Friday, February 23. 2007

Autodesk 2008 Product Line Release Dates

Just in case you want to be first on your block... Autodesk didn't give dates at our recent press gig and just yesterday I read on a GIS site that Map3D would appear in March. I'm pleased someone told Ralph Grabowski what's going on.

The ones about which GISers might care should appear:

Friday, March 23
AutoCAD 2008

Thursday, April 5
AutoCAD Map 3D 2008

Monday, April 16
AutoCAD Civil 3D 2008
AutoCAD Land Desktop 2008

Tuesday, April 17
Design Review 2008

Friday, April 20
Raster Design 2008

Posted by Adena Schutzberg in Autodesk, Autodesk Press Day 2007 at 07:41 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) |

Tuesday, February 20. 2007

Podcast: Directions on the News - February 20, 2007

This week's podcast explores Trimble's latest acquistion, new offerings from Autodesk's Geospatial Division, World Wind 1.4, voice enabled navigation and spend some time on the implications on the new Google KML Search, news from 3GSM and the end of the search for Jim Gray. The podcast is 12 minutes (~ 4 Mb) and was recorded February 19, 2007.

Posted by Adena Schutzberg in Google, Open Source, Autodesk, Surveying, Directions on the News Podcast, Autodesk Press Day 2007 at 01:00 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) |

Tuesday, February 13. 2007

What's New in Map3D 2008

Due out later this spring, Map3D boasts a few key enhancement areas.

1) Performance - Autodesk has "tuned up" the Feature Data Objects (FDOs) to increase speed. How much up to about seven times.

2) Do More GIS with FDO Data - Now it's possible to do all the geoprocessing that once was only possible on DWGs including things like buffering.

3) More FDOs - Third parties are producing new FDOs (both proprietary and open source) and they all behave the same way. Among them the open source OGR FDO which supports ESRI's personal geodatabases.

4) Data management - Map now includes support for metadata (think ArcCatalog). The metadata can be stored in the DWG (and only read by things that read them) or dumped out in XML (for use in other systems).

Mark Christian also noted that there are number of enhancements in the docs aimed at getting users to do more with Map. These include resources like "GIS Skills for Engineers" aimed at making sure users know how to do basic practices. This follows last year's "Best Practices for Managing Geospatial Data."

Disclosure: Autodesk covered travel, lodging, food for me to attend World Press Day. I also received corporate gifts.

Posted by Adena Schutzberg in Autodesk Press Day 2007 at 17:26 | Comment (1) | Trackbacks (0) |

Why Geo Folks Should Get Excited About Design Review 2008

Well, first it's free... but second, the 2008 version will support georeferencing. What means is that any Autodesk product that supports georeferencing (Map 3D, Civil, Land Desktop) can write out georeferenced DWF files. Those are then read into Design Review in those coordinates. There's a bottom display of the cursor coordinates in the native system or Lat/Lon (dec degrees or DMS).

The user can then use the redlining tools to mark up the DWF, "plop down" a point at keyed in coordinates and do real time tracking on the DWF with an external GPS.

Autodesk has made DWF and Design Review geo-friendly! Thank you!

Disclosure: Autodesk covered travel, lodging, food for me to attend World Press Day. I also received corporate gifts.

Posted by Adena Schutzberg in Autodesk, Autodesk Press Day 2007 at 15:13 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) |

Monday, February 12. 2007

ADSK Press Day: Press Questions

The shortened Q and A for the press after serveral hours of presentations was cut short since we were running late. But some were interesting. I'm paraphrasing both Qs an As.

Q: What's up with dealers only being able to sell in one vertical? They can't serve customers who need more!
A: Yes, expect to see us broadening what they can sell across our internal divisions.

Q: Will you price products such that they are more affordable in developing countries?
A: We already do. In fact, now we are getting complaints that folks in the UK can't compete in India because of software costs.

Q: What's the value proposition for geospatial at Autodesk?
A: We focus on public works/telco/utils an unlike others do geospatial analysis during design.
We make integration easier. We want to capture "volumization" that is, the things that are done the same across the world (water runs downhill everywhere). Others don't do that.

Q: Autodesk is big on Building Information Management (BIM) but not on Product Lifecycle Management. Why?
A: PLM is really a marketing answer for the three companies that do PLM (they are all mechanical companies most of us in GIS won't know) to serve the fininacial community, aka investors. We've yet to see a company that needs PLM! When consulting is 90% of a job and software 10% one of two things is going on:
(1) the softawre is no good
(2) the client is trying to do something that won't work

Disclosure: Autodesk covered travel, lodging, food for me to attend World Press Day. I also received corporate gifts.

Posted by Adena Schutzberg in Autodesk Press Day 2007 at 20:39 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) |

Autodesk Shows off Hardware

Folks going to the ESRI User Conference are now prepped to see cool hardware after the "Touch Table" appeared one year and the "Terrain Table" another. I believe today was the first time I saw hardware showed off that way on an Autodesk stage. Being the press we didn't ooh and ah, but the two offerings do warrant at least a "cool" from me.

One was simply a large touch screen mounted on the wall. With familiar gestures an Autoesk "fellow" zoomed in and turned a 3D model. It was sort of the touch table, but on a wall. Autodesk apparently has made that tool available to a few clients and is looking for partners to build it. (We first got a "we've not made it available" from CEO Carl Bass, then got a "no, clients have it" from CTO Jeff Kawalski. Get the story straight, guys!)

More interesting to me was the "Boom Cam" in-house only toy. Imagine a flat screen monitor hung on a boom so you can move it where you like. Now consider it your window to look at a 3D model. Move the boom low to look at the wheels of the car. Come up to see the door. A control even opened the door so you could navigate inside the car. The idea there, said Carl Bass, is to make using any software that intuitive.

Disclosure: Autodesk covered travel, lodging, food for me to attend World Press Day. I also received corporate gifts.

Posted by Adena Schutzberg in Autodesk Press Day 2007 at 20:28 | Comments (2) | Trackbacks (0) |