It is Alive in the Lab

Advanced Physics: Measure Hunt Extension

We were happy to see Project Draw used in education:

http://sites.google.com/a/penncharter.com/advanced-physics/Home/outline/unit-2-the-physics-toolbox/measure-hunt-extension

Cheers to Advanced Physics Instructor, Ms. Lorre L. Gifford, for using Project Draw in this way.

Project Draw 0.7.9 Now Available

Project Draw is our technology preview for creating designs using just a browser. It follows a software as a service model in that you don't need to install anything. You want to take advantage of the service - you use the service. You create diagrams by dragging and dropping a variety of resizable shapes. Recently we had a minor update to our Project Draw servers:

• Our support for Google Gears was updated to support the Firefox 3 browser. Now even those using the latest release of Firefox can work offline.
• Our email processing has been streamlined to make it more efficient. Messages that took one second to send now only take a fraction of a second. (OK, maybe we're the only ones excited by this.)
• Our copyright statements were updated to include 2009. (Autodesk Legal is probably the only one excited by this.)
• A few defect corrections were included. Thanks to all who provided the useful test cases and reported their issues. (Now this we can all be excited about.)

Updating one of our long standing software as a service technology previews is alive in the lab.

TiddlyWiki Drawing Plugin based on Project Draw

A Project Draw diagram embedded in a Wiki.

TiddlyWiki is a wiki-modeled software as a service application that people can use as a personal notebook. Project Draw is our technology preview of a software as a service application that people can use to create simple diagrams. Autodesk Labs Software Engineer, David Falck, found this:

TiddlyWiki Drawing Plugin based on Project Draw

We are excited to see Project Draw mashed up this way. Thanks to Michael Mahemoff for this informative video.

Celebrating the interoperability of software as a service solutions is alive in the lab.

Choosy Homeschooler: Free web-based vector drawing application for older homeschool students

Project Draw is a hit with older children who are home schooled:

Free web-based vector drawing application for older homeschool students

We are proud to be part of America's diverse educational system. If our marketing department gets wind of this, I can see the slogan now: Choosy Homeschoolers choose Project Draw. (OKAY, maybe not everyone remembers that JIF peanut butter commercial on American TV.)

I wanted to post a comment of thanks on the Choosy Homeschooler blog, but try as I might, I got into a "you must be logged in to leave a comment" infinite loop. So thanks for spreading the word Nikki Phipps.

Happy Holidays

Since I had a turkey for Thanksgiving, I figured I might as well do a Christmas tree for today.

Christmas Tree DWFx. Zoom in!

This tree brought to you by Project Draw and Project Freewheel. No trees were harmed in the creation of this diagram. Happy Holidays to all.

David Falck: Consolidated Login - More Wacker Drive than Big Dig

Autodesk Labs Software Engineer, David Falck, sent me this for the blog. Since the mass translation of old Project Draw users to the new system resulted in no loss of Project Draw data, I was happy to post it.

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Wacker Drive in Chicago is my absolute favorite place to drive in the United States. Besides being a picturesque double-decker road, it snakes in every direction - much to the chagrin of many Chicago visitors. It is an essential artery in the middle of downtown. If you need to get somewhere quickly by car, you're best route probably involves going underground on Lower Wacker. Wacker Drive has been featured in a lot of movies - everything from the Blues Brothers to the recent Batman films (this handy guide from the team at Everyblock http://chicago.everyblock.com/the-dark-knight-film-locations/). While my Honda looks nothing like the Bat Mobile, I can't help but pretend. ;)

Wacker Drive underwent a huge reconstruction effort a few years ago. I spent many a lunch hour peering into the construction pits, wondering how it was going to all turn out. The reconstruction was considered one of the most complex downtown transportation projects, yet was completed on time and under budget. And then you never heard about it again. Such is the price of a successful engineering project. Contrast this with Boston's "Big Dig" which was admittedly a bigger and more ambitious project, but nonetheless made national news by being 5 years late and billions of dollars over-budget.

Why is it we hear so little about the successful engineering implementations? Take our consolidated login project we recently completed here at Autodesk. I had a very small role in this massive project, but I got to work with several key engineering and QA teams that worked tirelessly day and night for months to tie all of the disparate accounts across Autodesk into one seamless login system. The project was managed and implemented successfully - so much so, that most users saw little difference when they logged in after it went live. No fanfare, no ribbon cutting, just lots of happy users (with a fewer login accounts to manage), getting to where they want to go faster and more efficiently.

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Our consolidated login project was very successful. We have received very few problem reports at labs.freewheel@autodesk.com and labs.draw@autodesk.com. We were able to manually correct the handful of "victims" of the mass processing. We are happy about that.

Project Draw 0.7.8 Now Available

In a previous release of Project Draw, we began the work of integrating Project Draw with Project Freewheel. This allows you to publish your designs as DWF files, manage them with Project Freewheel, and include them as shapes in Project Draw. You can use Project Freewheel to select a desired model or sheet, pan, zoom, or orbit to get the desired view of your design. You can use Project Draw to reference that design as a shape that is part of a larger workflow or any other diagram you create with Project Draw. It's a match made in heaven.

Project Draw 0.7.8 includes:

1. When working with your 2D designs as shapes in Project Draw using Project Freewheel, Project Draw allows your designs to have a transparent background and maintains the correct aspect ratio of your design as you resize the containing shape:
   
   
   
   Project Draw adds the proper "white space" to avoid distorting your design that would occur if it were stretched to fill the shape.

2. At Autodesk Labs Marketing Manager, Amanda Collins', urging, we've added some getting started pages for Project Draw. Though the select a shape and drag and drop interface is pretty easy to use, it never hurts to get people off on the right foot. This includes a list of what's changed and what's new in each release. For those of you keeping score at home:

   Date	Release	New or changed
   10/21/08	0.7.8	improved Project Freewheel integration, getting started pages, revamped file menu, improved DWF property control
   09/21/08	0.7.7	integrated the Autodesk consolidated login
   07/24/08	0.7.6	Project Freewheel integration, API Key Generation web site, Draw API samples
   06/26/08	0.7.5	deleteAllSessions API
   05/31/08	0.7.4	added API
   04/08/08	0.7.3.1	install cleanup. DWFx, help file, defect corrections
   04/03/08	0.7.3	DWFx, image links, connection pooling, Ctrl-s, help file, defect corrections
   03/06/08	0.7.2	no Google Gears for Firefox 3 Beta, easier color palette, alpha export to DWF, bug fixes)
   02/15/08	0.7.1	better Google Gears, international server locations, bug fixes, gallery submission link)
   01/30/08	0.7	Google Gears, multiple selections, color palette
   11/20/08	0.6.2	metric grid size, email dialog box size, email instructions, My Diagrams
   11/19/08	0.6.1	email drawings, better connectors
   11/08/07	0.6	rotational grid, IE popup blocker workaround, minimize properties pane
   10/31/07	0.5.2	file deletion fix
   10/26/07	0.5.1	login changes
   10/24/07	0.5	technology preview launch

   The team has been quite nimble.

3. The File menu has been updated to make working with DWF files easier to find. Thanks for the feedback that using the DWF ball as an icon was not the best choice.
   
   BEFORE:
   
   
   NOW in Project Draw 0.7.8:
   
   
   Feedback like this is exactly why we preview technologies on Labs.

4. Software engineer, David Falck, updated the Project Draw UI to allow easier ways to work with DWF files once you have included them in Project Draw.

   

   In addition, you can now see your design embedded in the shape as you manipulate it using Project Freewheel:

   

David Falck sent me a great graphic that summarizes what's in this release:

To take a test drive of Project Draw, see:

http://draw.labs.autodesk.com

Extending software as a service technology previews at a fast and furious pace is alive in the lab.

Project Draw helps happy couple with room arrangement

One of our developers on the Autodesk Seek team sent me a note the other day:

Scott,
Amy and I are looking at a new place and were trying to figure out if our furniture will fit in a particular room. At first we were trying to draw approximate sized boxes on the paper floorplan and quickly became frustrated, since we couldn't tell if the sizes were correct, but then I remembered Project Draw. In less than a few minutes I had the room set up with correct sizes and had moved in our furniture. I used an L shaped room and using handles molded it to meet our weird room angle. I used the scale property to set dimensions correctly and brought in blocks to represent furniture sizes and locations. We realized that our current guest bed will make the space look too small and decided to dump the bed and buy a sleeper (hence helping the economy).
Regards,
Shelly

Eating our own dog food is alive in the lab.

Project Draw User Consolidated Login and Google Gears

Autodesk Labs Software Engineer, David Falck, shared a story regarding some Project Draw feedback from Amsterdam.

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The Project Draw (http://draw.labs.autodesk.com) users were migrated successfully during last weekend's consolidated login deployment. The percentage of users whose diagrams were migrated successfully was 97.6%! Of those accounts that did not get migrated, it appears most fall into the following categories:

• Abandoned accounts - a user saved diagrams to the Project Draw server in the past, but hasn't logged into labs.autodesk.com in more than 6 months.
• "Victims" - approximately 45 accounts were "victims" of the consolidated login implementation. Don't worry; it's not as bad as it sounds. It just means that the users had more than one labs.autodesk.com account, and they saved diagrams in a directory owned by an account that was not migrated. If you find yourself in this situation, let us know at labs.draw@autodesk.com, and we'll move your diagrams to the correct account.
• API accounts - these are folders of diagrams used by Draw API users.
• Dave's test accounts - it takes a massive authentication system replacement project to make Dave realize how many test accounts he really had on the Project Draw server. :-)

A few days ago, a really interesting (and unanticipated) issue was brought to our team's attention. One of our loyal users in Amsterdam took Project Draw (version 0.7.6) offline using Google Gears last Friday just before our big migration. When he tried to go back online on Tuesday, the Gears cache was incompatible with the latest version of Project Draw (version 0.7.7.CL) which takes advantage of the new authentication system. This issue can be resolved by clearing your Google Gears cache and refreshing your browser while using Project Draw. If you've gone offline before the migration and need to synch up with the latest release of Project Draw, here's how you can do it:

1. Click on the ONLINE button in the Draw toolbar - you should be prompted to enter your username/pwd if you're not already logged in.
   

2. If that doesn't work, you can clear the Google Gears cache. This can be done by going IE's Tools menu and clicking on Gears Settings. You can do the same thing in Firefox too.
   

3. Once you click on Gears Settings, you should see this:
   

4. Click on the "Remove" link and then the "Apply" button.

5. On your keyboard, hit F5 to refresh the browser. You should then see this:
   

6. Check the checkbox to allow Project Draw to use Gears, then hit "Allow" button.

7. If this doesn't work, you can always uninstall Google Gears from your machine, reinstall it, and then visit the Project Draw site once more.

Just to reiterate - no diagrams were harmed in the migration to the new login system! We have several copies of the Project Draw database and file system from pre-migration, so if you have any issues whatsoever, please let us know at labs.draw@autodesk.com. We'll work to make sure you get your diagrams back as soon as possible.

Being grateful that consolidated login migration was successful is alive in the labs.

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Thanks David.

Project Freewheel and Project Draw updated for new Autodesk Labs login

Project Draw 0.7.7 and Project Freewheel 1.0.7 were released yesterday to be compatible with the new Autodesk Labs consolidated login. Please feel free to give them a try. If you experience any problems, please let us know at labs.draw@autodesk.com or labs.freewheel@autodesk.com.