3D Adobe integration -- was it market-driven? They think 3D PDF will become more important in the years to time, and so they are anticipating demand in the future. I thought I got a hint that this may be driven by Adobe.

Well, something that's got to be fixed the 3D PDF display speed. The demo jock apologized, "It's Acrobat, not ours"  as the 3D model failed to rotate inside Acrobat Pro. It's that sluggishness that has caused me to ignore 3D PDF.

ADTdirect

Vadim Kosarev of the ODA is demoing the architectural extension to the the ODA's DWG "platform", called ADTdirect. This lets you write custom architectural applications -- not new, something that's been around for quite a few years, but relatively unknown. The ODA wants to change that lack of awareness.

The demo architectural app shows the capabilities of ADTdirect. Some of the features we are seeing include:

• 3D grips (eg, make walls longer, wider, and taller)
• self-cleaning walls; slabs (floors); single- and double-angle roofs; doors and windows that snap intelligently into walls
• interactive 3D rotation
• window styles change all windows instantly
• all types of stairs, with grip editing. If railing entities are attached to stairs, they react as stair parameters are changed.

Facet Modeler

The ODA's facet modeller uses b-rep [boundary representation] technology (AECGe class name). It is currently used by the ODA's architectural and civil engineering apps, but could be used elsewhere. It supports primitives, Booleans, revolution, section, cut with extrusion, and so on.

- - -

(I just noticed that the government of Portugal is running tourism ads on this Weblog. I am guessing that Google AdSense is reacting to my references to Holland.)

Photos from The Netherlands

The ODA conference has 95 member attendees with 4 media and 25 employees of the ODA. There's representatives here from Oracle, Intergraph, AVEVA, Nemetschek, Spatial, and TechSOFT 3D.

Neil Paterson addresses the 125 attendees.

The lovely seaside town of Hoorn, north of Amsterdam. When leaving the train station, turn right (going past the bus stop), and then head a few blocks to the seaside -- there are no signs. On our return from Hoorn, the Netherlands Railway system backed up due to a suicide on the tracks. 

The waterfront at Hoorn, The Netherlands.

On Sundays, the Dutch rail system offers a country-wide first-class travel pass for a mere e20 (about $26). First-class sections, however, barely differ in quality from second-class -- except for being uncrowded.

Double-decker trains run every 5-20 minutes between stations.

The tulips are currently and bloom, and here are some of the fields seen from our train.

 Tulips were developed in Turkey.

Your editor enjoys "first class" travel on Netherland Railways.

Open Design Alliance Conference - Day 1.5

It's afternoon and Robert Graebert of Graebert Gmbh is showing his company's CAD software that works with mobile devices. Well, just those that run Windows Mobile OS, which is getting increasingly long in the tooth.

So I asked him what they were planning to do, seeing how iPhone and Android were taking off.  Well, iPhone is a pain, because it relies on electrical conductance between the finger and the screen -- no using the iPhone with gloves, Randall Newton added. Google's Android is interesting, and so Grabert might begin developing for it.

Mr Graebert handed out copies of their newest CAD software, named Ares (and pronounced "aries"). I'll have more about it in a future issue of upFront.eZine.

Core ODA Platform Components

Sergey Slezkin is head of programming in the ODA's Russian offices, and began with this joke-warning about hiring Russians: "Within days, or months if he is less brave, a Russian programmer will tell you that your code needs to be completely rewritten."

He's giving us detailed information on aspects of DirectDWG, such as how its repair function works, which detects and repairs 100+ error types.

In some ways, some small parts of this conference is a bit of a repeat of last fall's IntelliCAD Technical Consortium conference in Athens, because there was a fair amount of info from the ODA. 

Open Design Alliance Conference - Day 1

Okay, so here we are in Leiden, The Netherlands for the ODA's first annual conference. I've got Randall Newton typing at high speed on his Mac to the left of me, and Deelip Menezes across the aisle in the hotel conference room.

We're listening to ODA CTO Niel Peterson outlinning all of the software the ODA produces, along with their capabilities. This is no longer *just* the DWGdirect people. For instance, allit takes to add ACIS to your CAD software is to get a license from Spatial; the ODA has done all the work getting its libraries working with ACIS solids modeling -- including creation, rendering, and editing 3D solid models.

But not just ACIS. They also handle rendering of Parasolid data in DGN files and have a lightweight 3D facet modeler.

Mr Peterson's history is pretty interesting, as he is candid on the ODA's triumph's and disappointments -- like the member who last week finally updated from 6-year-old DWG code to the latest code

The Platform

To begin the first day of this 3-day conference, ODA president Arnold van der Weide announced that the Open Design Alliance will no longer talk about "libraries." From now on, the term is "the platform."

Too grandious? Not when you sit through Mr Peterson's presentation and all the software available from the ODA. Next format to be supported: PDF.

The organization has 2,000 members, and this quarter grew 10% over a year ago.

(I'll have more in next week's upFront.eZine.)

Q&A

Mr Menezes asked where the ODA sees itself in 5 years time. 

Answer: The ODA hopes for 10% annual growth. It also hopes that Autodesk stops seeing ODA as a threat, but instead as a partner -- especially since the ODA has its DWG platform working in the Mac.

I asked what was meant by the ODA's aim: "To develop a platform for technical graphic applications," because "technical software is pretty broad, and could include diagramming software like Visio-- "and PhotoShop," added Mr Newton.

Answer: "Yes." The ODA feels it can do much more than just CAD software, and that a Visio-like program is possible.

Commentary

We'll see. I recall when Visio decided they were going to be dominant in technical graphics, and then crashed'n burned in its first attempt to go beyond diagramming -- recall IntelliCAD? Even Autodesk had a similar plan in the mid-1990s, branching out to PowerPoint-like software, Chaos software, clip art, etc, all handled by the now-defunct Autodesk Retail Products division in Bothell Washington.

OTOH, those missteps resulted in significant impacts on the CAD industry. Out of Visio's "mistake" in buying IntelliCAD came the ODA and ITC (IntelliCAD Techncial Consortium).

Time for lunch; talk to you later.

PS: Next year's conference will be in Florida.

(Disclosure: The ODA provided me with transportation, accomodation, some meals, and a plaque in recognition of upFront.eZine's 600th issue.)

Countdown to Leiden - T Minus 0 Days

I fly so much that I find a phobia spreading over me in the days leading up to departure. The phobia is a feel of dread, because I've experienced so many screwups over the years. It's that racing through airport hallways -- or worse, stuck in an excruciatingly slow security lineup -- as I undertake another desperate and ultimately failed attempt to catch a connection: that wears me down the most.

I love traveling, especially overseas; once I am sitting in the airport departure lounge, the phobia leaves me.

Last night, 24 hours before departure, I began struggling with Air Canada's online check-in system. I was reminded of the words of Paul who warned against making definite plans for the future, such as, "We will go to such and such a city next week." In his case, he figured that God might have other plans before then; in my case, it was Air Canada's computer system.

Promptly at 5:20pm, I attempted to check-in through aircanada.com. It didn't work. Over the next 14 hours, I tried every so often. The part that puzzled me was that I could get part way through the check-in process before being kicked off with the uninformative "We are sorry..." message. Each time, it occurred at a different stage.

Since the process broke down at random places, I began to wonder if the problem was with Air Canada's computer, rather than something going wrong at my end.

This morning I finally got through all the way. The flight to London looks absolute jammed full -- ugh. London to Fankfurt looks quite empty -- no wonder BMI canceled its flight on us, forcing us to route through Frankfurt to get to Amsterdam.

I changed a set of seats so that my daughter and I sit nearer each other. (Our reservations are not linked, because she is flying on my United points). I printed off my boarding passes. I printed off hers.

Wait a minute! For the 3-legged trip, I only have two passes, while she has all three. I recheck my reservation online, and Air Canada has me down for only two legs. Gulp.

I called Air Canada's reservation line. The agent noted that other customers had also been calling to complain of the online check-in being flaky. He told me that their computer system has a limited number of requests it can handle, and so might be overloaded. Welcome to 2009.

He confirmed that I was in the system for all three legs, but that I'd have to get the third boarding pass at the airport. I asked if he could assign seating for the third leg, but he could not see our trip's two Lufthansa legs on his system -- odd, since I was able to see them through their Web site.

Eight hours to go before the phobia leaves me.