I'm not at the Bricsys 2010 Conference

I had to beg off attending this year's Bricsys 2010 Conference for I was simply too busy with work. (Overwhelmed is a better word.) Bricsys ceo Erik de Keyser has insisted I attend next year.

In looking at the agenda, I see a number of topics I'd've found interesting to sit in on at Concertgebouw Brugge (concert building Bruges, Belgium):

 - Status of the Bricscad technology
 - How about Linux & Mac
 - Status of APIs for the Bricscad platform
 - OpenDCL by Owen Wengerd
 - Under NDA: 12 months roadmap and Bricsys internal development steps
 - IP rights presented by Attorney Jeff Keustermans
 - Questions and answers

A European attendee tells me, "Every good old LT hacker seems to be moving to BricsCAD. That's an interesting development, don't you think?" Well, it is certainly one that Autodesk is missing out on!

I look forward to reading a flurry of blogging from Deelip Menezes.



My wife and I spent a half-day in Bruges last year. It was only a half-day, because (1) we slept in until 11am that morning and (2) everything touristy in Bruges closes around 4-5pm. As a tourist-oriented city, it is one of the nicest I've visited, and one from which Disney could learn its lesson.

Comments

[Tim Neumann]

I wonder if a 3rd party modeling app for
Bricscad is far off. How hard would it be
to come up with something like Autosolids
which was built on the Acad platform?

Currently the software is a free download but only works with Acad 2000-2008 I think.

[Henrik Vallgren]

With the introduction of BricsCAD's BRX API, I see new future for CAD application development.

Many years ago, I developed Streamspace Solids to show the capabilities of LT development. This has been completely remodeled in the past months and you may expect a prerelease within a month. While I use BricsCAD as my main development platform, there'll be AutoCAD versions as well.

[Dietmar Rudolph]

Ralph, I don't see a point in "Every good old LT hacker seems to be moving to BricsCAD." Given that a formerly well-known LT hacker is now a Bricsys employee only shows that they are serious in providing 100% API compatibility. And Owen's talk had nothing to do with any LT extender product, but was on development tools available for both AutoCAD and Bricscad, thus allowing application developers to support both platforms in parallel.
What I found much more interesting from the presentations was that high-volume customers either ported themselves or had their suppliers port their main applications to BricsCAD due to various reasons, pricing and OS support being some of them. IMHO this much more shows that the market considers Bricscad a valid alternative not only to LT.

@Tim: From Ralph's Jan-18 posting you learn that Autosolids was taken off the market due to the enhanced solids editing functions in AutoCAD. So a recent AutoCAD or Bricscad may already do what you want. Check it out.

Dietmar

[Tony Tanzillo]

Dietmar wrote: " Given that a formerly well-known LT hacker is now a Bricsys employee only shows that they are serious in providing 100% API compatibility."

I'm not sure who would want 100% compaibility with an API that is intentionally crippled by-design to avoid allowing the product that exposes it from being used as a platform on which solutions that compete with other products from the same vendor can be built.

[Dietmar Rudolph]

Tony, nobody said there shouldn't be any improvements. But for transition from one platform to another or simply for having more choice, it helps a lot if platforms share the same file formats and interfaces.
And this is valid in both directions. An application developer may not even want a "better" API if it again locks them to a certain platform. They might be perfectly happy with a crippled, but compatible API.

[Ralph Grabowski]

I think that Dietmar just defined what a "standard" is! An API or format that's good enough, and works for everyone -- like HTML.

[Henrik Vallgren]

In the case of ARX/BRX I expect that standard to change a bit as they move away from windows dependency.

Does anyone know what the reported AutoCAD for Mac is? Is it using a crossplatform library like wxWidgets? A clean rewrite using Cocoa would be impressive but probably disastrous for apps.

[RK Elrod]

"In Bruges" is a great movie, one that should be watched several times to fully appreciate.