It is Alive in the Lab

Try AutoCAD, Inventor, and Revit on your Windows 7 system without installing them

Autodesk Labs just released an update of its Application Trials Service. Also known as Project Twitch, this technology preview lets you try our flagship products over the internet without the need to download or install them on your computer. Right now, users can try AutoCAD 2010, Inventor 2010, Revit Architecture 2010, and soon Maya 2010 (stay tuned for the next update of the service). This update provides the much anticipated support for Windows 7 (32- and 64-bit) along with some core improvements to the technology. Please give it a try and tell us what you think at labs.trials@autodesk.com. Frederic Loranger, Autodesk Labs

Project Twitch Down for a small Maintenance Window Today

Project Twitch will be unavailable at 9:30 am Thursday, November 11, 2009 PT for an upgrade to the application service. Stay tuned for more details about the upgrade…

Cloud Services You Need

[This is Ben Cochran again writing for Scott while he is on Sabbatical.]

For years now, languages, tools and platforms have been making the creation of web-based services easier and more robust. Some of these are IIS, Apache, Tomcat, Java, .NET, WCF, PHP, Ruby on Rails and the list goes on and on and … 

Until recently deploying and hosting these services had been difficult and expensive. This is because any service of value needs to be dependable.  Otherwise, who would use it? I personally have come to expect web services to be highly available. For example, I love on-line banking, but if my bank had flaky on-line services, I would change banks without thinking twice. Thankfully, that is not the case for my bank.

Cloud based services are generally a collection of connected dependent systems that include storage, databases, security, auditing, monitoring and more. The whole system is only as reliable as the weakest link. Traditionally, making these services reliable required lots and lots of hardware. Each server needs to have redundant power supplies, redundant disks, redundant network, redundant load balancers and redundant storage. Then the data-center that houses all this equipment needs to be redundant. Does this sound a little redundant?  With all this equipment, hardware failure is inevitable, requiring teams of IT people to keep everything running smoothly.

The result is that many companies think twice about building scalable reliable services. Companies that do have the needed IT infrastructure are often times not flexible enough to try out new ideas. They require a retooling to support different and out of the box services.  All of this makes the cost of exploring new web based services expensive and risky, for many too risky to try the next crazy idea.

This is changing! With cloud hosting services from companies like Amazon, Microsoft and Google providing the backend systems on an as-needed bases the initial cost is a fraction of what it was. For example, servers, load balancers, network, reliable backed up storage and databases are rented by the hour or gigabyte. Instead of buying truckloads of expensive redundant hardware in hopes that a new cloud service idea is successful, companies can spend almost nothing to try out new ideas. If the new idea takes off, the backend systems scales up for the demand. Companies need only pay for resources that are actually used.

Labs had been experimenting with new and interesting cloud services like:
http://labs.autodesk.com/technologies/dragonfly/
http://labs.autodesk.com/technologies/draw/
http://labs.autodesk.com/technologies/freewheel/
http://labs.autodesk.com/technologies/showroom/
and more recently http://labs.autodesk.com/technologies/trials/

What new cloud services are useful to you?  What are your crazy ideas?

- Ben Cochran

Project Twitch now runs on Windows XP x64 and Vista x64

[Frederic Loranger here as a guest writer while Scott Sheppard is on sabbatical]  ®

Project Twitch is a technology preview that lets you try AutoCAD® 2010, Inventor® 2010, Revit® Architecture 2010, and soon Maya® 2010 over the internet without the need to install these applications on your computer. A small application called the Autodesk Trials takes care of the communication between our servers and your computer. This small client originally supported only Windows® XP and Windows Vista™.

Since we first launched Project Twitch, many of you have asked our team to consider adding support for other flavors of the Windows Operating Systems. After doing some preliminary testing, we are happy to announce that we have now added Windows XP x64 and Windows Vista x64 on the list of available platforms.

Please give it a try and tell us what you think at labs.trials@autodesk.com

Frederic Loranger, Autodesk Labs

Project Twitch Range Expanded: can YOU connect?

 
[Brian Mathews here as a guest writer while Scott Sheppard is on sabbatical]

Originally when we launched Project Twitch (internet delivery of Application Trials), we had a requirement that participants be within 1,000 miles of our Santa Clara data center.  Our intent was to provide a desktop-like experience of doing a product trial of AutoCAD, Inventor, or Revit.

Now we have eliminated the 1,000 mile limit and replaced it with a network latency limit.  We have found that some people up to 2,500 miles away had network latencies that were better than people only 900 miles away.  So rather than base our requirement on distance, we are now using a more useful network test to measure your actual network latency to our data center.  The further you are from Santa Clara, the less likely the system will allow you in: but some of you will succeed.

This is the reason for Autodesk Labs: we want your feedback to help us improve the service for you!

If you haven't been able to try Project Twitch before, take 2 minutes out of your day and see if it lets you connect.  Take it for a spin.  Let us know what you think and send us an email at labs.trials@autodesk.com Thanks!

[Update:  ...and the answer is "no", you can't connect because I typed in the wrong URL!  I've now fixed it, sorry.]

The Latest Labs News

Hello - this is Ben Cochran. Scott is on sabbatical, and I've been invited to be a guest writer while he is out.

I wanted to let you know the latest additions and changes to Autodesk Labs.

• I just learned that the RDB Link Tool for Revit Family technology preview, originally set to expire on September 30, 2009 has been extended until January 1, 2010. Keep the feedback coming.

• UI Technology Preview for Autodesk® Moldflow® just posted to Autodesk Labs Today. Check out this streamlined UI.

• The Multi-threaded Solver helps Autodesk® Robot™ Structural Analysis take full advantage of multi-core systems.

- Ben Cochran
 

Football is a game of inches; SaaS is a game of miles

You too can help us test AutoCAD, Inventor, and Revit in the cloud.

On Saturday my undergraduate alma mater, University of Louisiana at Lafayette (ULL), played its rival school, Louisiana State University (LSU), in college football. LSU defeated ULL 31 to 3. That was to be expected since LSU is a larger school and is nationally ranked. What was unexpected is that ULL had the ball on the LSU 4 yard line with a first and goal and failed to score. ULL ran four plays up the middle and was stopped on the last play just inches from the goal. They say football is a game of inches, and I guess they are correct.

Re: system requirements for Project Twitch

I have seen many blog postings about the 1,000 mile limit for Project Twitch. The goal of Project Twitch is to let you run applications like AutoCAD, Inventor, Revit, and Maya remotely using the internet. In responding to some of the feedback we have received at labs.trials@autodesk.com, Autodesk Labs VP, Brian Mathews, has pointed out:

The only reason for the distance requirement is to make sure you have a good user experience: you are dealing with the laws of physics on network latency with distance. Other services often use more bandwidth than our solution, have more latency, have lower frame rates, and therefore might not give the same immersive experience. Other services work at any distance but have a degraded user experience that is more of a “remote desktop” experience rather than feeling like you are running locally. We believe (and are testing with customers) that our Project Twitch experience is much more like the real deal: higher frame rates, lower latency, more realism, less bandwidth. Rather than aiming at the convenience of remote access for occasional file access, we are shooting for a high quality experience. Thus the 1,000 mile limit essentially keeps your network latency around 35ms.

By the way, when I drew the green circle around the Bay Area to show the radius of allowable connections, it was not to scale. It was only to make a point. So yes I don't really expect anyone to test Project Twitch from a boat in the Pacific 999 miles off the coast of the Bay Area.

Keep that feedback coming in. We're learning a lot. As Shaan Hurley says "Are you twitching to try it?"

Evaluating internet latency while running design applications remotely is alive in the lab.

Autodesk Single Sign-On System Maintenance

Project Draw, Project Freewheel, Project Showroom, and Project Twitch rely on the Autodesk Single Sign-on login. This provides the convenience of having one user name and password for all things Autodesk. The other side of the coin is that when the Single Sign-on login is down, capabilities on these Labs services are reduced.

1. You cannot save your diagrams on Project Draw.
2. You can view your designs on Project Freewheel but cannot upload or delete designs.
3. You cannot save rooms on Project Showroom.
4. You cannot evaluate AutoCAD, Inventor, or Revit using the internet via Project Twitch.

The scheduled maintenance window will last until Sunday at 8:00 PM Pacific time. Enjoy your weekend. Read a book.

Try AutoCAD, Inventor, and Revit without installing them

What if your design application was in the cloud?

Autodesk Labs team members Eddy Kuo and Frederic Loranger have been hard at work creating an environment where you can run trial versions of AutoCAD, Inventor, and Revit on remote servers. At this point in the technology preview, we are looking for feedback on using our applications in this fashion. You can take one of our applications for a spin at:

Project Twitch: Autodesk Labs Application Trials Technology Preview

To try our design applications, you will need to download and install a small client application that is much smaller than our design applications. It is used to access our server. So although Project Twitch is not totally install-free, it does allow you to try AutoCAD 2010, Inventor 2010, and Revit Architecture 2010 without downloading these applications or requesting a DVD. You will need an Autodesk Labs Community login (a.k.a. Autodesk Single Sign-on also used for subscription and other communities) to participate in the technology preview.

The technology preview is not intended for production use. As such, you cannot upload your own files or save your work. Instead you fire up an application remotely, load a sample file, and view/modify it. Based on the technology involved, you need to be within 1,000 miles of the San Francisco Bay Area to participate in the technology preview - any farther than that and there would be too much internet latency for a pleasurable experience. (Hey I relocated just in time, but actually my old house was 725 miles from the data center so it worked there too.) You can let us know how it worked for you at labs.trials@autodesk.com.

I feel twitchy, oh so twitchy... Like a canary in a coal mine, evaluating software as a service is alive in the lab.

Autodesk Announces Expanded Support for Mac Users via Boot Camp

No, not that kind of Boot Camp.

Senior Public Relations Manager, Noah Cole, shared some interesting news with Autodesk bloggers,

Autodesk is now officially supporting Apple Boot Camp, a component of the Mac OSX operating system that enables customers to run Windows on their Apple Hardware, for users of AutoCAD 2010 software, 3ds Max 2010 software, 3ds Max Design 2010 software, Autodesk Inventor 2010 software, Autodesk Revit Architecture 2010 software, Autodesk Revit Structure 2010 software and Autodesk Revit MEP 2010 software. A growing number of Autodesk customers are working in environments with Apple hardware and have requested support from Autodesk to use our design and engineering applications on that platform. With Autodesk support for Boot Camp, customers can now run their favorite Mac applications and Autodesk applications on the same computer. This will also enable customers to run Autodesk applications at full speed on a Mac and leverage its native graphics capabilities. We know some customers have been successfully running their Autodesk software under Boot Camp for years, so we’re pleased to finally offer official support. See www.autodesk.com/mac for more details.

Boot Camp is a utility included with Mac OS X v10.5 (aka “Leopard”) that allows users to run Windows-based applications on their Macs. Users can run their Windows applications at native speed with full access to the Mac hardware processors, accelerated 3D graphics, and I/O connections. Users need to have an Intel-based Mac (ex: MacBook Pro, Mac Pro), Mac OS X Leopard, and a copy of the Windows OS (Windows XP 32 or Vista 32/64).

At this time Autodesk support for users on Apple hardware for these products is limited to Windows versions of these applications running via Boot Camp. In contrast, Autodesk currently offers seven native OS X Applications: The Alias family of products, Sketchbook Pro, Maya, Mudbox, Toxik, ImageModeler, and Stitcher. Autodesk is currently working to extend support for the same products currently supported via Boot Camp to a virtualization environment. This will enable users to operate their Autodesk applications alongside their Mac applications without requiring a reboot of their computer. We are considering a technology preview of a virtualization environment via Autodesk Labs.