Firefox 3 Add-on for Autodesk Design Review Now Available

Fox in the wild

Many of you like to embed your designs in your web pages. This allow visitors to your sites to view your designs, plus pan, zoom, and orbit to see more than what could be accomplished with just a picture.

Project Freewheel makes this possible using HTML that looks like:

<iframe scrolling="no" width="800" height="600"
src="https://freewheel.labs.autodesk.com/dwf.aspx?
path="http://labs.blogs.com/articles/mouse.dwf">
iframe>

The items in red are what you change specific to your needs. Project Freewheel does not require anything to be installed since it uses just the browser, but the DWF file does have to be publicly available or uploaded to the Project Freewheel server.

Historically, in cases where you rely on your site visitors having Autodesk Design Review and Internet Explorer, HTML could be used that looks like:

<OBJECT CLASSID="clsid:A662DA7E-CCB7-4743-B71A-D817F6D575DF"
 CODEBASE=http://www.autodesk.com/global/dwfviewer/installer/
 DwfViewerSetup.cab#version=7,0,0,928
 WIDTH="800" HEIGHT="600">
<PARAM NAME="Src"
 VALUE=http://labs.blogs.com/articles/mouse.dwf>
</OBJECT>

Autodesk Design Review can be used for the internet as well as intranet-only situations.

I am happy to announce that a Firefox 3 add-on is now available on Autodesk Labs. Firefox 3 users can download the add-on from the Autodesk Labs site:

Firefox Add-on for Autodesk Design Review

Users who download and install this add-on can view HTML pages with designs embedded. If you are authoring a site and wish to allow visitors to your site who have Autodesk Design Review plus this add-on to see your designs embedded as part of your site, you would include HTML that looks like:

<OBJECT ID="ADR"
 TYPE="application/x-Autodesk-DWF"
 WIDTH="800" HEIGHT="600">
<PARAM NAME="dwffilename"
 VALUE="http://labs.blogs.com/articles/mouse.dwf">
</OBJECT>

We are excited to expand the embedding capability from Internet Explorer to Firefox 3. Autodesk Labs data shows that Firefox is growing in popularity:

Once you have done an install, if you would like to try it out, Software Architect, Kumar Mettu, has a test page.

http://www.filmboxnow.com/multibrowser.html

You can use the browser "View Source" capability to see how he used JavaScript to support Internet Explorer and Firefox 3 on the same HTML page. Thanks Kumar!

Reaching out to Firefox users is alive in the lab.