In the Pipes

Happy anniversary to me

Yesterday was my 2 year anniversary at Autodesk.  October 17, 2005 was my start date here – and it has been an interesting two years.  I came out here direct from New Orleans – which had just reopened after the Katrina Hurricane disaster.   I managed to spend 4 days in New Orleans cleaning up the yard, taking stock of the neighborhood, and shipping a few boxes of stuff to California before I myself got on a plane and flew out to San Francisco.    (Thinking about Katrina and discussing the mess that is the “rebuilding” aftermath still sets me off.  Not going there now.)  I have to say moving to San Francisco was a big change for me – new job at a new company, new home in a new city.   

So it’s been two years.  I’m settling into the new job – product design is something I’d never experienced as a formal part of software development before.  It is interesting to work with specialists who are concerned with FORM as well as FUNCTION.  It’s no longer good enough that it works (which was enough when you had nothing else), it has to work well.  It has to be easy to use, easy to learn, aesthetically pleasing – “User-friendly” is more than just a marketing buzzword here.  We formally evaluate designs against usability heuristics; we have staff specialized in it; we regularly schedule user testing to reality check designs. 

When I first got here, it was weird to be THINKING so much about the software design.  It seemed to slow everything down. I can just see this conversation:
“What did you do today?” 
“I thought about my problems”   
“Seriously, didn’t you put out any fires?  Write new revolutionary interface specs?  Defuse any time-bombs?” 
“Nope, but in a few weeks, trust me, all that thinking will pay off.” 
That would never have flown in my consulting days . . . but here’s the thing.  At Autodesk it does go over well.  Sure, we have milestones and deadlines and all.  And we also take time to think. 

Of course, in the end, thinking is a good thing – how often have you heard the “spending X% more in the design phase pays off 10-time-X in the construction phase” ? It’s the same with software as with plant design – nail the design, and the programming development goes smoothly.  In the end, the time spent upfront more than pays for itself.  Thinking trumps reacting anytime; again Rands says it better than I can (no, Rands, I’m not stalking you.  Lovely article on pens, though.  I too prefer the Pilot G-2).

Oh, and I’m settling into my new home in this new city also.  My New Orleans cat is finally flying out to join me in 10 days!  I'm actually looking forward to mornings like this:

More DWF with P&ID

So yes, it seems like I’m on the DWF kick lately.  It’s weird, as I’m not usually one of those “ooh, look how cool this technology is” types. I don’t really care that much about technology for its own sake – I care about what technology can do for me.  Using DWF and DWF tools lets me do all sorts of interesting things, hence I keep blogging about DWF. 

Publish a Project to DWF

One of the features available in AutoCAD P&ID 2008 is the ability to publish the project to a DWF set.  In case you’ve never seen DWF sets and (free!) Design Review, I highly recommend that you give it a look. If you’ve never published a set before, you can do it by invoking the Publish option from the AutoCAD File menu. In the Publish dialog box, click the Add button to add all the P&ID drawings to the set (plus I wanted only Layout views so I unchecked Model).  When you click Publish, you get one DWF file with all the P&IDs.  Nice.

You not only get graphics, you can also get all the P&ID data. If for some reason you don’t want to publish some of the data fields, you can control this via the Publish Options button.

So you have an easy way to send the P&ID and the data in one file.  My approximately 2 MB of 5 sample P&IDs (and data!) published out as a 72kb DWF.  Anyone who has the (free!) Design Review can look at the drawing and review the component data.  And add some markups if desired.

Compare DWFs

One of my favorite features in Design Review is the ability to compare DWFs.  So, say I make some changes to a P&ID.  I can republish the DWF, then use the compare feature in Design to show exactly what changed.   Here I’ve moved some things around, you can see the old deleted items in red, the new items in green.  (I clicked View in GrayScale from the View menu to turn the unchanged items gray.)

Simple, and yet powerful.  And did I mention free? 

FYI:  If you happen to be going to Autodesk University, there are lots of sessions that highlight cool ways to use DWF.  I’m especially looking forward to CP211-2 Develop Custom Websites and Applications with DWF.