Good morning, Australia!
When I woke up this morning, there was a wind storm pushing trees around outside my hotel room windows. Naturally, I got up, got dressed, and went for a walk along the beach, and then onto the breakwater that shelters a sailboat harbour. Several signs warned me that I was now engaging in dangerous behavior; the joggers also ignored the signs.
Between the rocks of the breakwater, I captured the sun rising at the edge of the Pacific Ocean, at 6:40am.
To make a switch from the management seminars I've sat in on, I decided on a programming seminar to start the last day of the Revit Technology Conference.
Matt Siebert of Xrev is going to tutor us on Coding for Revit. The API for Revit is only a couple of years old, and so is relatively new. Maybe that is why he has found that there are not many articles or blogs that explain how it works. He will cover .net, add-ins, and macros using Visual Studio.
"Programming is all about problem solving," he explains. Ways of programming Revit:
Macros. Opens a development environment that talks to Revit's APIs. Can store them in the drawing or with the application. Macros have security problems, just like with Office docs.
Add-ins. These are external commands and external applications,cwhich you access through the Add-in menu. Completely dependent on the user to click a button to start the command.
SDK. Software development kit is provided with Revit, free, but is not well documented. It can activate commands on its own.
.Net Framework. The .Net API is an extra layer on top of the Revit API. Lots of languages can program with .net. Autodesk is getting better with the API, but there are still lots of things missing. You might hit a wall as you program with .net.
Now he is taking us through a demo tutorial of using Visual Studio (Microsoft's official programming environment for Windows) and create the 'hello world" app for Revit. Setting up projects, selecting core APIs, and so on -- this is foreign stuff for someone like me who learned programming with FORTRAN, Pascal, BASIC, C, APL, and LISP.
The number of steps involved with Visual Studio is staggering to me, for I am used to typing (princ "hello world") and then pressing Enter.
Morning tea is over, and now I'm sitting in an "ideas" session. Justin Morris of Ardent Architects is talking about BIM: It's more about information and people, and less about 3D modeling -- perhaps the longest title of these four days at Revit Technology Conference.
Mr Morris finds that Revit is more of a concept than a tool, in practice. "We use revit only on Wednesdays." "If you need it quickly, we'll have to do it in AutoCAD." "We outsource Revit modeling." "We use it only for jobs under $5 million." "Our drafter did it only with lines and hatches in Revit drafting mode" so no model. And the city council that asks for the project to be done with BIM, but not knowing what that means.
Using Revit for hospitals is different from using Revit for shopping malls or residential towers.
"Information is power. Information is data. Information can be contained in models, linked to models, referenced by models, can be a database, a spreadsheet, a text file." Now he is showing us what information looks like in different forms -- he displays the same data different ways in Excel spreadsheet (rows, columns, tabs), and Access database software (fields and identifiers).
"You can get someone working on Access with 20 minutes training; in two days, they'll know how to write reports." He shows how to link Revit drawings with Access to change values of details, such as door info.
"Don't put all possible information in the Revit model." Keep information like shipping costs and model numbers the spreadsheet linked to the model. Revit should only know it has desks and so on.
"You would be mad to run Revit on 32-bit Windows."
From databases to hardware. It is lunch time, or should be, but the third class of the day is starting, instead.
Let's Explore Mobile Apps by Jim Balding. He looked at 60 mobile apps for today. He did his entire presentation on his iPad and is doing the presentation on an Apple TV. Problem is that the two are not talking to each other, and so we wait while the iOS devices agree to acknowledge each other.
80 tablet models were launched at CBIT last year -- nearly all of them Androids, of course. Oops, lost the connection. Mr Balding holds up his iPad for the entire audience to see, while a techie rushes a cable to the front.
He's going over office apps first; GoodReader sends like an interesting app. I am looking forward to the CAD-related ones coming up later in the hour. I wonder if he will cover HTML5 apps that run in browsers.
(Yesterday I installed AutoCAD WS on my new Android 4.0 tablet, to see if it would handle it. It did, including 3D realtime rotations. The fellow sitting next to me wondered what this software was? This Revit user had never heard of WS.)
(I read the other day that the iPad is now the most-lost item on airplanes. A fellow at this event told me he was at Delta airlines earlier this year, and they have 600 lost iPads stacked up in a warehouse. One speaker this morning showed us his 4-week-old iPad, because he had... lost his on an airplane. He used iPad software to wipe data from the lost unit.)
I've seen most of the software he's showing us, but there is a new class of augmented reality programs new to me. Sightspace and AR Media placed 3D models in the place where you are; use the camera of the iPad to integrate the images.
Good talk, Jim.
Lunch time!
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