Project Freewheel 1.0.6 Now Available

Autodesk Labs is happy to announce the availability of Project Freewheel 1.0.6. One of our technical leads in Shanghai, Sydney Xu, pushed the new build to the server last night. Project Freewheel 1.0.6 includes:

It's a new look. Four out of five dentists surveyed may recommend sugarless gum to their patients who chew gum, but five out of five dentists surveyed liked the new look.

OLD

NEW

As mentioned in Consistency of look and feel extends to SaaS blog posting, Project Freewheel now uses the same icons as Autodesk applications. The command names below the icons have been replaced by tool tips. The result is a leaner, meaner UI that you can embed in HTML pages on your sites.

In keeping with the new UI, Project Freewheel got a new viewing cube. Recall that the cube is Project Freewheel's way to provide instant feedback as you orbit your 3D designs. The new cube was conceived by Eddy Kuo whom many of you know as our multi-touch developer. The new cube gives you a better sense of 3D orientation with your model. It looks crisper too.

Project Freewheel now supports transparent backgrounds when 2D sheets of your designs are embedded as shapes in Project Draw, You can publish your design from AutoCAD, Inventor, Revit, Design Review, DWF Writer, etc. - anyway you wish to create a DWF file, upload it to Project Freewheel, and include it as part of the diagrams you create with Project Draw. If you need your sheet to show up in Project Draw with a transparent background, Project Freewheel will now accommodate your request.

Hopefully my humorous double entendre of Will it blend? (the Blendtec site and the 2D sheet data blending into the Project Draw shape) is not lost on everyone. :-) Personally I think the physical suspension mechanism would defeat that Blendtec blender. It would not blend. (Yes I know it's bad when you have to explain your own jokes.)

Thanks to your diligence, we fixed a defect that crept in. Project Freewheel only requires that you login to the Autodesk Labs community when you want to upload a file or make a comment as part of a collaboration session. That way Project Freewheel knows whose file is whose or who said what. Well the previous build was requiring login to view designs when links were sent via the email feature. We have made this correction. Now users who view your designs do not have to login. Things are back to normal.

So check out the new Project Freewheel and let us know what you think: [email protected]. You can also post to the discussion forum, http://discussion.autodesk.com/forum.jspa?forumID=251, or post comments to this blog entry. We read everything we get in any form.

Evolving our software as a service solution for viewing design data using just a browser is alive in the lab.