Friday, April 22, 2011
Help Shape the Future of AutoCAD
The CAD Geek Blog: "Having just wrapped up a series of 2012 Autodesk Product Launch events, it’s hard for me to even start thinking about next year’s release. Of course, for Autodesk to meet their annual release cycle, you better believe they’ve already started thinking about AutoCAD 2013 and beyond. In fact, Autodesk is currently conducting a survey on what looks like it could lead to a very cool drawing compare feature in a future release of AutoCAD.
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3 comments:
Was excited about the article, then took the survey.
I thought it was going to be about user input in forming future versions of AutoCAD. And while this is true to some point and I'm sure happens (I don't think Autodesk is making arbitrary changes for future releases) it wasn't what I expected. I thought it was going to be a direct feedback survey, instead it was about how you use AutoCAD to compare different versions of different drawings. Which is one way users use the software.
Makes a lot of sense for us for AutoCAD to get smarter about what it is showing us. By the time a drawing goes to the floor it could have multiple incarnations from designer's CAD to the tech design which could include multiple people working in on it at different times. The survery was about how you'd like AutoCAD to help you notice changes in the drawings, either visually, making a table, tracking the differences as XREFs or other options. Might be a good thing to have the software we use track the changes that a drawing goes through. If something changes incorrectly (a flat too short say) AutoCAD will be able to see the change. It'll still be up to the human's to see the error but might be nice to have the software show you that the designer drew it at 10' but it's now 8'. We can find out where that change occured (mistake, meeting, material restriction, etc.)
Very interesting indeed. It's always nice to hear about companies reaching out to their users to insure that they are delivering them the type of product they want to use. I suppose one concern with these surveys is that if not everyone puts their 2 cents in, then AutoDesk can't have the best information for making future changes to software. It's sorta like voting/the democratic process. It relies on people donating their time to make the user experience better for everyone.
As to the actual functionality: it sounds exciting. Tracking all of the changes, and finding intuitive ways to display that information is certainly useful information. Finding out where changes have been made and why is certainly a welcomed functionality... if implemented well... now onto the survey.
I was really existed about getting to take a survey about how to make AutoCAD better and make it better for the things that I do on an everyday bases. Like fixing the mac version of the program to work and not crash all of the time. And make it work a lot better. And then I took it and the thing was about things changing and comparing drawings. I don’t find myself doing much of now but i may see myself doing a lot of that out in the real world and the things changing and needing to know that they have change and keeping up to date. Overall it was a big upset that they did not have a section saying what would you like us to work on for the next version of AutoCAD.
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