Beyond the Paper

Free Tinkercad Lessons Plans are Available for Teachers

With COVID-19 impacting the ability of teachers and students to gather face to face, remote learning is the remedy. As such, Tinkercad has been found to be a valuable tool in teaching Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Mathematics. Tinkercad is our free, easy-to-use app for 3D design, electronics, and coding. It's used by teachers, children, hobbyists, and designers to imagine, design, and make anything!

In 2018, my colleague, Guillermo Melantoni, and I taught a Tinkercad class at the Alameda Boys ad Girls Club. During this time of the pandemic, one of the most frequent requests our Tinkercad team receives is for lesson plans. Well, you know what they say, "Ask and yee shall receive." The Tinkercad site has a set of free lesson plans.

Review the lesson plans.

Autodesk has always been an automation company. Today, more than ever, that means helping our customers automate their design and make processes. We help them embrace the future of making, where they can do more (e.g., quantity, functionality, performance, quality), with less (e.g., energy, raw materials, timeframes, waste of human potential), and realize the opportunity for better (e.g., innovation, user experience, efficiency, sustainability, return on investment). Helping teachers and students get a start on design and making is part of providing the opportunity for better.

Project Blink Beta - Sign Up Today!

Our partners over at Autodesk Labs want to let you know that Autodesk customers can sign up for the Project Blink Beta. Project Blink provides you with the ability to access your design software from anywhere.

Interested? Limited number of slots available! Just take this quick survey!

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/project_blink

Project Blink: Another way Autodesk is going beyond the desktop!

DWF File Viewing Comes to the iPad

Judging from the amount of email we receive requesting the ability to view DWF files on your mobile devices, we think you'll be interested in learning about an iPad® app called McDwiff, by third-party developer Austin Silver Software.

Using the Autodesk Freewheel Web service, which requires an Internet connection, McDwiff enables you to open, view, convert, and print 2D and 3D DWF files on your iPad. (Of particular interest to some may be the app's Dropbox integration.)

For more information about the app, visit the McDwiff website. And if you try the app, be sure to leave a comment here to let us know how viewing DWF files on your iPad works for you.

McDwiff (and the Autodesk Freewheel Web service). Just another way Autodesk enables our customers to go beyond the paper!

 

Your Autodesk Design Review 2012 WikiHelp Awaits!

When we have questions about "how to" use Autodesk Design Review’s tools, we may search the Help file for answers and find what we're looking for there. However, when we have job-specific questions, requiring us to know "when to" or "why to" use certain product tools as part of a larger process, we often need to turn to people who have real-world experience and insight. 

We may ask our questions using email or instant messages, use Web searches, or post to discussion groups--all the while hoping to get our answers...answers we can trust. When we find our answers, or when we develop our own solutions, we’re excited to share them! But where? We may post videos and presentations to a variety of websites, but are we sure we’ll find a receptive and responsive audience? 

Rather than spending time searching and posting to all of these different online channels, the new Autodesk Design Review WikiHelp can provide the best of both worlds. As you might expect, right now as we roll it out, our WikiHelp lets you browse Autodesk Design Review's Help information. But with your participation, WikiHelp can become much more than just the typical Help file presented online. 

Autodesk Design Review WikiHelp is a way for you to add your own knowledge; it's all about providing you with the venue to share your design reviewing experiences with each other. In short, Design Review's WikiHelp can be used to combine "how to" with "know how" to create a single, vetted resource for Design Review users. 

You can review the Autodesk Design Review WikiHelp right away without even registering or signing in. The Wiki Guidelines and the Frequently Asked Questions will help get you started. 

Whenever you're ready to participate, just sign in to the WikiHelp site using your free Autodesk User ID. If you don't have an ID, go to the Autodesk Log In page and click Create User ID Now. To start, you can comment on, rate, and share WikiHelp pages. If you're ready to dive right in, you can begin editing content, posting tips, tricks, and tutorials, uploading videos, or whatever you think is useful to other Design Review users. 

All new or modified content is saved as a draft to be reviewed by Autodesk moderators. This is to ensure that all contributions meet the posted Wiki Guidelines. Once approved, your contributions become public, and the interaction begins! Over time, the entire community will begin to make contributions, validate changes, and apply meaningful tags to make the content even more useful and discoverable. 

As you begin using the Autodesk Design Review WikiHelp site, we'd love to hear what you think about it. What's your favorite aspect of it? What can we do to improve it? Either post comments to this blog article or post your comments directly to the WikiHelp site itself.

With WikiHelp, the Autodesk Design Review team begins moving away from its previous information monologue, toward a more collaborative content conversation. We look forward to participating in this conversation with you.

Introducing Autodesk Product Support e-Services

Vice President of Autodesk Product Support, Roberto Sigona, speaks about available options for self-help technical support; including Autodesk knowledgebase, blogs and community forums.

 

Video Link

Autodesk Design Review on the iPad?

Check out this article at Autodesk Labs and share your thoughts through the offered email channel, if you have an interest in this particular subject.

Thank you.

Author's Whereabouts

The Beyond the Paper blog has been rather quiet over the past few weeks and I want to take a few minutes and share with the readership as to why this has been the case.

News does not stay secret for long in this new media and social network driven world.  Not, I suppose that we were really planning to keep it a secret.  Carolyn and I got married last weekend and we (and all the guests) had a wonderful time.  Family and friends attended our little ceremony and the weather (and foliage) played along, too. What a day it was! Expecially after it all turned out as planned...almost. Those, who know me closer, won't be surprised to hear about Volker's organizational "drive"..

Blogs shall appear again on a frequent basis and we thank all well wishers in advance.

Thank you.

Has browser speed become irrelevant? - Off Topic

Personally, I would vote "No", if somebody was to ask me. How about you?

Now that Chrome 3 is out, and Google claims that the JavaScript engine is some 25% faster than Chrome 2, it’s time to consider whether speed has got to the point where more speed is irrelevant.

So, rather than crack out the synthetic benchmarks,  Adrian Kingsley-Hughes of ZDNet took the latest versions of Internet Explorer 8, Opera 10, Safari 4, Firefox 3.5 and Chrome 3 for a quick spin around the internet to see if he could feel a difference in performance between them. He states that the results were quite an eye-opener.

Firefox 3.5 had a noticeably slower load time. IE8, Opera 10, Chrome 3 and Safari 4 all felt pretty much the same during the test.

For general browsing of sites which are largely text and images (not JavaScript intensive) all five browsers felt about the same. On really large pages IE8 seemed to be the slowest at rendering the page but he thought that this is more of a visual thing than anything else because it doesn’t look as smooth.

On sites that are both large and have use JavaScript, IE8 begins to feel slow and sluggish and the browser seem to find the page hard work. Chrome 3 on the other hand is fast and super-snappy. Firefox 3.5, Opera 10 and Safari 4 all feel about the same, being much faster and smoother than IE8, but noticeably slower than Chrome 3.

Flash heavy websites feel best in Chrome. Not only that, but the browser also feels the most responsive when under heavy Flash load. IE8 once again seems to be under the greatest strain, and the rest of the pack all feel the same.

When it comes to the actual performance of the browser itself, in terms of flipping through tabs and so on, Chrome 3 is way ahead of the pack, IE8 is trailing way behind, and nothing separates the rest.

Despite having all five browsers installed side-by-side on several test machines, he never took all of them on a test like this before. Given his experience of the browsers under synthetic benchmark tests, he expected Chrome 3 to be the fastest and IE8 to be the slowest, but he didn’t think that those milliseconds difference in synthetic benchmarks results would translate into anything noticeable in the real-world. The fact that there is a noticeable difference means that we have all benefited from this latest round of browser wars because we’re all enjoying faster browsers.

This side-by-side comparison also puts it into perspective how slow some older browsers must have been given that we’ve seen huge performance gains from all fronts over the past year or so. His recommendation: "If you’re still using an old, outdated browser, whichever one it is, update it and enjoy the performance boost."

Bottom line is that a few milliseconds do make a big difference!

What is your personal experience? Share it with us.

Thank you.

To Netbook or not to Netbook? - Off Topic

One would think that it is safe to say that netbooks are here to stay. They could even dominate the laptop landscape in a couple of years.

Since their humble beginnings as cheap laptops that could be used to surf the Web, compose e-mails, do light office tasks, but not much more, they are evolving into more substantial machines.

Set against their low price and portability are limitations such as screen and keyboard size, and lack of a built-in optical drive. But perhaps the biggest differentiator between netbooks and other laptops is performance.

We know netbooks can easily handle the sort of basic tasks mentioned above, but how do they do at more rigorous tasks such as handling complex CAD applications and tasks?

Key to the performance of any PC, netbook or otherwise, are its processing parts. The vast majority of netbooks run on an Intel Atom processor and typically ship with 1GB of memory, while bigger laptops are standardizing at 3GB and 4GB now. And let's not forget that graphics components and hard drives can influence the performance of a netbook.

Do you use a netbook? We would love to hear about your experiences and as to whether you are actually using it for CAD related task.

Thank you.

Beginning of the End for Vista? - Off Topic

One can find many references out in the “blog world”, that indicate the rise of Windows 7.

Should that mean for Vista to exit the market earlier than anticipated?

Windows 7 is looking better and better as it gets closer to release. Many analysts state the obvious and tell businesses to move away from Vista and to directly go to Windows 7.

Remember Windows Me, which came on-line about a decade ago? Windows Vista appears to have similarities and turned out a “not so great” product, too. It was filled with problems and launched before it was ready. By the time Microsoft smoothed out most of the problems, Vista had already gotten a lasting reputation for being frustrating at times as well as slow.

A few businesses may want the option of buying Vista if they've invested in conversion and training, but most are still on XP for the majority of their users. Stopping the distribution of Vista just makes sense if Windows 7 really turns out to be as great a success as it seems to be heading for.

Said that, despite all the improvements made in Windows 7, it still requires additional expenditures for things like mal-ware protection.

Let’s see where this journey takes us.

I think that I will go straight for Windows 7, being still a strong proponent of XP – how about you?

Thank you.