Tag Archives: Cloud Computing

Autodesk Project Butterfly Cloud Computing Update 2

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In my previous post on Project Butterfly Cloud Computing, I stated “I sent two invitation emails to one of my other email addresses which never came”. Well I was wrong. They did come, but they were sent to the junk email folder –probably because the email message below…

Mark Randa has invited you to join an online meeting. Click the following link or the image bellow to join the conversation.
Link: http://butterfly.autodesk.com/app/message?link=ZZ[aj7eSgBT314e

Project Butterfly is an Autodesk service that lets you edit and collaborate on design data over the Web.

 Sent to you by Autodesk Project Butterfly.

 AEC Plan Elev Sample.dwg <http://butterfly.autodesk.com/app/message?link=ZZ[aj7eSgBT314e&attid=10178>

 

…has too many links. In practice, a person would need to be informed of this possibility and to check their junk email folder –possibly by sending two emails the first time, one with, and one without the links. The one without the links could tell the person to expect the second email, and check their junk folder if it does not arrive momentarily. The receiver would then need to add the sender to a safe sender list to avoid the problem in the future.

Having said all of that, this would be a great collaboration tool! I would use it right now if there were Inventor and/or Revit versions. More later…





Autodesk Project Butterfly Cloud Computing Update

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This morning I checked out the Butterfly Project, and I must say it appears as though something along these lines may be very useful to current AutoCAD users or those of us who have to deal with legacy files. The right click context menu was annoying in that it did not behave as expected for AutoCAD (Flash related stuff only), but it is still a technology preview where things such as this are discovered and fixed. Also……I sent two invitation emails to one of my other email addresses which never came, so I never got to try out that functionality, and the multi selection (window select) is limited to 30 objects at this time, but again, it’s a preview.

Autodesk Project Butterfly Cloud Computing

One thing that definitely needs to be changed is the size being fixed at what looks to be an optimized size for a 1200 x 1600 resolution monitor. Engineers and Designers who are the target audience of this product (service?) are likely to have larger, wide screen monitors, so there is a lot of wasted space as you can see in the image above. If the interface re-sized to fill the usable screen, it would help. Especially when working in garish AutoCAD files :) Continue reading →





Autodesk Project Butterfly Cloud Computing

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 New at Autodesk Labs(a kind of skunk-works for new software ideas), is Project Butterfly, a technology preview of cloud computing that enables AutoCAD users to edit and collaborate on AutoCAD drawings through a Web browser. Something along these lines would definitely speed up the collaborative process on projects with widely dispersed team members.

When I was the Senior Architectural Modeler/Applications Engineer at a large yacht maker, a typical design cycle would have us collaborating with designers and engineers in the Netherlands, Germany, England, Australia, New Zealand, and Italy as well as vendors scattered across North America. Having something like this back then would have helped greatly with AutoCAD files.

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