I’m curious. What do you think I think about the Ribbon, particularly in AutoCAD? Do you think I’m a hater, a lover, indifferent, or what? Now, on what evidence do you base that view? Feel free to quote back to me anything I’ve written on this blog or any other public place to support your opinion. If you can’t find anything that gives you any clues one way or the other, feel free to mention that, too.
One of the things my blog’s WordPress dashboard shows me is a list of incoming links, i.e. who is pointing to this blog. One line intrigued me:
unknown linked here saying, “318 random votes.. http://www.blog.cadnauseam.com/ …”
Clicking on the link took me to the Autodesk Discussion Groups, but only as far as this message:
Error: you do not have permission to view the requested forum or category.
A Google search showed up the link as follows:
Important Revit information
Saturday, 3 April 2010 9:23 AM
318 random votes.. http://www.blog.cadnauseam.com/2009/09/09/ribbon-acceptance-in-autocad-and-revit/
Call me self-obsessed if you like, but I find this curious. If anybody has any more information about it, please let me know.
According to David Cohn, at yesterday’s blogger event in San Fransisco prior to the 2011 launch, Autodesk provided the following figures:
Well, that’s all very nice, but those numbers are completely meaningless without context. Autodesk may as well have just published the equivalent numbers for Release 13; I’m sure they would have looked impressive in isolation.
Did anybody in the blogger audience ask the obvious question?
How do these numbers compare with previous releases?
If so, I’d be interested to see the answer.
If not, why not? I’d like to think that I would have asked such a question rather than sitting there unquestionably accepting whatever was being presented.
I’d like to think that, but I can’t. I’m in no position to throw stones. I had a similar opportunity at the equivalent event last year and failed to take advantage of it. I was operating at a very sub-optimal level for a variety of reasons (some of which were entirely of my own making, so no excuses there). It was a small, fairly informal event at which Autodesk actively and repeatedly encouraged two-way communication. But sitting there absorbing what I was told was pretty much all I did. I even caught myself on video doing this (i.e. very little), so I have absolutely no right to expect anything better from anyone else this year.
Still, it would have been nice to have had that question asked. It would be even nicer to have it answered. Otherwise, the numbers will remain meaningless.
The past few days haven’t been so great for me. Here’s what has happened lately:
All in all, not the best time of it. But I’m OK. I’m feeling pretty positive about things. There are lots of people in my area with destroyed homes, well-hammered or flooded cars and still no power supply. I still have a source of income, my health and that of my family. There are large numbers of people in the world without adequate shelter, food and clean water, let alone a convenient power supply that fails for a couple of days only once every few years. Many of them live a miserable and fragile life under oppressive regimes or other sources of potential or actual violence or injustice.
No, I reckon I still have things pretty good.
My first computer was a Dragon 32, which I think I bought in 1982. With a massive 32 kilobytes of RAM and a proper typewriter keyboard, it was quite advanced for a home computer of the time. The Commodore 64 may have had more RAM, but a lot of it was grabbed by its very basic BASIC. I preferred a computer with an ELSE to go with its IF, thanks. Microsoft Extended BASIC for me, not the crummy old BASIC 2.0 of the Commodore. The Commodore 64 was one of the great consumer electronics sales successes of all time. The Dragon, er, wasn’t. It lasted less than two years before the Welsh parent company went under.
Inside, it was pretty much a Tandy TRS-80 Color Computer. Outside, it was this:
I cut my coding teeth on this beast. The first thing I did with it was to write a parametric 3D bottle design program. I later spent several all-nighters developing what I thought was an awesome space game in BASIC using its limited graphics. I bought a plug-in cartridge that provided me with assembly language facilities. Real nerd stuff.
I sold it to a co-worker just before the company collapsed and replaced it with a Sinclair QL, another great commercial success story. I still have that QL (broken), and another one I bought much later as a replacement. I must get it out one day and see if it still works.
What was your first computer?
Here’s a quote from somebody I know:
Blogging is an inherently arrogant concept. It implies that your opinion is worth more than that of other people.
At the risk of offending all my blogging friends, I’m not sure this is an entirely inaccurate viewpoint. Discuss!
This is one of those awful self-indulgent blog posts you hate, so just skip it and read the more interesting stuff a bit further down instead.
It is now a year since I started this blog and this is my 200th post. Here are the site statistics for 2008:
Here they are for 2009:
I’m sure there are other CAD blogs out there with much more impressive stats than that, particularly the Autodesk ones. I’m pretty happy with the number of visitors I have, though. I’m not sure what I was expecting when I started doing this; maybe a couple of hundred people might be interested, maybe not. I certainly wasn’t expecting 168,000 visits in the first year. I wasn’t even sure I was going to keep it up after the first few weeks. But it seemed to grow in popularity quite quickly so I kept at it. Hopefully, I’ll retain my enthusiasm and keep it going for a while yet.
I’d like to thank all of you who find this blog worth reading, and especially all of you who add your comments, whether I agree with them or not. Please continue!
As many of you may know, I’ve been writing for Cadalyst since 1995. Yesterday, I read in David Cohn’s summary of the history of Cadalyst that in 1991, Lionel Johnston sold CADalyst to Aster Publishing for $2.2 million.
How times have changed! Today, current owner Questex doesn’t think it’s worth keeping alive. I’ve been aware for some months of uncertainty about Cadalyst’s future, and Questex has finally decided that it doesn’t have one. Most of the staff have been laid off, with a tiny skeleton staff keeping things ticking over until the end of the month. As a Contributing Editor (i.e. writer), the financial effect on me is small, but others are less fortunate and have my sympathy.
There’s still hope, though. This is the official word from Editor-in-Chief Nancy Spurling Johnson:
Questex Media Group has decided to divest itself of Cadalyst, effective the end of February. A few of us are working actively on an employee buyout. We believe in Cadalyst and the CAD market and are positive about the future. There’s a lot to work out in the near term, but we are very, very optimistic that we can make this happen and not only keep Cadalyst moving forward, but make it a more valuable resource than ever for our readers and advertisers.
As Questex seems to think the Cadalyst name isn’t worth anything, with a bit of luck the employees won’t have to dig too deep to buy it out, and a long tradition will continue. With the unfortunate demise of AUGI World and uncertainty about any replacement, there’s a hole in the market right now. Sure, it’s a depressed market, but it still has a hole in it and even in a depressed state that market is surely much bigger now than it was in the “good old days” when the magazine was much thicker and the reviews were more critical.
If Nancy can pull off the buyout and Cadalyst continues without a publisher-owner, it’s possible that the result will be a better Cadalyst. It’s almost like a return to its roots; a small core of enthusiastic staff building up a publication. As a long-term reader, I’d be happy to see Cadalyst go back to the future.
The world has changed, of course, and I know I read Cadalyst almost exclusively on-line these days. Cadalyst could continue without printing a thing, either in the short term or permanently. Is there a future for a printed CAD magazine? I hope so. Despite the shift of readers to the on-line world, I still see newsagents full of magazines covering all sorts of topics, many of them more obscure than CAD. There are millions of us. Surely we deserve our own magazine?
Looking at the comments, it seems not everyone is happy with the Matt Stein interview. If so, I’m sorry you feel that way about the piece. In my own defence, I would point out the following:
Enough from me, what would you have asked? Let’s hear what questions you think the interview is missing. Maybe there will be a chance to ask them one day.
Roopinder Tara has raised an interesting point about how different CAD vendors treat journalists and bloggers. Ralph Grabowski has responded with a “Who cares“. Now you have more CAD blogger navel gazing to put up with as I have my say on the matter.
As a traditional magazine journalist (Cadalyst, 1995 – present) and now as a blogger, I’d like to say I agree with Ralph. The label shouldn’t matter, content should be king. From a reader’s point of view, that is.
Where it does matter is from a vendor’s point of view. How to dish out the freebies? Should Autodesk fly every blogger out to San Francisco, put them all up at Nob Hill hotels and shower them all with gifts? Or just the traditional journalists? Or journalists and major bloggers? If so, what’s a major blog and what isn’t? Is is based on how active the blog is, the quality of writing, the number of visitors, how vendor-friendly the articles are, or some other factor?
Every vendor’s PR team has to draw the line somewhere. Some invite only traditional journalists while others invite a host of bloggers to their events. It all comes down to how much coverage the PR people want to see and how much they are prepared to invest to make that coverage happen. Their budget, their choice.