RobiNZ CAD Blog

About "Knowing What You Don't Know About CAD"

A great blog about AutoCAD, Architectural Desktop that wasn’t in my feedlist ‘till today. Knowing What You Don't Know About CAD A place for Building Designers and Engineers to keep up with my continuous knowledge growth as an Application Engineer for Autodesk products. via Beside The Cursor Read more →

Blog Poll Poll Results

Looks like 72 % like polls on blogs.. Blog polls are... 72.0% Good - I respond to them! 20.0% Who cares - I just ignore them 8.0% Bad - I avoid them! Read more →

TeamDWF, spot the mistake...

The site is fine but launching a marketing site with content, articles & news being updated without RSS is not the brightest move, especially with the tag line “Extending the reach of design data”. If RSS is there I can’t find it RSS is now alive and well at TeamDWF TeamDWF - www.teamdwf.com But not to my feed-list…. Now it is! UPDATE 30–08–2006 – RSS ON THE WAY: As per the comments Randall has advised RSS is coming to the “release version” of this site! UPDATE 30–08–2006 – RSS IS THERE! Read more →

Preview DWF links in a click

This is an interesting combination of Search, DWF and Freewheel to find and render/view DWFs from a link. The only downside is it seems some sites, or maybe older DWF’s, display “not valid”. The actual DWF is fine so suspect fire-walls, or similar, are blocking Freewheel. DWF-This-Link! Bookmarklet What does it do? DWF-This-Link! bookmarklet converts your DWF file links on your web page to thumbnail preview images (rendered on the fly). Visitors to your web page can click the thumbnail image to view the DWF using the Project Freewheel DWF Viewer. UPDATE 28–08–2006: Scott explains the Not Valid response Beyond... Read more →

New Zealand Tech·Ed Presentations

Microsoft have posted the NZ Tech-Ed presentations. Microsoft New Zealand: Tech·Ed Presentation Downloads via scrappad Read more →

Fear and Loathing in CAD vs. BIM World?

J B Zallan has a view of the whole CAD vs BIM thing. I’m not so sure about the “vs” bit as I think CAD & BIM really are very different answers, from a different age, to the same problem but his blog is well worth a read. I’m preparing a series of posts about my approach to BIM, “The road to BIM” so to speak, but not quite ready to publish. Fear and Loathing in CAD vs. BIM World – A CAD junkies guide to overcoming an addiction to lines. If you fall into the category that feels that... Read more →

Capture thoughts with GyroQ

Eric Mack has a great post and demo video of GyroQ which I blogged about earlier this week. I’ve been using a preview version this week and it’s a nice combination with MindManager which has integrated into my workflow. It allows thoughts to be rapidly captured in a pop-up dialog then later added to a MindManager Map. If you want a note of anything just pop up the GyroQ dialog, enter it and forget about it. At any time, if you shut down the machine it’s retained, click to transfer to an “inbox MindMap” ready to review/process. GyroQ - a... Read more →

Comics, Powerpoint and Rendering?

Joel posted these for the intended audience, comic book artists, but I think many of the techniques for composition/lighting apply to both PowerPoint and rendering. Joel Johnson: Wally Wood's 22 Panels That Always Work: Unlimited Edition Ask any working comic book artist who has been in the business for more than ten years about "Wally Wood's 22 Panels That Always Work", and they know of it like it was the bible. Once shrouded in secrecy, Wally Wood would selectively give assistants and those close to him three 8×10 photocopies of comic panels that bore the absolute essence of drawing comic... Read more →

Customise the Windows Places Bar

Thanks to this cool tip from Ed my frequently used blog Draft folder is only a “Places Bar click away” when saving files. I’ve removed the defaults and added a couple of folders I use all the time. Ed Bott's Windows Expertise » Tip of the day: Customize the Places Bar Read more →

A logo on your PowerPoint slides is not branding

Imagine you worked for a company that had re-branded, including redesigned corporate templates. Maybe this included a PowerPoint template that ignored every bit of advice you’ve read recently about better PowerPoint design. It might use overwhelming bright colours and a huge logo on every slide overpowering a tiny area for the most important bit – the content. Of course you could just use it or you could create a presentation that massaged that template into something more modern. Maybe slightly tone down the colour so it doesn’t shout, perhaps ignore the “approved content area” (a letter-box slot between the “branding”)... Read more →