How I Came to Write 39 Books About BricsCAD. And Make 161 Videos

Opinion

 

Sometimes, it’s useful to look back to see where you came from, and why you are the way you are today. You may well find a thread of events, of decision trees, and of opportunities taken -- or avoided. The most convoluted for me, perhaps, was how I came to produce so many books and training videos about BricsCAD. Each time an outside event changed my direction, I've noted it below as (Decision Tree). 

 

1991: From AutoCAD to Corel Draw

It began with Corel Draw. Or, rather, it didn’t.

(Decision Tree.) In 1991, Wordware Publishing asked me to write a book on learning AutoCAD, which they titled “Learn AutoCAD in a Day.” The gimmick was that the book had eight chapters -- one per hour of learning, from setting up a drawing to viewing in three dimensions.

I ended up writing 21 books for them. (Book cover at right: The first book I wrote for Wordware Publishing, although not the first book I wrote.)

At this point in my story, I want to put in a plug for the owner of Wordware Publishing, who pushed me to write better, more clearly, and with a consistent method. I employ his advice in my writing to this day.

1996: From Corel Draw to Visio

The publisher of Wordware asked me to write a training book about Corel Draw, and so I put about installing it and trying out the software.

(Decision Tree.) Just about the time I was deciding I wasn’t particularly keen on writing about it, Wordware’s owner said he’d changed his mind: he wanted me to instead write about Visio.

This made me happier, as Visio was more CAD-like than Corel Draw. In 1996, I was tasked to write “Visio 4 For Everyone” as a series of 34 modules, from starting a new drawing to customizing shapes. (Book cover at left: The first book on Visio I wrote.)

(Decision Tree.) The folks at Visio noticed that my treatment of shape customization was rather weak, and so invited me to Seattle a couple of times so that I could better understand how Visio works, especially in programming its spreadsheet-like back end. This lead to another book, “Learn Visio for the Advanced User” in 1999.

(I still make "Tailoring Visio" and "Inside Visio" available as PDF e-books through worldcadaccess.com/ebooksonline/2015/07/inside-visio-and-tailoring-visio.html.)

As the Visio user became better understood, Wordware asked me in 2001 to write a very basic text, “Learn to Diagram with Visio.” My Visio books became the best selling ones on the market. 

Then, a most unexpected sidebar occurred.

 

1998: From Visio to IntelliCAD

In another part of the country, Autodesk decided it wanted to buy Softdesk, then the largest third-party developer of add-on software for AutoCAD, specializing in engineering applications, such as civil design. Autodesk, to its horror, found that the Softdesk had been secretly developing an AutoCAD clone -- because Autodesk had begun kicking third-party developers out of its fold. Softdesk wanted insurance against the day should Autodesk ever come after it. The software under development was named IntelliCADD, with two Ds.

Here things become a bit murky. Well, my telling about it becomes murky. I know exactly what happened, because the principals involved told me their roles. But I’d rather not get sued, because the story behind the story is not general knowledge.

Anyhow, “somehow” the US government got involved and issued a decree that Autodesk (a) had to spin off IntelliCADD, and (b) could not interfere with it for three years. The reasoning: otherwise Autodesk would have a monopoly in DWG editors, and three years was considered sufficient for IntelliCADD to get on its feet. “Somehow” Visio ended up acquiring IntelliCADD. The company thought that with its success in diagramming, greater success would follow with CAD.

(Decision Tree.) With my connections to Visio, the company asked to write some of the documentation for the brand-new CAD program, including the command reference M-Z, IntelliCAD for AutoCAD users, and the LISP manual. (Book cover at right: One of the manuals I wrote for IntelliCAD 98.)

Upon its launch in 1998, it was renamed IntelliCAD 98 (one D) and sold poorly enough that a year later Visio spun it off into a self-sustaining organization, IntelliCAD Technical Consortium.

2003: From IntelliCAD to BricsCAD

ITC continued developing the software, while members licensed it for rebranding and resale, or for internal use. This proved to be a successful business model, and continues to this day. Based on my IntelliCAD documentation work, some ITC members asked me to write e-books on using the new software.

(Decision Tree.) One of them was Bricsys of Belgium, who in 2003 asked me to write, and then keep updating my e-books with every release. So, here are 39 I wrote, over a span of 16 years:

• Learn BricsCAD in a Day (from release 4 to 13), renamed Inside BricsCAD (from release 14 to 20)
• Customizing BricsCAD (from release 4 to 20)
• BricsCAD for AutoCAD Users (from release 9 to 20)
• What's Inside? BricsCAD (releases 16 and 19)

I designed and typeset all books. During releases 8 and 9, roughly 2007-9, Bricsys rewrote BricsCAD so that it no longer contained any code written by ITC. So, Bricsys asked me to rewrite the entire command reference from scratch, which I did.

Typesetting "Customizing BricsCAD V13" in InDesign, with figure annotations by Visio

In 2014, the company asked me to start producing video tutorials -- typically 3-5 minutes long -- as many as I could churn out. So, I did:

• BricsCAD V14 -- 27 videos
• BricsCAD V15 -- 37 videos
• BricsCAD V16 -- 29 videos
• BricsCAD V17 -- 15 videos
• BricsCAD V18 -- 52 videos

My collaboration with Bricsys collapsed the year after Hexagon of Sweden purchased the company in 2018. Overnight, BricsCAD went from being a huge part of a small company, to a small part of a huge one.

I had my fans. One reader wrote me, “I wish that Bricsys would team up with you again. Not a fan of the current documentation. Web pages are a pain to navigate and, of course, impossible to highlight and add notes to. The auto-generated (apparently) off-line help files are not good.”

An acquisition is also the reason sales of my Visio books ground to a halt. After Microsoft bought Visio the company in 2000, it launched its own books on using Visio the software, which by 2002 killed the market for independently-written ones, like mine.

 

Lessons Learned from Visio and BricsCAD

In the end, Visio was, in my opinion, possibly a one-trick pony. The genius behind it was the ShapeSheet, an Excel-like environment that defined and manipulated every property of every object in the drawing. It was brilliant, and it was, you could say, parametrics for dummies. The flaw behind Visio, though, was also the ShapeSheet, which, like a spreadsheet, got slower down the huger it got.

Ultimately, it seemed to me that the program never advanced far beyond its initial conception. You would think that a program that doesn’t grow would have no market in selling books year after year. But, no. Here is the secret: the kind of people who tended to use Visio tended to not be power users, research seemed to suggest. Rather than use templates, reuse existing drawings or invoke macros--, they tended to start from scratch each time. Which, oddly enough, generated demand for my books.

Microsoft continues to sell Visio, and it can be had for as little as $20 from sites like PC World. I used Visio a lot when figures in my books needed callouts (see figure of InDesign, above).

BricsCAD is very different, yet very similar to Visio. The original programming geniuses behind BricsCAD extended a me-too DWG editor into a 3D modeling powerhouse in areas like mechanical design, BIM, and civil engineering. Its killer feature is that all vertical modules use the same extensible DWG format -- unlike Autodesk, whose verticals are, for the most part, incompatible with AutoCAD.

BricsCAD is, on the other hand, very similar to Visio in that a CAD program is a CAD program. Anyone who used, say AutoCAD, in the mid-1980s today uses the same commands to draw lines and place dimensions.

So, in my case, I can trace a path from AutoCAD to Corel Draw, to Visio, to IntelliCAD, and then to BricsCAD -- each connected by a single outside event that determined the decision tree and a new path for me to follow.

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PS: You can see the complete list of my e-books at WorldCAD Access: https://www.worldcadaccess.com/blog/2021/09/my-137-ebooks.html.

 

 

 

Comments

[Dairobi Paul]

Fascinating story! Thanks for sharing it.