Category: <span>Fail</span>

Category: Fail

Autodesk, Fail, Spin

Autodesk is firing. No, wait! Hiring.

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August 2012: Autodesk increases profits, but not as much as expected, and gets rid of 500 people. This sort of thing has happened before, resulting in the loss of good, skilled people, some with many years of priceless and irreplacable experience. September 2012: Autodesk goes on a recruiting drive. So, if you want to work for a company that will put you out with the trash the next time reality doesn’t quite match some financial analyst’s estimate, you know where to go. Good luck with that.

AutoCAD, AutoCAD 2013, Autodesk, Bug, Cloud, Customer Service, Fail, Other Autodesk Products, Other Blogs, Rant, Spin, Thoughts, Tip, Web Stuff

AutoCAD Help suckage to continue – confirmed

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In a recent post on Between the Lines, Shaan passed on the following response from the AutoCAD Team: There has been some recent discussions about the built-in help system in AutoCAD 2013, both positive and some criticism.  As our longtime users know, AutoCAD help has been through many evolutions. We are particularly proud of the new AutoCAD 2013 online learning environment we recently released (AutoCAD Online Help Mid-Year Updates.) This update addressed several user requested fixes and changes, and we will continue to take our direction from our user’s feedback. We do recognize that the online learning environment may not …

AutoCAD, AutoCAD 2013, Autodesk, Cloud, Comments, Customer Service, Fail, Image manipulation, Rant, Spin, Subscription, Thoughts, Web Stuff

I was wrong about AutoCAD 2013 Help, it still sucks

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In my effusive welcome of AutoCAD 2013’s updated Help system, I wondered if I had been shocked into missing some glaring problem. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what happened. In my enthusiasm, I managed to totally miss the fact that the new system has not been introduced for offline users. If you use the new system, there’s a link on the front page to the offline files. I got as far as downloading and installing what I thought was the offline version of the new system and discovered that it didn’t want to install because the old one was already installed. What …

AutoCAD, AutoCAD 2013, Cloud, Fail, Subscription, Thoughts

AutoCAD 2013 Service Pack 1 – Now you see it, now you don’t

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Last week, Autodesk released Service Pack 1 for AutoCAD 2013, and then removed it a few days later. Service Pack 1 for AutoCAD 2013 has been temporarily removed due to a newly discovered fatal error. The AutoCAD team is actively working on resolving this and a new service pack will be posted here as soon as it is available. This is the sort of thing that Beta testing is supposed to prevent, but in this case it obviously didn’t. Somebody in a position of influence at Autodesk needs to investigate whether this is just a freak one-off, or if there is …

Apple, AutoCAD, AutoCAD 2013, Customisation, DCL, Fail, Interoperability

AutoCAD 2013 for Mac – the holes live on

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A couple of years ago, I reported on the missing features in AutoCAD 2011 for Mac. While some generous souls were prepared to accept something half-baked as a first attempt, even that excuse doesn’t wash when it comes to a third iteration. So how well is Autodesk doing at filling those holes? Decide for yourself. Here’s an updated list of missing features in AutoCAD 2013 for Mac: Quick Properties Palette Layer State Manager New Layer Notification Various layer commands including LAYCUR, LAYDEL, LAYMRG, LAYWALK, and LAYVPI Autocomplete doesn’t work entirely properly, including offering commands that don’t exist Filter Quick Select …

AutoCAD, Autodesk, Cloud, Fail, Other Sites, Web Stuff

AutoCAD Exchange bites the dust

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Three years ago, I was happy to promote Autodesk’s then-new site AutoCAD Exchange. However, Autodesk has now given up on this attempt to maintain a social site of its own. My comment at the time, “AutoCAD Exchange is an important and potentially very useful site for AutoCAD users” turned out to be optimistic. I was closer to the mark with “It has yet to be seen if Autodesk manages to develop a real community on this site”. Now we’ve seen the answer. No, it didn’t. Autodesk has instead handed control to more socially successful sites, as this message indicates: Thank you …

Announcement, ClassicArray, Customer Service, Fail

ClassicArray Registration Service

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When you register ClassicArray, you are supposed to receive an automated response with the registration code. I have not been able to get this working reliably, so for some customers I have been sending out the email manually. Personal circumstances dictate that I will be unable to do this promptly for much of April, so if you purchase ClassicArray and do not receive your code immediately, please accept my apologies in advance. I will also not be able to be very active on this blog for much of April.

AutoCAD, AutoCAD 2013, Bug, Development, Fail, Performance

AutoCAD 2013 – Using Help in anger

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Trying to be fair, I decided to put aside my initial hostility to the AutoCAD 2013 Help system and use it for real. I used it in a realistic situation, to find out how to work with something new or changed (model documentation) as I was working through it with my own example drawing. Try as I might to give it a fair go, I could only get so far before I got irritated. Using it in anger might not be an entirely appropriate phrase for it, but it’s not that far off. Using it in annoyance, perhaps? Here’s how it went. I …

AutoCAD, AutoCAD 2010, AutoCAD 2013, Autodesk, Cloud, Customer Service, Fail, Rant, Web Stuff

AutoCAD 2013 – Autodesk pulls off a miracle with Help

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In AutoCAD 2011, Autodesk introduced on-line Help. It was badly done and poorly received. It was slow and generally awful to use, and so obviously inferior to the generally well-crafted old CHM-based system in so many ways, that there were squeals of joy when somebody discovered that one of the AutoCAD-based vertical products hadn’t been updated to the new regime and still provided a CHM file. That file became hot property, being posted by users on Autodesk’s own discussion groups and other places. Eventually, the outcry was loud enough that Autodesk was forced to make the CHM version of Help …

AutoCAD, AutoCAD 2013, Autodesk, Customer Service, Fail, Rant, Spin, Tip, Web Stuff

AutoCAD 2013 – Download the trial without Akamai

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Edit (October 2016): see this post to download Autodesk software easily. It’s AutoCAD new release time again and many of you will want to get hold of the trial software, or download the production software from the trial site rather than the Subscription site for performance or other reasons (the resultant downloads are identical). As in previous years, Autodesk is heavily pushing the use of the Akamai Download Manager to download it, going to what I consider unethical lengths to do so. For a variety of reasons, some of which I’m not at liberty to discuss and others of which …

Autodesk, Cloud, Fail, Other Autodesk Products, Other Blogs, Performance, Review, Spin, Web Stuff

Autodesk Cloud-based structural engineering software review

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As I’ve already discussed, one of the areas where CAD on the Cloud shows potential is in handling specific tasks that require performing intensive calculations that are suitable for sharing among many processors. That sounds great in theory, and a lot of Cloud marketing (e.g. Virtually Infinite Computing) emphasises that point. OK, that sounds promising, but how does it pan out in real life? One problem dissuading me from finding out is that Autodesk is being very restrictive with access to many of its Autodesk Cloud products (I’d probably throw a few sample render jobs into the Cloud and compare …

Apple, Autodesk, Fail, Fun, Hardware, Microsoft, Music, Polls, Rant, Thoughts

Poll of evil

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I have closed the Which of these is most evil? poll, which had been running from 20 February 2009. It attracted 2,351 voters, each of whom could distribute up to three votes among thirteen (yes, that number was deliberate) candidates. Here are the ranked results: Satan (36%, 846 Votes) Microsoft (31%, 721 Votes) Apple (26%, 614 Votes) RIAA/IFPI/MPAA (26%, 601 Votes) Miley Cyrus (23%, 546 Votes) Autodesk (23%, 536 Votes) Disney (16%, 382 Votes) Google (10%, 230 Votes) Dell (7%, 172 Votes) The Pirate Bay (6%, 147 Votes) Sony (6%, 140 Votes) Steve Johnson (4%, 89 Votes) Gaahl (3%, 82 Votes) That top …

AutoCAD, AutoCAD 2009, Cloud, Development, Fail, Nostalgia, Polls, Rant

The worst feature ever added to AutoCAD is…

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…the Ribbon, according to your selections in the What are the worst features ever added to AutoCAD? poll. As in the best ever poll, the winner (loser?) in this race had no serious competition. I’ve listed eleven top (bottom?) features here rather than ten, partly because the popular (unpopular?) choice Memory Overuse isn’t exactly a feature. But it’s mainly because I’d hate to see Action Recorder unfairly miss out on a well-deserved mention. Ribbon (30%) CUI (20%) Help (on line / 2012) (18%) Memory Overuse (17%) AutoCAD Today (2000i/2002) (16%) White / Cream Drawing Background (16%) Unreconciled Layers (16%) Nudge (10%) Blipmode (9%) …

Autodesk, Cloud, Customer Service, Fail, Rant, Web Stuff

Any Autodesk/Akamai people care to explain this?

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Akamai is an Internet/Cloud infrastructure company, used extensively by Autodesk. To be polite, my experiences using its services over several years have been somewhat negative. Back in March, when trying to download the AutoCAD 2012 trial, I went through the usual Akamai download manager struggles before being informed of the wonderful Opera workaround (thanks again, Helper). I thought I’d seen the last of Akamai for a while, but today, while left unattended, Windows threw up this warning: Huh? What is Akamai software trying to do here? I hadn’t asked it to do anything. I’m not downloading Autodesk software or even …

AutoCAD, Comments, Fail, Fun, Nostalgia, Polls, Win

Best and worst AutoCAD features ever – polls

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Using your suggestions and a few of my own, I have added two polls for you to select what are, in your opinion, the best and worst features ever added to AutoCAD. To help us find The Answer, there are 42 items in each poll, from which you can choose up to three. A few items (e.g. Action Recorder) made it into both lists, while several items in the ‘worst’ list (e.g. 2012 Array, Ribbon, Annotative Scaling) were suggested multiple times. It will be interesting to see how the poll results pan out.

AutoCAD, Comments, Fail, Fun, Nostalgia, Polls, Win

What are the best and worst features ever added to AutoCAD?

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Audience participation time, I think. A comment on one of AutoCAD 2012’s new features recently set me thinking about what were the worst features ever introduced to AutoCAD. That in turn got me thinking about what were the best. I’ll keep my opinions to myself for a while, as I’d like your input and don’t want to influence it. Please add a comment with your list of what you consider the best three features ever added to AutoCAD and the worst three. If you can’t think of three of each, you can submit less, but please don’t submit more. By …

AutoCAD, AutoCAD 2012, Autodesk, Customer Service, Fail, Performance, Rant, Subscription

AutoCAD 2012 – Massive download bloat

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Note: this post is not an April fool’s joke. It may be ridiculous and hard to believe, but unfortunately it’s all true. After I managed to overcome Autodesk’s obstructive download manger and download AutoCAD 2012, it became available on the Subscription site (when that site wasn’t running unusably slowly). Or it became kind-of available. Here’s what is actually available: AutoCAD 2012 Multilingual 32 bit Download File Size: 2,080,558,319 bytes (1,984.2 MB) AutoCAD 2012 English Korean Traditional-Chinese Simplified-Chinese Win 64bit Download File Size: 2,240,915,999 bytes (2,137.1 MB) These file sizes are roughly double those of the AutoCAD 2012 English files I’ve already …

AutoCAD, AutoCAD 2012, Fail

AutoCAD 2012 – Nudge encourages ‘bad’ drawings

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If you preselect some objects in AutoCAD 2012 and hold down [Ctrl], then the objects will move a bit if you hit an arrow key. Great, cool! Exactly how far do they move? Let’s try it, shall we. First time, the move was about 4.5565 units. Zoom around a bit and try again. This time, it’s about 11.6677 units. Zoom around a bit more and it’s different again. And again. What’s actually happening is that the Nudge feature is moving the objects by 3 pixels. What? Since when has AutoCAD dealt with object location in terms of pixels? Since 2012 …

AutoCAD, AutoCAD 2012, Autodesk, Fail, Rant, Subscription, Web Stuff

AutoCAD 2012 – Downloading the trial is a trial

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Edit (October 2016): see this post to download Autodesk software easily. Let’s say you’re trying to download some software and it insists on first installing some intermediary download manager. Do you think, “Great, this will make my life easier, things are bound to go quickly and smoothly now”? No, didn’t think so. How about when it’s by Akamai? Does that make you feel more confident? No, nor me. If I download stuff without a manager, it just works. Sometimes it’s slow, but it works. If I use a general-purpose download manager that’s part of my browser, or one I chose to …

Apple, AutoCAD, AutoCAD 2011, Customisation, DCL, Development, Fail

Autodesk for Mac – the hole story

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You may remember my pre-release speculation about what was likely to be missing from the Mac version of AutoCAD 2011. It turns out that my list was pretty accurate as far as it went, but very incomplete. In a move that I can only applaud, Autodesk has now published its own list of missing Mac features. It includes this statement: Although AutoCAD 2011 for Mac is based on AutoCAD 2011, it was written to be a native Mac application. As such, it is a new and separate product and not simply a port from the Windows version. In the first …