Revision Manager Progress Report

As you probably know, the BIG new development in ArchiCAD 13 is the completely new Teamwork system.

In most cases, making the Cadimage Tools work with this was manageable, as they either don’t touch Teamwork at all, or are only slightly affected by it (like the Door & Window Schedules).

Revision Manager, however, was already sitting pretty close to Teamwork and had required a lot of effort to get it to play nicely with ‘Teamwork 1′ in the first place. Most of this was in the area of who was allowed to do what, and when they were allowed to do it, so we relied pretty heavily on the much maligned ‘Exclusive Access Mode’ to get things done.

Now that v13 has rolled around, ‘Exclusive Access Mode’ has been shown the door and by extension, a lot of what Revision Manager was doing. To get it working again, we’ve had to re-think a lot of the core functionality of the tool and give it a lot of testing to make sure that it does what you would be expecting it to.

Consequently, it’s taken us a while longer to get it into a state where it is ready for General Consumption. We’re currently working through the final stages of Development and Quality Assurance, so we are expecting to bring you the finished product in the next fortnight.

We’ll be keeping you up-to-date via this Blog, and our Twitter and Facebook pages, so as soon as it’s ready, you’ll be the first to know.

Website – Updated

Following on from my earlier post, I have now completed the updates to allow Tool and Suite Downloads to function again.

Changes behind the scenes have been relatively extensive so if you experience any issues please contact me direct on campbell@cadimagetools.com

Thank you for your understanding during the last 24 hours.

Tags: downtime

I am not a Web Developer…

I expect that if Murphy wrote his laws today there would be a law along the lines of:

Your websites will only ever go down when your web developer is on annual leave

And based on the last 24 hours would also add

and when you can’t get a fast internet connection

To make a little more sense of this, yesterday our web host updated their ‘Dallas/Fort Worth’ DataCenter and in the process managed to break our websites.

At the time I was in Dunedin (at the bottom of the South Island of New Zealand) launching ArchiCAD 13 to our customers – and as outlined above our web developer was (is) on annual leave.

Late last night I managed to at least get a message explaining things in plain English, unlike some of the cryptic error messages showing prior to that.

I have now managed to isolate the ‘break’ to our Tool Downloads so the bulk of the website is now live again – though I appreaciate buying Tools and not being able to download is less than ideal!

Keep an eye out on this Blog and also the Downloads page for any progress updates as I try to work through this rather complex issue.

Tags: downtime

Website Downtime

Hi Everyone

Some of you may have noticed that our website is no longer working. That deranged looking error message is about as good as I can get it for now, but we are working on it. Please bear with us!

Sorry for any inconvenience.

Tags: downtime

Day 13 – They’re Here!

The Team here at CadimageTools are very pleased to announce that we’ve just released the Tools for ArchiCAD 13!

They are available for download from our website immediately, just login and go to My Account – Downloads, or follow the link below:

http://www.cadimagetools.com/myAccount/downloads.aspx

At this stage, all tools are available except Revision Manager(and, by extension, the Documentation Suite), which is getting a bit of ‘extra care’ to make sure that it plays nice with the new Teamwork. It’ll be released in about a week.

Tags: 13 Days

Madrid Airport

The most rewarding parts of all the travelling I do is a mix of:

1. Being able to meet our customers – a fairly uncommon event for Internet Software  companies

2. Getting to experience world architecture

Last week I was in Madrid and arrived at Barajas-Madrid Airport. While experiencing this amazing building I couldn’t help but think this building provided an answer to an extremely common question we receive “What does 3D Profiler do?”

Over time I have decided that unlike our other Tools 3D Profiler really needs to be described by examples not words.

Recently we uploaded a number of youTube videos that used a bus shelter as an example to show the many uses of 3d Profiler.

Below are some images of both the airport and a very quick model. Apart from some slabs, columns and curtain walls, the majority of the structure was created with the various Tools within the 3D Profiler Tool:

Check back soon as there may be some more images uploaded.

Day 12 – Cabinet Builder

We’ve added a slew of little enhancements to the Cabinet Builder, making it easier to use, and better than ever!

You can now:

• Adjust the position of the cabinet back wall

• Set the Pen for cut surfaces

• Show the shelves as a dashed outline in plan view

• Allow a different cabinet depth to each leg of the corner unit

• Show a smart label, which can display either a long or short text or the object ID, as set in the Model View Options.

We’ve also added a bunch ofsettings into the Model View Options so you can customise your views:

Tags: 13 Days

Day 11 – You asked for it!

For the version 13 Tools, we’ve added a lot of features that you asked for, including:

• Rapid Detail Floor Framing – The ability to use a different joist style has been added

• Key Notes – Say farewell to ‘Missing Keynote’ messages. You’ll never see them again
• StairBuilder – You can now lock the Tread Depth on Straight Flights
• Door & Window Builder – You can now import Bulk sets of notes into the Door & Window Builder objects

• 3D Profiler, Wall Framing, Accessories – Several objects in these tools now have a graphical ‘Click to Edit’ mode which makes it much easier to to edit anchor points, edges etc…

There are many more User-Requested features in the new tools too. You’ll be able to see a complete list in the Release Reports once the Tools are online.

Day 10 – Speed

For the version 13 Tools, we’ve made several changes to the way that our add-ons interact with ArchiCAD which will mean that you’ll have fewer rebuilds and generally increased speed of operation.

It’s hard to illustrate speed increases with screen-shots, so here it is, in photographs:

Here are 2 of our developers, Jack & Andrew, working on an average day:

And here they are now, wearing the safety precautions we require while working on the new, faster Tools:

Tags: 13 Days

Day 9 – Archiving

All of the CadimageTools now support creating archive(PLA) files without having to use the ‘Include all parts of Loaded Libraries’ option.

This, combined with the improved Portability, means that you can easily create standalone ArchiCAD files which will work for any other ArchiCAD user without them having to install anything or hunt down any library parts!

Tags: 13 Days