This came across my inbox today from Jim Quanci, Director of the Autodesk Developer Network. If you are a coder interested in learning about our various product APIs - or aspire to be one, these dev camps are a great way to dive in head first. I may stop by since I am clearly in the "aspirational" camp!
Join us at Camp this Summer!
Announcing Autodesk AEC DevCamp (June 6-7)
Register by April 30th to get the $100 early bird discount!
DevCamps are held every other year where software developers like you can learn to get the most from your time and effort working with Autodesk platform technologies. The two industry specific Developer Camps include several tracks catering to the learning needs of beginner and expert software developers – as well as a business track for start-ups looking to develop and leverage their relationship with Autodesk. Come to Camp and get two days of face to face learning and help from Autodesk software engineers – the same Autodesk software engineers developing and supporting the Autodesk technology you work with every day.
You can also join us for a third day at “DevLab” where you can work on your hardest coding challenges with an Autodesk software engineer looking over your shoulder giving you immediate help and advice. Bring your laptop and work on your code as you’d normally do in your own office – the difference is that you have a team of DevTech experts (the same people who answer your questions through DevHelp Online) available to review your code if you’d like, answer your questions, and make suggestions.
Cloud and Mobile Classes
New for this year’s DevCamps are several classes on helping you get started developing apps based on Cloud and Mobile technologies. Learn how to build your first Cloud app integrated with your favorite Autodesk product – and how you can make it available “everywhere” through browser and mobile user interfaces. Have you been considering building your first app for the iPhone, iPad or Android device but holding back because of fear of lost hours thrashing while learning the new technology? DevCamp includes classes that will show you how to quickly and easily create your first “Hello World” app for iOS and Android - with a design and graphics twist.
AEC DevCamp, June 6-7 (outside of Boston)
You can attend beginner and expert classes on developing solutions with Autodesk® Revit® (all flavors including Server), AutoCAD® Civil 3D®, Autodesk® Infrastructure Map Server, Autodesk® Vault, Autodesk BIM 360, Autodesk Project Vasari, Autodesk® Green Building Studio®, Autodesk® Navisworks®, and several more Autodesk AEC technologies. Hear from Autodesk’s AEC Leadership including Vice President Jim Lynch. Learn firsthand about developing a new Cloud based business leveraging Autodesk technologies from the Co-Founder of Horizontal Systems (recently acquired by Autodesk) Jordan Brandt.
Complete list of classes being offered at AEC DevCamp found here.
Register to attend the AEC DevCamp here.
Optional AEC DevLab, June 8, requires a separate registration here
I know most of the readers of this blog are already Revit black belts. However, if you, or some of your colleagues, are new to the concept of energy modeling, you may want to consider tuning in for our Vasari Talk webinar on Wednesday at 11:30 Eastern (-5 GMT.) This is the first part of a three part series. We will begin by covering inputs, then analyzing and interpreting outputs and finally creating a simulation strategy for your project.
Apologies for the late notice, but we are recording the sessions. Past sessions are available on our wiki site as well. Hope to see you there!
_tom
We are happy to announce that, just after three months since the initial release, we have an update to Project Vasari on Autodesk Labs. We have been working hard to deliver on some features that we were unable to get to back in November, fixing bugs, and more importantly: delivering some new experimental analysis features. So text annotations, metric templates, and STL export are now available. We have also further isolated Vasari from potential Worksharing badness by automatically detaching a work-shared RVT file upon open.
Now on to the fun stuff. We have had the distinct pleasure of working with Dr. Andrew Marsh of Ecotect fame for this release. He has developed two prototype analysis features based on Ecotect technology. The Wind Rose tool allows you to visualize wind speed and direction data in your models for different seasons and times of day. The Planar Solar Radiation tool lets you perform solar radiation analysis in the external spaces within and around your site. Both of these tools continue the trend of visualizing analysis data directly inside a BIM. We also had the pleasure of working with an excellent team in our Shanghai office that has been porting over the Maya "Nucleus" physics engine to work with native Revit masses. In what I believe is an Autodesk Labs first, we have a coordinated launch of two Labs tech previews with one integrated in another. So now inside Project Vasari you can play around with applying real phsyical forces such as gravity and wind to mass surfaces!
Have you been using Project Vasari since the initial launch? Did you pass it along to some of your colleagues not yet initiated into Club Revit? One of our goals with Vasari is to introduce the concept of BIM and parametric modelling to a new audience that may be intimitated by Revit. I am curious to hear your about your experiences with this. Did this spur a larger conversation about BIM and analysis in your office?
_tom
There has been some perennial buzz on the Revit rotate tool. Each new person that learns the program has to learn this tool and its peculiarities so the topic persists. In this post I want to review the current behavior, the access points, and review some popular revamp proposals.
Rotate lives in the modify ribbon.
When activated there are three options:
The first click is the start point of the rotation and the second click the end point. Note: After clicking the first point of the rotation the temp dims listen so you can enter a distance via the keyboard in lieu of the second click.
This brings us to the main issue folks have with the tool: the center of rotation. The center is shown as a blue control that can be repositioned by dragging it to a new location. The problems are:
Figure - Default rotation centers (hosted door, component, group)
There are really two main proposals that have been discussed over the eons.
I'll share my opinion.
(1.) Simple and while it may mean an extra-click in some cases clicks are just part of performance. It's proven that a person can make dozens of clicks in the same time it takes another to cognitively process a situation and then respond. It follows industry patterns including other Revit patterns such as the nearby "Scale" tool. Some snapping would need to be implemented such as center of Group unless it's not needed.
(2.) Provides a convenient way to place the center but is still as discoverable as the current control drag method. New users would be unlikely to discover it. Placing the point instead of dragging it should be better.
Another variation is to employ approach (1) but offer a snap to get the current behavior where Revit calculates the center. We could also make some better choices such as choosing the family origin, remembering a repositioned center for the active session ect. My concern would be implementing a dozen tweaks to the current behavior will not address the most pressing issue and cost more than just implementing a three-click behavior.
Note: the option rotate after placement would follow the same behavior as the rotate tool and the shortcut to rotate using the spacebar would be unaffected.
Bring on the comments.. Additional ideas or feedback on the proposals listed here are welcome.
_erik
Last week inside the factory we held our (mostly) weekly design pinup. These lunch time pinups give interaction and product designers the opportunity to pin up an unfinished design and have others throw darts. You know the drill. This particular pinup was not focused on a particular interface or feature design. Instead, we brainstormed on what constitutes the absolute essential skills for first-time Revit users to learn. Our colleagues in the Media & Entertainment division pioneered the concept of Essential Skills Movies back in 2002 when they released the Personal Learning Edition of Maya. This was a free version intended to introduce the product to new audiences. During usability testing, the user research team noticed common problem areas that made users stumble and sometimes even abandon learning the product. The team distilled these issues into seven 60 second movies that introduce the most essential skills needed to have a successful first learning experience. It is interesting to note, we have been talking a lot about in-canvas and more direct model interactions vs. "traditional" user interfaces such as toolbars, ribbons and menus. The problem is, our industry has not standardized most "direct" interactions, so they remain hidden to users. This technique is a nice way of lowering that initial steep learning curve and introducing features that may be, by there nature, hard to discover.
We decided that this method was intriguing and deserved some thought on how it could be applied to Revit. Below is the list we came up with. Note: the ultimate goal is to get this down to no more that seven movies. And each should be no longer that 60 seconds. The Maya team has done a lot of research and found that this combination of quantity and length strikes the right balance. In your experience learning and/or teaching Revit, which items would you add? Remove? Modify?
An update on a couple of small interface changes related to Ceilings. In 2010 with the ribbon we received more than one question about "What happened to the automatic ceiling placement?". The answer turned out to be nothing - just a trick of the eye. The confusion was understandable on analysis.
In 2009 you would enter the Ceiling command and start clicking away (more on that below). While in the command there was an unassuming contextual button in the option bar called "Sketch". This would allow you to enter a sketch mode rather than get the automatic flood behavior.
In 2010 this button moved to the ribbon and got a lot more attention..so much that many more people pressed it rather than stay in the "automatic mode".
Those who have taught Revit will know people often overlook the option bar despite all reminders - perhaps because it blends in with the toolbars. The fix was simple enough. The next 2010 update, and subsequenty 2011, indicated the current state next to the Sketch option as a toggle. There is actually no way to press "Automatic Ceiling" and the command is just the same "Ceiling" command yet it solved the issue by indicating the state.
oh yes....the other change is if you click more than once in the same place with the Ceiling tool in automatic mode you now get a warning. This was an issue going way back. We did have warnings for components but not items that were sketch based. No more piles of ceiling elements or floors for that matter.
_erik
Consistency is an interesting topic in design. Its often spoke that improving it is a worthwhile pursuit in its own sake but in reality its much more subtle. The cookie cutter suburbs that now comprise large swaths of the U.S. might have been justified on some levels but often fail their eventual inhabitants. Lost was the pleasing diversity represented by vernacular building styles and common sense mixed zoning that create lively walkable communities. Much of new urban planning is a re-discovery of proven ideas that were casually tossed aside in the later half of the last century.
A co-worker Chauncey Wilson wrote a good summary of this topic applied to interaction design on a sister blog titled "The Consistency Conundrum". I recommend it.
In testing Revit and other products and also in my teaching I've seen many places where consistency improves learning by providing a scaffold via interaction patterns. A new feature can be understood by leveraging a known feature. In some cases the interaction pattern may not even be that great but once learned tasks are completed without trouble.
In the 2009 release there was a quiet effort to make our open and save dialogs more consistent. I placed some animated GIFs on a separate page (less annoying) showing the differences from 2008. In some instances it was just a layout fix but in others extra dialog bits were moved to occur before or after the save dialogs to better fit the work-flow and not overload the person performing the task with too many decisions.
To close I want to solicit comments regarding:
P.S. Please no stories of short inebriated mythical celtic creatures. I'm sympathetic and heard them all by now. I promise that bugger is on a strict coffee regiment and a cab has been called.
_erik
Although it is pretty, the new Revit user interface goes much deeper than just the surface visuals. When we embarked on the redesign back in the summer of '07, the AEC Product Design teams (consisting of representatives from the three Revit products, AutoCAD Architecture, AutoCAD MEP, and Civil3D) got together with the larger Autodesk Platform team and established design goals for this project:
Learnability
To accomplish the fist two goals, we needed to reduce the complexity of the UI. That is not to say we reduced the complexity of the product itself. Let's face it, our products are powerful and with power comes complexity, which is not an inherently bad thing. The problem is that the common impetus has been to give the user as many options up front as possible. This design approach, combined with an legacy Windows UI system (menus and toolbars), has resulted in menus like Modeling menu at right. Not only is this way too many items to scan efficiently but most of these commands were replicated on the design bar.
To address this redundancy, the AEC design teams established a rule: There Can Be Only One, or TCBOO (I think someone on our team must be a big Highlander fan.) This means a single location for a tool. Whereas the old user interface had two, sometimes more, locations for a single command. Our ribbon design is a task-focused, hierarchical organizational system. In such systems, it is best to avoid too much cross-referencing, or it becomes increasingly difficult for the user to find what they need. (See Rosenfeld and Morville's book Information Architecture for more on this. A relevant excerpt can be found here.)
Lets take as an example the old Basics tab. Some users we tested indicated they liked Basics. But when pressed, they usually conveyed a story about not being able to find something as they grew with the product. A little known fact: Basics was originally designed to make the product easier to demonstrate; the marketing guy would not have to flip around too much during the demo. In reality, Basics becomes a crutch. After using it for a while, user find themselves asking, "Hmm, Floor is on Basics, but Floor by Face is not. Is it on the Massing tab or the Modeling Menu or somewhere else? " This results in a lot of wasted searching - even after learning where the tool is located.
TCBOO lead to a lot of hard decisions. For instance, we debated a lot about whether "Component" is a modeling tool or something you insert. We ultimately placed it on Home because analysis showed that Component is usually accessed with other modeling tools, not while inserting. Of course, rules were made to be broken, right? We found some minimal cross-referencing to be beneficial depending on specific workflows. Can you find any examples where we duplicated a tool on the main ribbon (not counting contextual tabs)?
A big part of obtaining both the learnability and updated identity goals was related to the design of the new icons, which we will discuss in a future post.
_tom
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