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Happy New Year! Now, What’s Coming In 2013?

2012 has been a year of achievements for AutoCAD WS. With nearly 10,000,000 users worldwide, AutoCAD WS has become the leading mobile and web CAD app for on-site work, collaboration and design. As we’re wrapping up 2012, let’s take a look back at what we’ve done in this passing year and what we’re working on for 2013.

Let’s start with exploring some of the milestones we had in 2012: Early this year we introduced viewing of 3D designs within AutoCAD WS and a set of geo-location tools based on the device’s GPS sensor. Our next version introduced the Design Feed, a popular new feature gaining more and more momentum and offers you a new way to manage your markups and comments in the design and review or discuss them with your colleague, engineer, architect or contractor. We also featured attaching images to the design and last but not least, we’ve made significant improvements in the application’s interface, turning the viewing and editing experience smoother and even more enjoyable. 2012 was a fascinating year for us as we expended the boundaries on one hand and on the other constantly kept improving the existing tools. We saw the amazing changes that AutoCAD WS has brought into different industries and how taking your tablet to the field can significantly increase your productivity and collaborative work.

So, what’s coming in 2013 you ask? well, 2013 is going to be a huge year for AutoCAD WS. If you think 2012 was packed with goodies, just wait, you ain’t seen nothing yet. In 2013 you can expect big announcements along with some long awaited features. We don’t want to give away too many spoilers but what we can say is that if this has been a repeating request, there’s a good chance you’ll see it even sooner than you think. Is it going to be creation of new drawings? Coordinates and ID? Supporting larger files? Additional design and annotation tools? Win8 version? The list of possibilities is so long.. who knows.. (well, we do but you will too soon).

We would like to thank our millions of users again for your amazing support and feedback in 2012. As AutoCAD WS continues to grow as a rich, secured and robust CAD application, we would like to invite you all to share your thoughts and feedback with us. If you want to share your story about how you or your company use AutoCAD WS, if you like to see other features in the product or if you just want to say hello, please write to us at feedback@autocadws.com

We wish you all a Happy New Year!

The AutoCAD WS team.

Introducing the Design Feed – AutoCAD WS 1.5 Available Now

The first thing you need to know is that the latest update for AutoCAD WS is available now.

You can download version 1.5 of the AutoCAD WS Mobile App now on the App Store or from Google Play. The web version of the app will be automatically updated the next time you log in with your browser at www.autocadws.com.

The second thing you should know is that this is no ordinary update. We have taken the best things about the social web and infused them into the design process.  We recognized the need to provide tools that help you collaborate with your team on your own time in an intuitive and streamlined way.

With this new release we have added the Design Feed to both the mobile and the web app. The Design Feed is a major leap forward for AutoCAD WS giving users an in-drawing, interactive feed that enables context-specific posts and responses to turn your drawing into a living document.

Design Feed

Using the Design Feed you can attach a post to a specific point or area in your drawing to draw attention to a feature of your design and encourage discussion.

Your can target specific colleagues or friends with a post by tagging their email address. The people you tag will receive an automated email letting them know that the drawing has been shared with them and that a post has been created that requires their attention.

Add Photo

The latest release of AutoCAD WS allows users to add photos to their drawings. You can attach an image to your posts to provide clarity or to brainstorm ideas. You can place a photo anywhere in your drawing and move and resize it just like any other object.

You can also add an image to a post in the Design Feed to further illustrate your point and drive the discussion forwards.

For more information about the new Design Feed, watch our video below:

The AutoCAD WS Team Visits Google I/O

I’m delighted to present today a guest post from Kara Gillis from the Product Marketing team in San Francisco.

Skydiving out of a blimp. Remote control drones. AutoCAD WS.

What do these three things have in common?

They could all be found at Google I/O 2012!

At the end of June I attended the annual Android Developers conference, Google I/O, which takes place in downtown San Francisco to showcase our Google Drive integration in the Developers Sandbox.  As the conference approached, I geared up for a three-day adventure with 5500 Google developers.

Moscone Center West was buzzing with activity when I arrived at 8:30 am on the first day. Already, there was a line wrapped around the entire foyer waiting to ascend the escalators to get a good seat for the opening keynote. I navigated my way over to the Developers Sandbox Participant registration and procured my very large name tag that doubled as a full agenda of all of the sessions.

Google Keynote

I met up with my colleague, Dusty, and we headed to the keynote room. We were introduced to the new Android platform release – Jelly Bean – as well as the brand new Nexus 7 tablet, Nexus Q and Galaxy Nexus phone. Then, sometime during one of the new product demos, Sergey Brin interrupted the speaker by running onstage wearing the elusive Google Glasses.  The screens quickly cut to a real time Google+ Hangout featuring skydivers wearing Google Glasses while hovering above the Moscone Center in a blimp.  We watched them descend through the air and land on the roof of the conference center, hand off the Google Glass prototype to BMX bikers, who then gave the Google Glasses to individuals who rapelled down the side of the Moscone Center, entered the keynote room and delivered the Google Glass prototype directly to Sergey on stage to a round of applause.

AutoCAD WS

In order to set up the Autodesk Developers Sandbox station, Dusty and I left the keynote fifteen minutes early and found our booth.  We displayed the AutoCAD WS web browser interface, showing how easy it is to view and edit your AutoCAD drawings in your browser.  We also demonstrated how easy it is to use Google Drive to store and view your AutoCAD drawings using the AutoCAD WS Chrome app.  Check out a demo of the Google Drive integration here.

Throughout the day, conference participants and Googlers stopped by our booth to learn about the possibility of CAD in the cloud.  We met so many interesting and enthusiastic current users of AutoCAD WS. We also met AutoCAD users who were excited to learn about the flexibility and mobility that AutoCAD WS provides.  To all those people who stopped by our booth – thank you! My big grin reflects how much fun we had meeting you.

Learning to Share with AutoCAD WS

One of the things we were most proud of when we launched AutoCAD WS was that the functionality we had included in the app might herald a new era of collaboration and sharing among CAD users. Until the arrival of AutoCAD WS, if you wanted to show your work to others, you had a number of options:

  • You could send the original file to people and then try to manage the different versions you got back with different markups.
  • You could save your drawing to another format, like PDF, and email that.
  • You could print out your drawing and deliver it via bicycle messenger.
  • Or, for a truly read-only experience, you could invite people to come and look at your computer screen!

AutoCAD WS is a great leap forward enabling you to share your work with anyone with an email address and a web browser.

But for many people, sharing is as much a matter of temperament as it is functionality. One customer of ours who works in construction told me that he loves the share functionality, but that no architect has ever let him see a soft copy of the plans. Not everyone wants to share.

For those of you having difficulty letting go, here is a recap of the permission types that are available in both the web and the mobile versions of AutoCAD WS.

Permissions

There are two types of permissions:

  • Edit
  • Download

This means there are four different combinations of permissions:

  • Edit and Download – Users can edit the drawing using AutoCAD WS and download it to work on it offline.
  • Edit but not Download – Users can edit the drawing online using AutoCAD WS but they cannot download the file from within the app.
  • Download but not Edit – Users cannot edit existing objects with AutoCAD WS. They can only add to and mark up the drawing. In addition, the drawing may be downloaded (including additions and markups) and edited offline.
  • Not Edit and not Download – Users cannot edit existing objects with AutoCAD WS. They can only add to and mark up the drawing. Users cannot download the drawing

Sharing

I hope this will give you the confidence you need to start sharing your work with others. It’s a great way to mark design milestones with clients and colleagues and it will help you collect feedback and achieve consensus.

Tell us about the last project you shared with AutoCAD WS either in the comments or on our Facebook page.

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