ADTdirrect

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Permalink Reply by progeCAD USA on December 30, 2008 at 6:10am

You must be joking. Autodesk will never come down from their fort and actually share information to make the user less dependent on them, the all seeing, all knowing God of CAD who knows what is best for all users.

ADTdirect is just like it's cousin, DWGdirect, in that it was through sheer brilliance that they discovered the secrets of the master and tore from his breast the definition of the proprietary objects used in the Autodesk vertical products (notice I did NOT use the benign term "custom objects", lets tell it like it is).

If Autodesk wanted to be an ethical partner with its customers and allow them to actually own their drawings, and access them with the tool of choice, they would publish and distribute the source of at least the object enablers to allow all vendors to open and work with the black box proxy inducing objects of products such as ADT, Architecture, Civil 3D, and Mechanical Desktop.

Besides the Open Drawing Alliance, one IntelliCAD developer has cracked the safe of the CAD almighty and can work with the proprietary objects created by these closed design systems. progeSOFT a few years ago began including within progeCAD Professional the ability to open drawings based on the evil software applications and either view the objects as they were designed rather than as proxy representations, or explode the obects into their primitives to be able to edit them natively with progeCAD.

While not as elegant as adtDirect in that you can not edit the object exactly as it comes out of Autodesk's belly, directly manipulating it just like you would if you were the priveleged and had the object enabler to allow editing, still a solution none the less to those locked out of the golden city during the reign of sausalito the slayer.

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Permalink Reply by Xenophon on December 30, 2008 at 9:00am

maybe if the GSA has a talk with them. or the SEC

if they loose the case against the Open Design Alliance or Solidworks maybe it will set them straight.

is Bartz still there?

so you are saying ADTdirrect will make compatible objects that work both ways because the mighty sausalito has been defeated?

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Permalink Reply by Deelip Menezes on December 30, 2008 at 9:58am

Neil Peterson, the CTO of the ODA, showed us some neat stuff at the IntelliCAD World Meeting in Athens this year. You can edit custom objects using grips. I don't have the details. But I was impressed by the fancy demo he gave us.

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Permalink Reply by progeCAD USA on December 30, 2008 at 10:23am

Deelip Menezes said:

Neil Peterson, the CTO of the ODA, showed us some neat stuff at the IntelliCAD World Meeting in Athens this year. You can edit custom objects using grips. I don't have the details. But I was impressed by the fancy demo he gave us.

As I understand it, the ADTDirect is a toolkit to create, edit, and save the ADT proprietary objects created by the Architectural desktop product including object enablers. Developers can use this library to make their products compatible with the vertical applications Autodesk had hoped to keep proprietary to stranglehold their customers into using Autodesk products. The monopoly draconian one product lockin will be broken if and when the ITC brings this to the masses, but only for ADT in this case. As always with the ODA, they will need several months to perfect these libraries whenever Autodesk brings out new products so the AA library may be a while in coming out but eventually you will have the capability to work inside that product as well. I believe they also have a Civil 3D toolkit and possibly an MDT one as well.

I know a lot of users breathed a sigh of relief when these products were announced as it gave them an out. A way to maintain their legacy DWG drawings while allowing them to choose the platform they could use going forward. I mean, pay $4000 to a company that has essentially held you hostage for 10 years, or pay 1/10th that amount to a non-profit group of developers who are co-operatively working together with one main focus, to make their software better.

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Permalink Reply by Deelip Menezes on December 30, 2008 at 10:29am

You can get further details of what the ODA is up to here: http://www.intellicad.net/profiles/blogs/oda-components

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Permalink Reply by Xenophon on December 30, 2008 at 9:42pm

or even 1/100th

I am interested to see a implementation of this, thanks for all the information.

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Permalink Reply by Xenophon on January 9, 2009 at 11:34pm

they are doing it with Bentley. I don't see why they couldn't do it with ODA

maybe the FTC needs to get involved again

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