RobiNZ CAD Blog

Chris Bangle on design

Famous, perhaps infamous, for his work at BMW I first heard of Chris Bangle when the Fiat Coupe (right) appeared in the Nineties. In this video he talks about his career, design approach and process from his studio in Northern Italy. Chris Bangle on the future of cars and design – via Car Body Design (who found it in KLM’s iFly Magazine) Read more →

Revit User Group Wellington — Notice Of October Meeting

Wed 26 Oct 2011, @Productspec HQ, 14 Holland Street, 5.30 - 7.30pm Come along this Wednesday, have a drink, learn new tricks..! Everything you wanted to know about Shared Parameters Alex from RevitWorks will showcase shared parameters - this presentation is suitable for both beginners and gurus. Precast Concrete Schedules Richard from GHD is going to illustrate the simple 'wall-based' methods of creating schedules. BIM for the field Michael from Stephenson & Turner will (re)present the work done by US construction firm DPR using Revit, Tekla, and laser scanning to achieve improved construction efficiencies. See you on Wednesday, 5.30pm, Productspec... Read more →

iOS Auto-Incorrect and the CAD user

A text telling a user to try a generic “caduser” logon on a spare machine* is foiled by iOS Auto-correct. I suspect it will forever be the Cashew workstation from now on. * It was logon specific network problems preventing access to a shared folder so cashew worked fine. Read more →

Traffic Light Thought–Oh, not Solidworks?

Traffic Light Thought posts started as a way to capture random, ok rubbish, thoughts which occur waiting for the red lights to change on my commute. They usually appear on the other blog but tonight’s one has a CAD flavour. The car in front had a personalised plate: SOLWRK My CAD Geek brain immediately thought “A Solidworks user?”. The fine print on the plate surround dispelled that as it was some company touting a therapy which “puts you in touch with your soul”. * NZ 6 Letter max doesn’t allow them to Soulwork! Read more →

Yahoo! not ‘cool’? The Yahoo! Mail Visualization Project is!

I’ve used Yahoo! mail since 2007, simply because that’s when my ISP changed their mail hosting from MSN to Yahoo! I also have Gmail and Windows Live mail accounts but my primary account is Yahoo! hosted. Until recently their webmail UI was pretty awful but I only used when travelling so didn’t really mind. That changed when they unveiled a new interface which makes Gmail feel old and clunky. That’s backed by a pretty impressive spam filter as seen below. If nothing else it’s a nice way of presenting geographic and numeric data. In Our Own Words: How Yahoo! Keeps... Read more →

Bill’s AutoCAD Blog about (Revit) Spark

Autodesk Labs Project Spark is an experimental simplified Revit aimed at introducing BIM to new users. It could also be the Revit which gets seasoned AutoCAD users to try Revit. Bill is one of those who has: William Le Couteur's Autocad Blog: Revit Spark A while back I found that you could download a copy of a thing called SPARK. This is a possible release of a different type of Revit. Maybe you’d like to try Project Spark - http://labs.autodesk.com/utilities/spark/ Read more →

The Ferrari Pinin & me

I debated posting this on the CAD blog but it is a bit off topic. If you’d like to see how a 1980 Pininfarina Ferrari Concept car (now up for sale) led to a school tech drawing project which played a part in my career choice, and therefore (indirectly) led to this blog, click below: RobiNZ Personal Blog: The Ferrari Pinin Sedan Concept Car for sale (without my interior) Read more →

Trouble installing Snagit outputs/accessories? Fixed

Snagit accessories are a great productivity booster. Take a screenshot and push it to applications (including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, MindManager), Web services (like Flickr) or Blog platforms in a click. However I hit a snag while setting up a new machine. The accessories are downloaded as a package and installed from your local drive by double clicking. However this didn’t work for me as the browser had renamed the file extension from .snagacc to plain old .zip. The solution was easy to find on the Techsmith forum: Cannot get Snagit outputs/accessories to install - techsmith.custhelp.com I get a zip file... Read more →

I’ll remember the day I got a netbook

It wasn’t that I waited for the Apple event, but the announcement of the iPhone 4GS (rather than some other sort of device) was part of the decision. I had been thinking about a mobile blogging solution. While you can do a lot with an iPhone, more with an iPad, my blog creation is pretty much all Windows’centric. I write about Windows apps so grabbing screenshots etc is best done there. I use Live Writer to compose posts locally (rather than TypePad’s web editor), use RSS Bandit Reader (which can sync with Google Reader but I prefer a local app)... Read more →