Through the Interface

Floppy Friday #18

This is a big week for 1980s computing. Wednesday marked the 40th birthday of the BBC Microcomputer, the machine that helped launch thousands of software development careers (including mine) in the UK. This was such an important machine, in so many ways: it was really well engineered, with great performance, but also – due to government subsidies – available in the majority of schools in the UK. For my Computer Science A-level I used some networked Beebs to automate a hypothetical fast food restaurant: from touchpad-driven ordering by customers to printing of receipts and stock control. Here’s an image... Read more →

Enhancing exploration of sensor data inside Dasher

I added a “simple” feature to Project Dasher (although it’s not live just yet) the other day, that I think is worth sharing some information about – especially as from a UX perspective it’s completely hidden and amounts to an Easter egg. For a particular project I’ve been searching through sensor data for time periods that tell an interesting story. In Dasher the simplest way to explore the data for one or more sensors (as you can add multiple sensors to a single chart by holding down the Shift key when you click on a sensor) is to use... Read more →

Floppy Friday #17

In this week’s Floppy Friday – a short one, weighing in at under 10 minutes – we look at a couple of games: Bionic Commando and Zaga (sorry – the best article I could find on this game is in Italian). I found a couple of old reviews online for today’s games. The first – for Bionic Commando – is from Zzap! 64 magazine: The second – for Zaga – is from Anirog: As mentioned in today’s episode – and a post from earlier in the week – I have another bundle of retro computing joy about to be... Read more →

Animating stacked heatmaps in Dasher

Last week I mentioned some feedback I’d received from our HCI & Visualization team regarding the possibility of animating the heatmaps in the Types By Level UI. (Prior to this the Types By Level feature has really just been a legend for quick access to per-level heatmaps: I stopped short of attempting to animate the individual heatmaps while the timeline is playing.) For some background, the Types By Level feature is a stack of “cards” that each displays data from a particular sensor type for a specific floor using a 2D heatmap. These cards are rendered as individual textures... Read more →

Technology wars

I’ve been thinking a lot about “technology wars”, of late. Some of this has been driven by my foolings around with Floppy Fridays – thinking about the competition between 8-bit computing platforms, back in the day – but other musings have been prompted by links I’ve been sent in various newsletters. For instance, here’s an article on Quora by Dave Whittle that takes a look at the fascinating history between OS/2 and Windows, and why the latter won the battle for the graphical desktop OS. In a JavaScript newsletter I received a link to this excellent 3-hour (!) podcast... Read more →

Floppy Friday #16

This week’s Floppy Friday is all about Indiana Jones games. Well, two of them, anyway. First we look at Indiana Jones in the Lost Kingdom from 1985 and then we play Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade – The Action Game from 1989. They’re very different games, which I’m sure you’ll see from this episode. I think I’ve managed to fix the focus-related issue from last week (this happened when there was a major change in luminosity with the screen), so hopefully that’s better. Feedback welcome! I’ve also made some progress with repairing the second of my two “breadbin”... Read more →

Adding dividers to Dasher’s Types By Level UI

Last week I had a valuable discussion with members of our talented HCI and Visualization research team. They had reached out with the offer to perform “live science” review session for other teams’ research projects – with a particular focus on Human Computer Interaction and Visualization, of course – and I jumped at the opportunity. We sat down and talked through some of the recent work that had been done in Project Dasher to implement a multi-level UX that allows users to go from a top-level summary view to bring up individual 2D heatmap panels and a central 3D... Read more →

Floppy Friday #15

In this week’s episode we look at two games: one from 1986 and one from 2021. That’s right: we’re playing Super Cycle from the 80s and Runn ‘n’ Gunn which was just released last week. How crazy is that? I did what I could to adjust the settings on my TV and on my phone to get better colours from the screen recording (thanks to Fernando Malard for the YouTube link!) but I do see there was some auto-focus strangeness. I’ll try to get that fixed for episode #16. Both games shown in today’s episode were lots of fun... Read more →

DevDays Online 2021

At the beginning of March our Developer Advocacy and Support team will be running its annual series of DevDays Online events. The first week will focus on public information – mainly news related to the Forge platform – while the second week will be for Autodesk Developer Network members, and focus mainly on our desktop products and APIs. You can find more complete information here, and register via the links below: For everyone March 2 – DevDays Keynotes – Jim Quanci March 3 – Forge API update – Augusto Goncalves March 4 – Autodesk Construction Cloud and API update... Read more →

Floppy Friday #14

In today’s episode of Floppy Friday we use a Commodore 128D – with integrated, double-sided floppy drive! – to play some classic arcade games. Many thanks to Daniel from Bern for parting with the C= 128D via an online auction: this was his family’s home computer growing up. It even came with a Seikosha SP-1200VC, which I’m dying to try out. (I grew up with an Epson FX-80, and I just love the raw – sometimes harsh – music of a dot matrix printer.) So why play classic arcade games on an early “personal” (rather than “home”) computer? It... Read more →

COVID Office Occupancy: a Dynamo mega-graph and blog series

I posted, back in May, about the work we’d been doing to explore the possibility of using the Space Analysis package for Dynamo to plan for post-COVID office layouts. Soon after that post our research relating to the pandemic shifted focus towards a longer-term plan of creating a “living lab” that would allow us not only to explore how design decisions might impact viral transmission, but to have these decisions based on data measured from a functioning ventilation system. Expect to hear more about that research in a future post. We handed over the work that had been done... Read more →

Floppy Friday #13

Welcome to Floppy Ferrari Friday! In this week’s episode we look at two classic video game experiences that allow you to drive a Ferrari. The first is one I’ve been meaning to play for some time and mentioned back in Floppy Friday #6: the classic 1985 arcade game Out Run. It was fun to play the Commodore 64 version – and on a classic “breadbin” C64, no less – but I will say I found the conversion to be a little lacklustre. I certainly enjoyed the arcade version more. The second is a much more “serious” experience, which is... Read more →

Looking back to look forwards

Over the weeks since AU, I’ve been heads-down with writing a chapter for a book that’s due to be published in this summer. The book is about innovation in the construction industry, and my chapter will talk about opportunities related to digital twins and generative design. Which means I haven’t had much time to write “serious” posts for this blog, of late. I did want to put pen to paper in this new year about the sheer joy I’ve been getting from recording Floppy Fridays, though. It’s clear there’s been a strong “retro” trend in recent years. I’d probably... Read more →

Floppy Friday #12

In this week’s episode of Floppy Friday we take a look at two games that came on a Game On floppy from April 1991: Turrican II and Pure Seed. I realised afterwards that Turrican II was made available as a demo version on the floppy – and that I’d loaded the “main” program rather than the demo loader, which explained the lack of loading screen, etc. I used a Commodore 1311 joystick – known as the worst joystick ever created, and apparently a poor copy of the classic Atari CX40 – to play the games, and liked it a... Read more →

Realtime collaboration inside the Forge viewer: a hackathon project

Just before the holiday break I had an interesting chat with Elias Cohenca (someone I’ve mentored on and off over the last few years). He was about to participate in his 6th annual hackathon in the Tel Aviv office, and wanted to bounce a few ideas off me regarding technologies. Our Tel Aviv office has held these hackathons – named Bazinga, after Sheldon Cooper’s catchphrase in the Big Bang Theory – since 2015. Elias has used the hackathon to try out some really interesting concepts, over the years, from adding BIM 360 issues into a mixed-reality environment using HoloLens... Read more →

Floppy Friday #11

In this week’s Floppy Friday we take a look at three more games on the Commodore 64: Rick Dangerous 2, North Sea Inferno and Black Panther. I actually recorded this one before the holiday break (which I’m still enjoying with my family up in the mountains), but I have to admit I’m looking forward to being able to record more episodes over the coming weeks. I’ve been researching what I need to do to fix my “breadbin” C64, and I’m cautiously optimistic I’ll be able to coax it back to life. I also have a C128 to pick up... Read more →

Floppy Friday #10

Happy New Year!!! I’m sure everyone’s thankful that 2020 is behind us (what a year that was). Let’s all hope 2021 is going to be at least somewhat better. At the time I recorded this Floppy Friday, I hadn’t connected the dots on the date (i.e. that Friday was due to fall on New Year’s Day). So please do forgive it not being mentioned. What I do mention is Batman from 1986 and 1989 – at the suggestion of Francesco Cappilli – as well as Arkanoid and Spacefighter. Enjoy! Read more →

Floppy Friday #9

It’s Christmas Day and another Floppy Friday! Today’s episode looks at two quite similar horizontally scrolling shooters, R-Type and Katakis/Denaris. There’s a brief mention of Arkanoid, at the end, but that’s really something we’ll see another day. Read more →

Dynamo Core 2.10

Santa (meaning Sol Amour) has left one last Dynamo release under the tree for us all to enjoy over the holidays: Dynamo Core 2.10. According to Sol’s post there have been a few updates to Node Autocomplete – which I mentioned a few weeks ago – but that we should expect many more to come. And there are other updates that are likely to be of interest in this release, too – check out Sol’s blog post but also the release notes. There are a few new nodes in this release, for instance: AnyTrue, AnyFalse and a Math.Random node... Read more →

Another robotically constructed bridge

This week Autodesk offices around the world are closed for an extended holiday break. I’m grateful for this additional time off at the end of a crazy year, as I’m sure all my Autodesk colleagues are. My children are still in school until Wednesday lunchtime, so I’ve taken the chance to hit the slopes for a few days before heading back down for a quiet family Christmas. (We’ll be back up in the mountains afterwards, assuming we’re still able to ski then.) As I’m largely at a loose end in the evening after coming back from the slopes, I... Read more →