Project Draw 0.7.6 Now Available (features Project Freewheel integration)

Many of you have expressed your opinions that you feel Project Draw is a cool technology in the area of design software. For more information about Project Draw, see:

http://labs.autodesk.com/technologies/draw/

For those who don't need no stinkin' information, you can immediately take a test drive at:

http://draw.labs.autodesk.com

Yesterday we posted another update of Project Draw. Project Draw 0.7.6 includes the following:

• The big deal of the day is Project Draw-Project Freewheel integration. That's right. I am not making this up. Among other things, the Autodesk Labs team is responsible for the development of Project Freewheel and Project Draw, so we thought we would put them to together. You can now upload your designs from AutoCAD, Inventor, and Revit into Project Freewheel as DWF files and see those designs as editable images in Project Draw. In Project Draw, you treat them like any other image in that you can connect them to other shapes, draw on top of them, etc. When you double click on them, it brings up Project Freewheel so you can pan, zoom, orbit, etc. We are all giddy about this feature.
  
  

  For more information about Project Freewheel, see:

  http://labs.autodesk.com/technologies/freewheel/

  For those who don't need no stinkin' information, you can immediately take a test drive at:

  http://freewheel.labs.autodesk.com

• We tested Project Draw with Internet Explorer 8 BETA. There are a few quirks, but so far, so good.

Thanks to your enthusiastic testing, it also includes fixes for:

• Draw in Firefox 3 - Windows UI and Mac UI shapes created in Firefox 3 do not look right when opened in IE
• Draw in IE - when copying multiple shapes in canvas, zoom in and out makes copied shapes disappear
• Draw cannot use arrow keys in all text boxes in floating property box
• Draw in Firefox 3 - issue with zooming - after shape is placed on canvas, zoom does not work properly
• Draw in Firefox 3 - the font size selection drop-down is partially hidden by the vertical canvas ruler
• Draw in Firefox 3 - sometimes the blue selection box won't deselect
• Shapes with arcs drawn in Firefox 3 and then transformed into mmd (VML) in IE are not displaying correctly (Firefox 2 to IE is fine)
• Green "nice diagram" does not fit with the rest of the site and should be removed
  (Now there's some pinpointed feedback from a customer.)

As suggested by Pete Maxfield, to get started using your designs with Project Draw, look for the DWF icon that appears in the Project Draw menu:

In addition to these improvements exposed through the user interface, we've also been hard at work to help programmers who want to work with the application program interface, In fact, there's so many of you out there that we've set up a web-based process for obtaining a Project Draw API key:

http://draw.labs.autodesk.com/labsapi/index.jsp

For those of you who think you don't need no stinkin' API key, I'll just use the API, you do need an API key. Using the API allows you to manage your diagrams on your own servers. The API key site contains several API examples. So whether you are a user or a developer, Project Draw 0.7.6 has something for you.

Evolving our software as a service technology preview for creating designs is alive in the lab.