Category Archives: DWG

The BLADE video watchlist

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I did my third and final (for now) BricsCAD Unplugged webcast about BLADE last Wednesday. Here’s the video:

Before I dig into DCL, I start with a brief description of an absolutely brilliant feature that was added to BLADE in V19. If you code in LISP, you’ll love this feature.

Then I move on to some ancient history. Did you know that we can thank the far-sightedness of some slightly renegade Autodesk OS/2 developers in the early 1990s for the dialog boxes we use today? Did you know that you could program dialog boxes for AutoCAD for Mac in 1993 but you can’t today? Can you spot the items of interest in the background?

The rest of the video is dedicated to describing DCL programming and debugging, and I explain how BLADE is the best tool for that job using examples.

If you want to watch all three of the BLADE videos in a row (that’s 1 hour 49 minutes of viewing), Matt Olding has created a YouTube playlist for this series.

It has been an absolute pleasure working with the Bricsys people in putting this series together. Torsten Moses has informed me about yet another bunch of enhancements that are coming very soon to BLADE, so maybe you haven’t heard the last from me on this subject on BricsCAD Unplugged.

More BLADE videos

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As mentioned previously, In December I made a guest appearance on the BricsCAD Unplugged webcast series to discuss the LISP development environment, BLADE (YouTube link).

I made another appearance last week describing debugging using BLADE (YouTube link):

If you’re dealing with LISP code for AutoCAD and/or BricsCAD, you really should be doing it in BLADE. It’s the best development environment for AutoLISP/Visual LISP that you’re ever going to get.

I have another appearance scheduled for later today (13 February) in which among other LISPy things, I will be discussing using BLADE for DCL programming. Again, even if you’re AutoCAD-only, I believe this is worth a watch. BLADE is better for DCL programming, too.

Even if you’re AutoCAD-only and not a programmer, you might find my brief ancient history lesson of interest. Did you know that BricsCAD for Mac users can thank a far-sighted early 90s Autodesk OS/2 team for the dialog boxes they use today?

The BricsCAD Unplugged webcast broadcasts run on the Bricsys Facebook page and are then quickly transferred to YouTube. Today’s session will start at about UTC 14:15 (2:15 PM) on Wednesday, 13 February 2019 (click here for your local time)

Addendum – Why every AutoCAD CAD Manager should have a copy of BricsCAD – part 1, fixing drawings

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This post is an addendum to a post from June, Why every AutoCAD CAD Manager should have a copy of BricsCAD – part 1, fixing drawings. This post provides new information about useful functionality added in V19 of BricsCAD that is useful for any CAD Manager or power user who ever has problem DWG files to deal with. Yes, even if your site is still purely AutoCAD-based.

In this post I’ll describe the (inspector) LISP function. This was added in the V18 cycle but was significantly enhanced in V19. It’s probably the most useful LISP function you’ve never heard of.

Although it’s LISP, that doesn’t mean you have to be a programmer to benefit from it. If you’re a non-programming CAD Manager or power user, you can use it to work out what’s going on within any DWG you’re having problems with. You can use it to discover information about objects in the drawing; not just conventional entities, but also blocks, tables, dictionaries and so on. It even works with custom data.

I gave a brief demonstration of (inspector) in the last BricsCAD Unplugged episode about BLADE. However, you don’t need to use BLADE; just enter (inspector) at the command prompt, select an object and you’ll be presented with a dialog like this:

These dialogs are modeless, and you can have as many displayed as you like; you’re not limited to one. This dialog displays the same data in three different ways. At the top, it’s shown in traditional LISP assoc form, and by playing with the Expand controls you can vary the way in which this is pretty-printed. The bottom left pane shows the data in DXF form, which is probably easiest to read if you’re a non-programmer. If you’re more of an ActiveX person or you prefer to see the properties described with words rather than numbers, you’ll prefer the display on the bottom right, which shows the COM properties for the object.

If you want to select another object to inspect without calling (inspector) again, just use the [ > > ] button.

The grayed-out lines indicate data that is considered read-only. It’s important to note that this doesn’t mean it’s impossible to change the data, merely that the ways in which that data can be changed within a program is restricted. Generally, it means you can’t change the ActiveX properties directly, but there are various other means that can be employed in many cases.

The lists are somewhat interactive; double-click on an entity name and you’ll be given another inspector window for that entity. You can burrow down through the drawing database in this way, looking for the source of your mystery DWG problem. If you’re using it while programming, you can use it to work out what set of circumstances is causing your code to trip up in certain drawings.

The (inspector) function has an optional argument, and what it will accept is very flexible. If you pass an entity name to it, you will get the data for that entity displayed. The same principle applies for various ActiveX objects: pass it a layer table object and the appropriate data will be displayed.

Direct access is provided to various useful things from within BLADE using the pull-down menu Lisp+DCL > Browse DWG Database:

If you pick Browse Text Styles, you’ll see something like this:

Double-click on one of the text style items in the left pane and you will get this:

As you can see, this is very handy for tracking down issues both while programming and when diagnosing DWG problems.

Finally, I should note that there is potential for the inspector to provide even more power in future. Bricsys LISP guru Torsten Moses is investigating the possibility of allowing the inspector to modify data, not just inspect it. There’s potential danger there, but if Torsten can make that work safely then that would be another invaluable tool for any DWG-based CAD Manager.

As I stated in my original post, it’s definitely worth a CAD Manager’s while to do the quick download and install of an evaluation BricsCAD. My experience in dealing with Bricsys is that requests for extensions for evaluation purposes are usually accepted, so you probably won’t have to give up your valuable tool as soon as your 30 days are up.

Video – who is that masked man?

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Last night I made another guest appearance on the BricsCAD Unplugged webcast series. This time I was discussing the LISP development environment, BLADE. Here’s the video:

Bonus points will be awarded for identifying three items of interest in the background. No, not counting my dog Sunday asleep at lower left.

Despite going way over time, there was still nowhere near enough opportunity to describe the full LISPy awesomeness that BLADE represents. I am therefore scheduled to return for another two or three episodes beginning in February. In those, I’ll be doing more of a step-by-step demonstration rather than the overview and V19 new feature description I did in this episode. If you have any particular requests for what you want covered, please comment on this post.

I also showed how the tools in BLADE (e.g. the (inspector) function) are still worth having for any DWG-based CAD Manager or power user, even if you’re not a full-on LISP programmer. If you have to work out what’s going on with dodgy DWG files, you’ll want to have (inspector) in your set of tools.

The BricsCAD Unplugged webcast broadcasts run on the Bricsys Facebook page and are then quickly transferred to YouTube. This was the last episode for 2018 because of Christmas and New Year.

Video – Steve on BricsCAD Unplugged

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Following on from Lynn Allen and Robert Green’s guest appearances on the BricsCAD Unplugged webcast a couple of weeks ago, this time it was my turn.

Last night (my time) I was the special guest on the episode BricsCAD Unplugged – Steve Johnson 5 surprises moving to BricsCAD. I’m introduced at 2:12 and appear at 3:30. Here’s the full video:

In this week’s episode, you’ll witness:

  • Me discussing the five biggest things that pleasantly surprised me about BricsCAD. (I have more than five, but time was limited).
  • Don Strimbu bribing me with drinks containers.
  • An actual printed copy of Cadalyst magazine from 1995, complete with my old column Bug Watch (1995-2008).
  • The excellent euphemism, “You’re generally pretty conservative in terms of your praise.”
  • Don throwing me a curveball by introducing my points out of order!
  • The announcement that I’ll be at Bricsys 2018 in London and possibly participating in the BLADE session.
  • Me saying, “No. I’m wrong.”
  • Me drinking a glass of wine (parental guidance advised – alcohol consumption depicted). If you care, it’s a Shiraz (that’s Syrah if you’re American) from South Australia’s Limestone Coast region.
  • Total lack of coordination from everyone in raising our drinks at the end.

Thank you to the Bricsys crew for the invitation, it was a blast! If you ever want me on again, I’ll be happy to oblige.

For future reference, these live broadcasts run on the Bricsys Facebook page and are then quickly transferred to YouTube.

Where on Earth is Lynn Allen going?

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Well, this is a fun video for CAD geeks. The third in the BricsCAD Unplugged series of weekly webcasts, this one promotes the Bricsys 2018 conference which will be held on 23 and 24 October in London.

These live broadcasts run on the Bricsys Facebook page and are then quickly transferred to YouTube.

This one is interesting because of the people in it and some interesting news. It features Bricsys regulars Don Strimbu, Heidi Hewett, Vince Aman and Matt Olding, but also a couple of special guests. First on the scene is Robert Green (see 4:57) but the real surprise comes at 9:23 when somebody who may be familiar to you appeared in the bottom right corner:

The fun part comes when Lynn is “persuaded” with the promise of beer to turn up in London. Lynn won’t be going to AU this year (“My invitation must have got lost in the mail!”), along with quite a few others. So if you’re going to Vegas you’ll have to put up with somebody slightly less popular on stage instead.

So Bricsys 2018 in London is where all the cool people will be. Lynn and Heidi will be there and Robert will be rocking out with the Bricsys band. I might not be lead-guitarist-cool but I’ll be there too. What is said in the video about Bricsys conferences being great for meeting people is very true. Everybody’s approachable, right up to Bricsys CEO Erik De Keyser, so come up and say hello.

If you want to join us, sign up here. At the time of writing, there are just a few hours until the end of Early Bird pricing on the tickets.

Did I mention it’s being held in a brewery?

Oh, and there’s some CAD stuff.*

Here’s the full video:

* The CAD stuff alone made the Bricsys Conferences well worth attending for me in past years.

Why every AutoCAD CAD Manager should have a copy of BricsCAD – part 6, future proofing

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This is the sixth and final post in this series where I explain why this statement holds true:

As a CAD Manager looking after AutoCAD users, or a power user looking after yourself, it’s worth your while to have a copy of BricsCAD handy.

This post explains why adding a copy of BricsCAD to your stable of AutoCAD licenses is a good thing for your future and that of your company.

A CAD Management thing I did a few years ago was to examine the options for replacing AutoCAD and other Autodesk products. I was an AutoCAD loyalist (albeit a somewhat critical one) with over a quarter of a century invested in it. I was looking after the deeply entrenched and very heavily customised CAD environment of a major public utility company that had been using AutoCAD as its primary CAD system since the late 1980s. Hundreds of custom commands were in place and providing priceless productivity benefits. Hundreds of thousands of DWG files were on file, with thousands more coming through every month. The inertia behind AutoCAD was very, very strong. Looking outside the cage was a pretty radical step to take. What led me to that point?

  • Autodesk business policy. Autodesk has become increasingly anti-customer over the years in ways that will be familiar to all readers of this blog. I won’t rehash them here. This leads to…
  • Increasing costs. Autodesk software is expensive and getting more so. Autodesk has made no secret of its intention to move to an all-subscription (rental) model. This is an attempt to treble the ongoing income Autodesk receives, in return for doing as little as possible. Which leads to…
  • Lack of progress. It had become clear that the days of AutoCAD seriously improving from release to release were over, never to return. This isn’t because there is no room for improvement, it’s because Autodesk doesn’t want to improve AutoCAD. AutoCAD won’t be permitted to become too capable because that would just eat into sales of Autodesk’s other products. You’re not going to see 3D parametrics or sheet metal capabilities in AutoCAD: buy Inventor instead. You’re not going to see BIM capability: buy Revit. Beyond the internal competition issue, some years ago, Autodesk leadership lost interest in what it perceived to be an old-fashioned dead-end product. The income from AutoCAD customers is being diverted to fund purchase and/or development of more fashionable and interesting products.
  • Frustration with Autodesk’s Beta program. The goings-on within the Autodesk Beta program must remain private, so what I can say here is limited. I can say that I spent many years contributing large numbers of hours to that program in order to attempt to improve the product. As time went on, the positive results that emerged from that effort decreased; that much is no secret because it is apparent in the product. I felt I was fighting against Autodesk to try to improve the product, and losing. There were a few final incidents that persuaded me to stop bashing my head against that particular wall. I wasn’t the only one. I stuck it out for years longer than many very valuable people who had already given up before me.
  • Proxy server issues. Over the years, Autodesk’s habit of attempting to do sneaky things to access the Internet had caused a variety of problems in a secure proxy server environment. This caused several things not to work, and harmed performance severely in some places. As Autodesk’s developers turned over, things that worked in one release would not work in the next. Attempts to get this addressed as a support issue would result in the environment being blamed. These problems increased over the years as Autodesk threw in more and more connectivity-requiring features. There was a non-zero and ever-increasing possibility that one day, Autodesk would screw things up altogether and leave us with non-functioning software. That has already happened for some people, and although the stoppage has generally been temporary, it is important to have redundancy.
  • Poor performance. AutoCAD has been getting bigger and slower. Downloads are huge and Autodesk does its best to make them as difficult as possible. Installations take an age, as do uninstallations. Startup times are terrible and getting worse. My users were complaining – a lot – and there wasn’t much I could do about it.

That’s what moved me to take a very, very serious look at alternatives. Your motives may differ. Just the desire to have a Plan B in case of disaster might be enough.

If you don’t feel moved to investigate, you may eventually be faced with no option. Sooner or later, the person who holds the purse strings at your company may point to this year’s much bigger Autodesk invoice and ask, “What are we getting for this? How can we reduce our costs?” When that happens, you don’t want to be scrabbling round for answers before that invoice needs to be paid. Look into the options in advance. Are you really wedded to AutoCAD or are you actually tied to DWG?

Days of Future Past

Here’s my suggestion. Examine the available alternatives to AutoCAD and the other Autodesk products you use. Do it sooner rather than later so you get the chance to determine the answers to non-trivial questions like these:

  • Capability. Does the alternative product do everything that AutoCAD does, that your users need it to do? Does it do other stuff that AutoCAD doesn’t that you might find useful? What’s the performance like? How does it work on the hardware you have? Does it have user interface elements that don’t just look good but work productively in practice?
  • Compatibility. You will almost certainly demand extremely good DWG compatibility, but this question goes well beyond that. Will your LISP work? How about DCL? ActiveX support? DOSLib? Other programming languages? Can you carry over your customisation files? Can you make the interface look the same? If you have custom toolbars, or ribbon, or even image menus, do they carry across? Can your users carry across their skills without downtime, extensive training and a productivity hit? Can AutoCAD and the potential replacement coexist without issues? Can you use a common set of custom support files pointed at by both products? Will it work well on your hardware?
  • Add-ons. If you’re using third party products on top of AutoCAD, or if you’re using an AutoCAD-based vertical, is that product or an equivalent available? Does it work well? What do the objects they create look like in plain AutoCAD? Can you round-trip through AutoCAD and back and retain your intelligence? You’re probably going to have to test this with evaluation software and your own data.
  • Licensing options. Is perpetual licensing available? Can you stick on a release for a few years and still purchase upgrades later? Has the company committed to providing you with licensing options or has it made noises about going all-rental? Is network licensing available? Does it coexist problem-free with Autodesk’s network licensing software?
  • Costs. Compare the likely costs for all your options over several years. You’re going to have to make some assumptions. It can be difficult to work out what they should be.
  • Track record. Has the company been around for a while? What reputation does it have? Does it treat its customers with respect? How good is the support?
  • Future prospects. Is the company likely to be around long-term? Is it actively developing the product you’re interested in? Is it innovating? Is it merely following AutoCAD at a distance or charging ahead? Is the product going to be limited by Autodesk-like internal competition?

I went through all of these questions and settled on BricsCAD as the best option in my company’s case. In fact, several aspects made it really the only viable option. The product impressed me with high performance, capabilities well beyond AutoCAD in several important areas, a very high degree of compatibility (particularly LISP but also other customisation files), the availability of perpetual licensing and much lower ongoing costs. The company impressed me with its honesty and attitude toward customers.

Most of all, I was won over because I could see that the product had a future. Subsequent improvements have only strengthened that view.

Obviously, you need to make your own judgement based on your own circumstances. I would suggest looking at all the options, including sticking with AutoCAD permanently, with or without subscription or maintenance. Maybe you can use my investigations as a starting point, but I encourage you to start investigating now rather than when you’re under time pressure and don’t have time to do a thorough job.

It will cost you a few minutes to download and install of an evaluation BricsCAD and start preparing for the possibility of a different future. Maybe it won’t turn out to be part of your company’s future, but it could still be part of your future.

Options are good. Learning is good. Best case scenario, your knowledge is going to save your company money and improve its productivity, and you will end up smelling of roses. Worst case scenario, you’re going to spend some very justifiable time doing something new, different and interesting. I recommend it.

Other posts in the Why every AutoCAD CAD Manager should have a copy of BricsCAD series:

Part 1, fixing drawings
Part 2, 3D operations
Part 3, parts on demand
Part 4, efficiency
Part 5, LISP

Why every AutoCAD CAD Manager should have a copy of BricsCAD – part 5, LISP

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This is the fifth post in this series where I explain why this statement holds true:

As a CAD Manager looking after AutoCAD users, or a power user looking after yourself, it’s worth your while to have a copy of BricsCAD handy.

This post is about BricsCAD being better than AutoCAD at the one thing that made AutoCAD win the race against its competitors back in the 80s – LISP. That is, AutoLISP (added fully to AutoCAD in Version 2.18) and Visual LISP (fully integrated with AutoCAD 2000).

If you’re a good AutoCAD CAD Manager, you’ll already know the reasons LISP is an extremely important tool, so I won’t cover them here. I may explain those reasons in a later post, but that would distract us from the main point. Why is having a copy of BricsCAD useful to a CAD Manager?

  • BLADE. I’ve covered the BricsCAD LISP Advanced Development Environment in various posts already, and I intend to go into greater detail in future posts. There are enough advantages over VLIDE to warrant an entire series of posts. This is simply the biggest advance for CAD LISP in 20 years; if you’re doing any reasonably complex development in LISP and you’re not BLADE, you’re wasting time and money.
  • Performance. Because BricsCAD’s LISP engine is much more modern than AutoCAD’s, the performance is much greater. In my experience, it’s about three times as fast. Some function calls are as much as 30 times as fast. If you have a user who’s complaining that your routine is taking an age to process in AutoCAD, try it in BricsCAD instead. I once saved a user half an hour in processing time for one polyline by using BricsCAD. Another aspect that will benefit you when programming and testing is BricsCAD’s generally superior performance. Got nothing running and want to get programming in the next 5 seconds? Fire up BricsCAD. Want to do a complex process on a big drawing that makes AutoCAD run out of RAM? Try it in BricsCAD.
  • Licensing. While you’re developing in BricsCAD, you’re not using up an expensive AutoCAD license. You’re using a cheaper (or even free, while you’re evaluating it) BricsCAD license. Also, it’s a perpetual license so if you ever stop paying, you can keep developing as long as you like. Oh, and it’s not going to flake out on you on those days where Autodesk’s subscription licensing server has a meltdown.
  • Extra functionality. BricsCAD’s LISP has the AutoLISP and Visual LISP functions and then some. Some of the DOSLib functions are available without even needing DOSLib, but if you need the full set of DOSLib functions they can be loaded, as per AutoCAD. A range of extended functions are available with the vle- prefix, and the LISP Developer Support Package documents these and provides the source code so you can also use them in AutoCAD.
  • Platform independence. AutoCAD for Mac has severely restricted LISP capabilities, making it unsuitable for use in a professional, efficient custom environment. BricsCAD for Mac and BricsCAD for Linux both provide practically identical functionality to the Windows version. Yes, BricsCAD for Mac really is significantly more AutoCAD-compatible than AutoCAD for Mac.

I do my LISP development in BricsCAD these days, and can attest that it’s well worth the investment in time to get the hang of BLADE.

It will cost you a few minutes to download and install of an evaluation BricsCAD and check out the LISP situation for yourself.

Edit: it’s not just LISP. See James Maeding’s comment below about .NET, too.

An email exchange with a friend about AutoCAD

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Here’s an email exchange I just had with a friend. He’s a local person who I don’t normally discuss CAD with. He works for an architect. He has given me permission to use this discussion here.

Hi Steve,

We are looking to update from 2007 and 2010 versions in the office to more recent versions of Autodesk’s AutoCAD.

We don’t need full version but if that’s what is available ok then. Lite version is ok as we use for 2D architectural only. We use other packages when 3D work required.

We also have call to open consultants drawings which may be prepared on full versions or other packages.

Can you let me know what the last version that didn’t require the annual subscription and is available and likely cost?

Much appreciated if you could help.

Cheers

Here’s my reply:

You’re out of luck. Regardless of the release, you can now only pay for AutoCAD by annual subscription (which now means rental and used to mean pre-paid upgrades). Cost is currently AUD $2605 a year. Autodesk occasionally does an “upgrade” promotion for old releases but it’s really just a rental discount (15% at the moment) and means throwing away your perpetual license. If you stop paying, you have nothing, not even your old release. Here’s the link:

https://www.autodesk.com.au/products/autocad/subscribe

There’s currently a 20% off deal for AutoCAD LT rental at AUD $460 a year, which ends in a couple of days:

https://www.autodesk.com.au/products/autocad-lt/subscribe

If you just want to convert back to AutoCAD 2007 or 2010 DWG format and work in that, you have a few options. One is Autodesk’s DWG TrueView, which is a free very cut-down AutoCAD that will allow you to open new DWG and save in earlier releases.

https://www.autodesk.com.au/products/dwg/viewers

Another free option is BricsCAD Shape, which actually gives you more open/save options for drawings than AutoCAD itself, as well as being a 3D architectural modelling application.

https://www.bricsys.com/en-intl/shape/

There’s another free 2D application called DraftSight but that’s not keeping up to date with the DWG versions (it’s still on 2013 format):

https://www.draftsight2018.com/

If you want an AutoCAD-like perpetual license product for 2D drafting that will work directly with the current DWG format, you can’t go past BricsCAD. Works just like AutoCAD, uses the same files, up to date with current versions.

Full perpetual license is AUD $765 for the Classic version or AUD $1010 including a year’s maintenance. After that, keeping up to date at AUD $320 per year is cheaper than any option Autodesk has, even for renting LT. You can alternatively just pay your $765 once and do the buy-upgrades-whenever-you-want thing that Autodesk stopped doing years ago. It also gives you an upgrade path to full 3D and even BIM if you want to do that further down the track.

https://www.bricsys.com/en-intl/bricscad/

It’s a quick download and install which won’t harm your AutoCAD installation. You’ll probably find BricsCAD will work noticeably faster than any recent AutoCAD, which has got very bloated in recent years. This is particularly obvious if you’re running older hardware.

No, I’m not on commission!

Why every AutoCAD CAD Manager should have a copy of BricsCAD – part 4, efficiency

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This is the fourth post in this series where I explain why this statement holds true:

As a CAD Manager looking after AutoCAD users, or a power user looking after yourself, it’s worth your while to have a copy of BricsCAD handy.

This post is about BricsCAD being more efficient than AutoCAD for some of the things a CAD Manager might need to do. What do I mean?

  • BricsCAD starts up and closes down faster than AutoCAD, much faster in some environments. If your AutoCAD starts up slow (e.g. in some secure proxy server environments), pretty much any job you need to do to a user’s drawing that involves getting in, doing something quick, saving and getting out again is likely to be finished in BricsCAD before AutoCAD is even open.
  • If you perform a more complex operation on behalf of a user that is likely to take a while, there’s a better-than-even chance that BricsCAD will do it quicker than AutoCAD. In some cases it will do it much quicker (e.g. drawing compare).
  • BricsCAD tends to be able to cope with large drawings while using less memory than AutoCAD. If you have a user with a huge drawing who can’t work with it any more in AutoCAD and you need to split, purge or simplify it before it is usable, the very process of doing that in AutoCAD can itself be unworkably slow. Try the same thing in BricsCAD and there’s a good chance you’ll get the job done in a fraction of the time and without the same level of frustration.
  • If you perform a batch process that operaties on a set of drawings, under most circumstances it will be finished in BricsCAD well before the same thing is done in AutoCAD. Maybe this means you can process a set of drawings over lunch rather than wasting all afternoon on them or waiting until home time before setting the batch going. Plus you’re occupying a cheap BricsCAD license rather than an expensive AutoCAD one. Also, because BricsCAD uses much less RAM than AutoCAD while running, you can run your batch processes on that old PC sitting in the corner rather than having your top user sitting around watching your top spec PC grind away.
  • Certain user interface structures in BricsCAD are much more logically arranged and efficient to use than the AutoCAD equivalents. For example, if you have a drawing with an obscure setting that needs changing, unless you have an impeccable memory, you’ll find that setting much more quickly using the BricsCAD Settings command.

As I mentioned in my last post, this series is all based on stuff I’ve done in real life as a CAD Manager for a primarily AutoCAD-using company. Feel free to add your comments with your own experiences, even if they differ from mine.

It will cost you a few minutes to download and install of an evaluation BricsCAD and check out the performance and efficiency for yourself.

Why every AutoCAD CAD Manager should have a copy of BricsCAD – part 3, parts on demand

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This is the third post in this series where I explain why this statement holds true:

As a CAD Manager looking after AutoCAD users, or a power user looking after yourself, it’s worth your while to have a copy of BricsCAD handy.

This post is about using BricsCAD as a mechanical and structural parts library for your AutoCAD users. As I mentioned in my last post in this series, I was writing a client-specific AutoCAD 3D training course recently. To demonstrate the concept of revolving profiles, and also to compare and contrast different styles of solid creation, I wanted to use a ball bearing as an example. The easiest way for me to get hold of an accurate example ball bearing model was to fire up BricsCAD (a few seconds) and select the part from the Standard Parts panel (a few more seconds).

It gets inserted as a block. After explosion to reduce it to 3D solids, I could then slice it in either BricsCAD or AutoCAD to form the basis for my example. I could save it at any stage in BricsCAD and open it in AutoCAD to continue to work on it seamlessly. What I can’t do is simply copy and paste from one application to another; you do need to save the DWG. You can then open it in AutoCAD or access the blocks using AutoCAD’s DesignCenter palette; if you’re doing this a lot you might want to point DesignCenter to a scratch DWG you keep handy for this sort of parts exchange.

There are currently 13 sets of standards:

Although you may already have your own parts library, having access to a wider range of international standards may prove useful. Aussie steel sections? Go for your life, mate.

Just how much stuff is available? A lot. Each of the sets of standards has multiple sections, each section has many parts, and many of the parts have many sizes. Depending on the part, other parameters (such as bolt length) may also be available for a given size.

Here’s the full Standard Parts panel in action, in this case selecting a nut.

BricsCAD Pro and Platinum have 3D parametrics built in (and given the minor extra cost I’d suggest going for Platinum), so it’s quite feasible to use it as the basis for your own 3D parts library. If you’ve built up a few 2D dynamic blocks in AutoCAD, you’ll be quite capable of doing the same thing in 3D in BricsCAD. The methods are different but straightforward enough to teach yourself.

As pointed out in a comment by James Maeding, you can set up a network license or two and install BricsCAD on everybody’s PC, giving everybody access to the goodies without excessive cost. Bear in mind that like Autodesk, Bricsys charges a premium for a network license over a standalone one. Unlike rent-or-go-forth Autodesk, Bricsys allows you to have a perpetual license and the total cost of ownership is substantially lower.

By the way, this series isn’t theoretical, it’s all based on stuff I’ve tried out in the real world. For example, the network license software will happily coexist with Autodesk’s network license software on the same license server. The services ignore each other; no clash, no problem. My experience is that it works just fine on a virtual server.

It will cost you a few minutes to download and install of an evaluation BricsCAD and check out the included parts content for yourself.

Why every AutoCAD CAD Manager should have a copy of BricsCAD – part 2, 3D operations

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This is the second post in this series where I explain why this statement holds true:

As a CAD Manager looking after AutoCAD users, or a power user looking after yourself, it’s worth your while to have a copy of BricsCAD handy.

This post is about using BricsCAD to do things to help out your AutoCAD users who are having problems with 3D operations. Why would you bother using BricsCAD to mess with AutoCAD 3D models? Because sometimes AutoCAD can’t do stuff with them, and BricsCAD can.

If you have a user who finally asks for help after fighting AutoCAD for ages trying to get an operation to work such as an awkward fillet, a self-intersecting extrusion or a direct edit that doesn’t want to move, you have a couple of options:

  1. fight the same fight yourself in AutoCAD, eventually discover that the user was right, and then construct an excruciatingly awkward workaround; or
  2. fire up BricsCAD and see if you can do it there. There’s a good chance it will. If it does, hand the DWG back to the user with a smug look on your face. If it doesn’t, construct an awkward workaround in BricsCAD, because it will almost certainly be faster than doing the same thing in AutoCAD. Direct editing of 3D solids is more flexible and easier in BricsCAD; the Quad Cursor helps a lot.

I’ve been writing a client-specific AutoCAD 3D training course recently, and going through the exercises I’ve developed has been instructive. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve thought, “Man, this would have been so much easier in BricsCAD.” That’s before we get to the 3D parametrics that BricsCAD has had for a while and which AutoCAD never will.

Why is BricsCAD so much better than AutoCAD at making 3D work well? Because it has to be. When you base your entire product line (including BIM, parametric 3D, sheet metal and a host of other uses covered by 3rd party developers) on a single DWG-based 3D engine, that engine has to be robust, powerful, efficient and fast.

It’s not as if Bricsys can say to somebody struggling with performing 3D operations in BricsCAD that they should be using Inventor or Revit instead. That cop-out is unavailable. It has to just work.

Fortunately, Bricsys has acquired a small group of genius-level experts in this area, and holds on to them rather than dumping them when they get too experienced. It shows. Overwhelmingly, it just works.

It will cost you a few minutes to download and install of an evaluation BricsCAD and confirm this for yourself. It’s well worth it.

There are exceptions, of course. Nothing is perfect, and you will come across the occasional glitch. But those exceptions are definitely rarer than in AutoCAD. My experience also tells me that if you report those exceptions, there’s an extremely good chance that they will be fixed, and quickly. Bricsys ain’t Autodesk.

Why every AutoCAD CAD Manager should have a copy of BricsCAD – part 1, fixing drawings

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Here’s a mega-tip with a lot of experience behind it:

As a CAD Manager looking after AutoCAD users, or a power user looking after yourself, it’s worth your while to have a copy of BricsCAD handy.

Why? There are too many reasons to fit in one blog post, so I’m going to do a mini-series. The first post is about using BricsCAD to fix up drawings that are giving your AutoCAD users problems.

One of the things that surprised me most when evaluating BricsCAD as a potential replacement for AutoCAD was that my expectations were wrong when it came to the reliability of opening DWGs. Over the years, I collected a variety of DWGs that gave various releases of AutoCAD some problems. Some of those problems occurred while performing some kind of editing or processing, while others prevented AutoCAD from opening the drawing at all. I was expecting BricsCAD to have all those problems, plus perhaps some additional incompatibilities of its own.

What happened was the opposite. I don’t think I came across a single drawing that AutoCAD could open but BricsCAD couldn’t. On the contrary, BricsCAD was much more forgiving than AutoCAD, breezing through the process of opening drawings that had problems that originated in AutoCAD. Maybe 80-90% of my “problem” drawings were problems for AutoCAD alone. In many cases an AUDIT in BricsCAD and a re-save was enough to make the problem go away in AutoCAD. In other cases I could use BricsCAD to recover the unrecoverable using the traditional methods of WBLOCK, saving as an earlier release, saving as DXF, binary search (I may do a later post on exactly what that means), and so on.

Note that you may be able to obtain similar results using other DWG-based products such as DraftSight, ZWCAD or even the free BricsCAD Shape. However, I don’t have the experience with those products to be able to confirm that. Autodesk’s DWG TrueView, being a cut-down AutoCAD, tends to have the same problems as AutoCAD.

One thing that was particularly pleasant about using BricsCAD to fix problem drawings was the speed at which it could be done, because of BricsCAD’s generally superior performance. Closing and opening AutoCAD is painfully slow these days as the bloat gets worse, so having a product that fires up quickly is very handy.

Also handy is the availability of tools within the product that make it easier to locate and fix problems. Of particular importance is the Drawing Explorer, which provides a consistent and efficient interface that provides access to over 20 different types of aspects of a drawing (e.g. layers, linetypes, text styles, etc.):

One example arose showing how useful this is, when my users were having an intermittent problem with some drawings locking up AutoCAD 2015 on open. Some trial and error made it possible to discover that the trigger for this was the existence of a text style (any text style) with a bigfont attached, where the bigfont SHX file did not exist. It was possible to fix this in an earlier or later AutoCAD release, which the users may or may not have available to them, by opening the drawing, using the STYLE command, then using that dialog box to go through each text style one at a time, looking for bigfonts.

It was much easier to quickly fire up BricsCAD, use the STYLE command which opens the Drawing Explorer in the Text Style section, and see all of the text styles laid out at once (see above). It was very efficient to quickly look for recalcitrant bigfonts and make them go away, or to see instantly that bigfonts weren’t the problem.

Similarly, the consistent, searchable and efficient interface of the BricsCAD Settings dialog makes it easy to check the values of any settings that you suspect may be triggering the problem in AutoCAD:

As a CAD Manager, it’s definitely worth your while to do the quick download and install of an evaluation BricsCAD. My experience in dealing with Bricsys is that requests for extensions for evaluation purposes are usually accepted, so you probably won’t have to give up your valuable tool as soon as your 30 days are up.

Once you’ve determined that it really is an invaluable tool to have around, the cost of entry is low enough to make it relatively easy to justify the investment. You won’t need to recover many drawings to get your money back.

BricsCAD Shape for Mac

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BricsCAD Shape, the free DWG-based 3D direct modeling application from Bricsys, has now been released for macOS (formerly OS X). See my previous post on Shape for details of what it’s all about.

This is the same, just on a different OS. That’s because unlike Autodesk’s versions of its DWG products, the Bricsys versions are not cynically watered down for Apple users. Those users can now do full 3D conceptual modeling as part of a workflow that leads to full BIM (or simply view and edit DWG files if you’re not that ambitious), and without paying for the privilege.

It’s a proper free perpetual licence without usage restrictions, not a demo. You can’t get a perpetual license of DWG-editing software from Autodesk for any money, so by any measure Shape is a bargain.

The Bricsys blog post can be found here. The download page is here.

A Linux version of Shape is expected later.

Bricsys shows Autodesk how to do mid-term updates – again!

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BricsCAD V18.2 for Windows is out. The new stuff in this mid-term update is again showing up Autodesk’s lack of progress with its once-flagship product, AutoCAD. I’m sure Autodesk would love customers to accept that there’s only so much anyone can do with a DWG-based CAD product once it reaches a certain level of maturity. Customers should get used to nothing of significance being added year after year. Diminishing returns, and all that. Pay to continue using the product, but don’t expect it to get better.

What a shame for Autodesk, then, that Bricsys exists. By consistently providing a raft of significant improvements with each full and mid-term release, Bricsys shows up that idea as nonsense. It’s perfectly possible to keep improving CAD at a very rapid rate, particularly if you’re not worried about competing with other products in your range. There’s a reason AutoCAD’s parametrics are restricted to 2D, and BricsCAD’s 3D parametrics in a DWG product proves that the reason isn’t technical. It’s strategic. Also strategic is cutting the guts out of an already much-weakened AutoCAD team, because you would really prefer your customers to be using your trendier and/or more expensive products.

I should point out that BricsCAD V18 customers who have a perpetual license, even without maintenance, will be receiving V18.2 with all its improvements free of charge. Contrast that with Autodesk, which is, despicably, withholding even bug fixes from selected customers. Autodesk’s attitude to customers who aren’t constantly paying up front is one of utter contempt. Autodesk feels entitled to your money; Bricsys wants to earn it.

So what’s Bricsys done to earn your money with BricsCAD V18.2?

Mostly, it’s lots of relatively small-sounding things that add up to significant productivity enhancements. There are several items that are playing catch-up to AutoCAD, such as long-overdue in-place text editing. There are big performance improvements in drawings with PDF underlays due to a smart multi-resolution cache mechanism. The 3D-to-2D generation mechanism has also been significantly sped up. Constraints (2D and 3D, unlike AutoCAD) are easier to create. Several 3D direct modeling operations have been made easier. That also helps with sheet metal design, which has seen other improvements.

In Bricsys BIM V18.2, a lot of smarts have been added. The mechanism for converting CAD models (including those made in BricsCAD Shape) to BIM models, BIMIFY, already did some fascinatingly clever things, but that’s been improved further particularly in the areas of structural member and room recognition. For those of us in Australia, support for our steel sections is very welcome.

For me, that’s not the big news. Oh, no. The big news for me is a thing called BLADE – the BricsCAD LISP Advanced Development Environment.

If you’re a CAD Manager or in-house developer and you’ve been waiting until BricsCAD had VLIDE, wait no longer. But this isn’t just catch-up. This is a big leapfrog over Autodesk’s sadly neglected IDE for CAD’s primary user programming language. There’s so much good stuff in BLADE that I can’t hope to do it justice here, so I will be covering it extensively in future posts. For now, here’s a statement for you:

If you program in AutoLISP or Visual LISP, you should be doing it in BLADE.

It’s that good. Really. Watch this space for details.

The download is small, the install is fast, it won’t harm your AutoCAD installation, and you can evaluate it free for 30 days. Links:

BricsCAD Shape – can a free DWG product be a BIM game-changer?

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At the Bricsys 2017 Conference in Paris, one of the biggest surprises was the announcement of BricsCAD Shape. This product was demonstrated live, very impressively, in pre-release form. As I live-tweeted at the time, the demo jock was able to create a pretty decent architectural model in minutes, from scratch, very easily. That product has now been released.

What is BricsCAD Shape?

Shape is a 3D direct modeling application. At the core, it’s a simplified BricsCAD BIM. That means it’s small, fast, stable and it uses 2018 DWG as its native format. These are all good things. It’s obviously aimed at the AEC market, but there’s nothing to stop anyone using it for anything. Use it as a lightweight DWG viewer/editor if you like.

As you can see, it has a very simple, clean, cut-down interface. That dude is French Architect Jean Nouvel, by the way. He’s a block; you can erase him. He doesn’t appear in DWG files from other sources you open in Shape.

The idea is to do most of your work with the 18 buttons in this mini-ribbon/monster toolbar thing:

For less common operations, there is a set of pull-down menus. Although it’s hidden by default, you can even turn on a command line (Shift+F2) that will be very familiar to AutoCAD and BricsCAD users. Try to do without it; you will then discover how the excellent Quad Cursor interface (inherited from BricsCAD) uses AI technology to save you time and clicks.

How do I get it?

Click this link, enter your email address (no, they won’t sell it to spammers), and download away. Unlike Autodesk downloads, there are no nasty Akamai download managers to contend with, no multi-stage install processes, no massively bloated files, just a straightforward download of a 212 MB MSI installer. Time to download for me on ADSL2 was 2m 56s. The install time, including user interactions was 36s. Time for the first startup, including online registration, was 15s. That got me to the startup screen. The time for the first drawing startup was another 10s.

You can be using Shape in under 4 minutes. That is, you could be using it yourself in less time than it takes to read what I have to say about it.

How is it licensed? How much is it?

It’s a perpetual license, and it’s free. Bricsys has stated that it will always be free. Not much to complain about there.

So what’s in it for Bricsys?

The problem Bricsys faces in churning over large numbers of Autodesk’s disgruntled customer base is not the products. The products are fine. BricsCAD is notably superior to AutoCAD in a bunch of significant ways (while remaining inferior in a handful of less important ways), and costs a fraction as much.

No, the problem Bricsys faces is in persuading large numbers of people to try its products. Shape is an attempt to make that happen. It’s an ice-breaker in a way that goes beyond the usual 30-day free trial product.

There’s hardly any bar to entry; anybody with an email address can own it with zero investment. The interface has been kept very simple and there are a whole bunch of bite-size tutorial videos that demonstrate how to do things. If this product can create a buzz and get people to use a Bricsys product, half the battle is won. The models it creates are ready to be easily taken to the next stage using the full, paid product, BricsCAD BIM.

It’s not SketchUp
There are superficial similarities between Shape and the discarded-by-Google product, Trimble SketchUp.

However, there are very significant differences. SketchUp Free is a cloud-based product that works inside your browser (the paid product is currently a desktop product). Shape is a standalone application that does not require the Internet. SketchUp has its own file formats; getting those models into CAD or BIM is fraught. Shape is not just using industry-standard DWG file format, it’s a proper, efficient, accurate CAD application. Because it’s a cut-down version of what Bricsys is hoping you will use to fully develop the models later, there is no translation. The model you build in Shape opens directly in BricsCAD BIM where automatic classification of building elements can take place.

BricsCAD Shape. It’s free, it’s easy, it’s DWG, it’s CAD, it’s 3D, and it’s a pathway to BIM. It could change the game. I have no way of predicting whether that will happen. But if it does, it’ll be another kick in the guts for a dormant Autodesk that has largely given up on improving its products.

BricsCAD V18 – showing Autodesk how to do DWG CAD

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For years now, Autodesk has done very little worthwhile with AutoCAD. There have been a few small but welcome improvements, but it’s really just tinkering at the edges. The product as a whole continues to stagnate and yet blimp out. It’s getting bigger and slower with each new release. The downloads get bigger. The install times get longer. The startup times drag out. The responsiveness suffers. And for what? Pretty much the same old thing, every time. Sometimes you don’t even get a new desktop icon. Don’t get me started on value for money.

It’s as if Autodesk considers DWG-based desktop CAD to be a solved problem. Many CAD users accept this. There’s not much more that can be done to improve it, right?

Wrong.

Bricsys has, yet again, proven Autodesk wrong. It is very possible to significantly improve DWG-based CAD. The improvements to the just-released BricsCAD V18 go far beyond anything Autodesk has done for many years, and that’s improving on an already-excellent and innovative product in V17. I’ll be covering some of the most important changes in future posts, but for now here are a few Bricsys links:

Don’t take my word for it. The easiest way to test the validity of what I have to say is to try it out for yourself. Unlike Autodesk products, Bricsys downloads and installs are small, fast and efficient. How efficient? This efficient (R.K. McSwain, Twitter):

It’s a 258 MB download for an entire DWG-based CAD application which is significantly more fully-featured than AutoCAD. No nasty malware-like download manager. It’s not a stub or a pre-installer that expands itself before even starting the install proper. It’s a ready-to-run installer for the entire top-of-the-range product capable of parametric 3D, sheet metal design and BIM. It installs and starts up quickly. You can have no trace of BricsCAD on your computer now and be editing your DWGs with it (yes, including your AutoCAD 2018 and Civil 3D DWGs) in a few minutes.

Here’s the download link. You can evaluate it for 30 days.

Did I mention that perpetual licenses are available? Or that it’s way cheaper than AutoCAD? Or that when you report a problem it goes to a real developer who actually cares about fixing it in a reasonable timeframe?

Bricsys 2017 Conference

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I have recently returned from the Bricsys 2017 Conference, held this year at the Carrousel du Louvre, Paris. There were many impressive things demonstrated at this conference and I will be posting about them in due course. In the meantime, here is a short video from Bricsys:

You may wish to check out my Twitter feed to see what I live tweeted at the time, along with the #bricsys2017 tag to see what myself and other CAD press and bloggers thought of it.

Press and bloggers at Bricsys 2017

Disclosure: Bricsys covered my travel expenses for this conference.

AutoCAD 2018 – why did the DWG format change?

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In my review of AutoCAD 2018, I had this to say about AutoCAD 2018’s changed DWG format:

Why does AutoCAD 2018 need a new DWG format? It probably doesn’t. The 2013 DWG format is capable of holding pretty much anything you want… Although Autodesk cites performance reasons with certain drawings, I strongly suspect the new DWG format was introduced purely to make life difficult for competitors, and to encourage wavering customers to stay with Autodesk for fear of losing compatibility. In other words, it seems likely this is an anti-competitive change rather than a technical one.

In a recent blog post, highly respected Swiss-based Autodesk development and research person Kean Walmsley had this to say on that subject:

The main reason for the break in compatibility is some longer-term work that’s going on inside the AutoCAD codebase. For now this is really only surfacing in small ways – I expect it’s contributing some performance benefits, for instance – but the work is absolutely critical to the long-term viability of the product.

Kean’s a straight-shooter and I’m always ready to be corrected if it can be shown that I’m wrong. So I would be interested to learn more detail about this long-term work that’s critical to the long-term viability of the product. It might be good news for customers or really terrible news. If the groundwork is being laid for a file format that’s more heavily cloud-reliant or subject to continuous change, say, that would be an absolute tragedy for customers.

Autodesk is clearly manoeuvring customers into a position of maximum tie-in using various nefarious means, and if the DWG format change is part of that then it’s to be condemned. Maybe further information would help alleviate such concerns. Kean can’t provide that information, and neither can the selected bloggers who were given some insight under NDA last week, but I’m sure someone at Autodesk could. That is, if there really is nothing to worry about.

Kean also had this to say:

AutoCAD continues to be a core part of Autodesk’s business – and it continues to receive significant investment in terms of development resources – but don’t expect that to translate to buckets of shiny new features: AutoCAD’s feature maturity means the investment is rightly being focused in other areas (at least for now).

This had me wondering if Kean mistyped “immaturity”, because almost every AutoCAD feature from the last decade was released immature and only the lucky few eventually got finished. There’s a huge mass of outstanding work left to do in AutoCAD just to bring its existing half-baked features up to scratch, practically all of which could be done without disrupting customers with a new DWG format.

As for the feature set itself being mature, I can’t agree with that, either. Maybe it’s considered mature within Autodesk because of defeatist thinking about what’s possible with DWG-based CAD software? Kean’s comments seem to reinforce that impression. From where I’m standing, the lack of progress in recent AutoCAD releases demonstrates a severe lack of imagination and hunger to improve the product, not any inherent natural plateau in CAD development.

I believe this because Autodesk’s keener competitors have shown that no such plateau exists. Bricsys has proven that it’s very possible to improve an AutoCAD-like DWG-based product out of sight with genuinely useful and productive new features, and they can do it without changing the DWG format. Incidentally, my preliminary tests indicate BricsCAD V17 opens and saves DWG significantly faster than AutoCAD 2018, again without the need for a new format. More on that in a later post.

Back to Kean:

This is a tricky balance – and could easily be interpreted as a big company not caring about (some of) its users and only being interested in milking its cash-cow – but the work happening behind the scenes is significant and I believe will ultimately prove to be of real value to our customers.

Real value? History has taught me to be dubious about that. Many things that Autodesk promotes as being of value to customers turn out to be of net negative value. Time will tell with this one.

Sorry, but I really don’t believe that Autodesk cares about AutoCAD and its users as anything but an income source. I know there are still honest, hardworking, enthusiastic people within Autodesk (like Kean) who want to improve the product on behalf of customers. Good luck to those people, because their efforts are being stymied by management. The results we’re seeing out here in customer land are dismal, and no matter what spin is put on that, it must be disheartening.

Autodesk people, caring about users? Sure. Autodesk, the public listed company, as directed from the top? Nope. Autodesk’s actions and inactions tell me otherwise. Zero cares are given. No words can fix that, no matter who they come from.

AutoCAD really is being treated as a cash cow; hang one of those bells around its neck and be done with it.


(Original image: Daniel Schwen)

BricsCAD V17 – the best AutoCAD upgrade in years?

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I’ve been evaluating BricsCAD for a few years now, and have been looking at it pretty seriously as a DWG-based LISP-compatible AutoCAD alternative for a year or so. A couple of weeks ago, I flew to Munich for the Bricsys International Conference (at Bricsys’ expense – see the Legal page for disclosure) where I learned quite a few things I had failed to notice during my own evaluation of V17. As you may have noticed, I can be pretty hard-bitten and cynical about what CAD companies have to say about their products, but I came back impressed.

The conference and the product itself are not free of flaws, but I have to say the progress Bricsys has shown in developing the BricsCAD product is really quite astonishing. The rate at which serious, worthwhile-to-customers improvements have been made to BricsCAD over the last few releases is huge. Some of it’s just catching up with existing AutoCAD features, but most of it is going beyond what Autodesk has done. Overall, Bricsys lately has outstripped Autodesk’s efforts in improving its DWG-based flagship CAD product to such a degree that it’s frankly embarrassing for the much larger corporation.

I grabbed Bricsys CEO Erik De Keyser for a brief chat at the end of the conference. I told him that while there were still important areas that need addressing, nevertheless if Autodesk had shipped a new release with a quarter of the improvements that Bricsys managed with V17, it would still have been the best AutoCAD upgrade in fifteen years. Yes, the gap in progress from Autodesk to Bricsys really is that big.

The difference appears to be one of attitude. The Bricsys development team (many were there in Munich to speak to) is focused, motivated and enabled. For Bricsys, BricsCAD really is the flagship product. That’s where all the effort goes; everything goes into the DWG-based product. High-performance 2D drafting, user interface innovation, parametric 3D models, IFC-certified BIM, sheet metal, everything. You would think this would lead to massive bloat, but somehow it doesn’t; the product remains small and fast.

For Autodesk, the emphasis has been elsewhere for some years now. The rate per release of worthwhile AutoCAD improvements, never stellar since the 12-month release cycle was adopted, has been trending downwards since AutoCAD 2010 and has slowed to a trickle. Autodesk is happy to accept the income from AutoCAD customers and use it to develop a hundred trendier products, neglecting the foundation on which the company was built. That’s relying on inertia, and there’s a big question mark over how sustainable that is.

Here’s a 5-minute YouTube marketing video outlining some of the changes. If you have a bit longer, here’s a 37-minute YouTube video of the new features from head of development Hans de Backer. The presentation lacks sparkle (no insult to Hans, but he’s no Lynn Allen) but the substance is there. Note that Hans was demonstrating live to the full conference using a pre-release product, including opening a huge drawing, which surely deserves marks for bravery! As a bonus, you can just about see Owen Wengerd and myself in the bottom left corner.

I’ll be going into more detail on BricsCAD V17 pros and cons later (yes, there are cons), but for now here’s the press release and here’s where you can download the product for evaluation. It’s a straightforward download of a 234 MB MSI file and the install takes just over a minute. That in itself is a breath of fresh air for people who are used to hanging around, waiting for AutoCAD downloads and installs to finish.