Autodesk 360 Mobile - We're Sorry. We Messed Up.

.
It's just a little bit of history repeating itself........ found in my inbox today ;0(    so glad I had not got around to downloading it...

	You may have recently downloaded the release of the new Autodesk 360 Mobile App. We have seen your reactions and regret we have missed the mark. Our intention with this release was to deliver an improvement to what you had with Design Review Mobile, and we failed. We apologize for any frustration or inconvenience this has caused you or your teams. We appreciate the feedback we have received from our customers and have documented all of the issues you have reported. We are working extremely hard to resolve them as quickly as possible. Please look out for continued updates as we make improvements to the product. If you would be interested in giving us early feedback or testing the new features before we release please send us a note. To that end, we have just released an update to the iOS version of Autodesk 360 Mobile, now available on the iTunes app store. This release has resolved the crashing issue found in the previous version. We thank you for your patience, and are committed to bringing you the best and most useful products and services to help you do your job better. Getting your input about your experiences with our products – good and bad – is extremely valuable to us as we navigate our way through these early phases of building out Autodesk 360. You will find the latest iOS release of the Autodesk 360 Mobile App on iTunes®. We hope you continue to work with us and appreciate your feedback. Thank You, The Autodesk 360 Team

REVIT 2013 Stair Components

/
Daryl Gregoire Over at Revit Rocks! is having a little trouble with the 2013 stair components, can you spot it?

Great for spiral staircases I guess?

If you know how to fix his problem let him know....
/

Errors Installing Revit Structure 2013 and Design Review

/
As I'm having a lazy Bank Holiday I thought I would have a look to see if Revit Structure Suite 2013 had made the subscription centre, and it had, so with due diligence I downloaded the files and installed....

Within the first ten minutes of the install I had two error messages

The first was this

I had a look at the file it was having problems with, it's there and a day later than all the others in the directory, but appears corrupted as I can't obtain properties, preview or open with infranview dispite just being a graphic file.

OK it Design Review and Not Revit so after Ignoring as Retry didn't work we moved on about two minutes then I got the next error message.

I have no idea what WhipFilter.dll is or what does but it has not registered and it's suggested I contact my support personnel !

OK I'm at home it's a weekend, I will ask my IT support guy next wednesday when I see him, or perhaps just download design review and install again

Finally I get this screen

I've apparently successfully  installed everything...... Umm it seems to have missed the two error messages for Design Review that its' presented and the advice to contact my support person.

So if you're out there, and you are having the same problem, you are not on your own ;0)

If and when I find out what WhipFilter.dll is and what is not going to happen as a result, and what the missing png file affect I will let you know. If I don't just un-install and re-install after downloading Design Review 2013 on it's own.

One year, just one year to would be so good for Autodesk software to install with no problems..... I can dream can't I?

The install, including errors took just under an hour after I had downloaded the files which I didn't bother to time, as I said it's a lazy bank holiday, I just set them to download and enjoyed the sun in the garden.

UPDATE

I un-installed Design Review 2013 when to the Autodesk web site to re-install and get the following error message when I try to install

--
After multiple tries of checking my internet connection it still will not install

Now trying to download the setupDesignReview2013.msi.zip file from here and reading the Installation Guide , it appears I'm not on my own and this suggestion has come from the Autodesk discussion groups.

I had trouble downloading the setupDesignReview2013.exe, I don't think my virus protection software liked it, but I did manage to download the msi.zip unpacked it and installed a working copy of Design Review 2013 without any bugs..... Yippppppeeeeeee
-

Out of the Box UK Templates ~ Guide to What's Missing

.
I reported about the problems with Revit Structure not installing and missing content back on the 15th April - What can best be called a work-a-round from Autodesk was to suggest that UK users install the USA Metric Library and harvest what was missing see my post on the 17th may about Loading Missing Content

This process  does not provide everything, below is a review guide of what you should get and what’s missing once you have downloaded the USA Metric and created what should have been installed in the first place.

The structure below has been based upon :-

What installed in UK RST2012

What installed as a US Metric Library

Cross referenced with what was in RST 2011 UK Install

Click Here if you would like this document as an Adobe pdf

I have fed this information back to Autodesk.

Because of the suites becoming available they are now also looking at the way they install and provide the library when you are installing all three Revits side by side. If you are a regular visitor you would have seen my posting on the 4th June about a Short Family Content Survey this was not open and available for very long.

For those that want a glimpse of the possible futures for Revit families below are some screen shots from the survey



Update on the KIP Printer Problem

Time travel has featured quite a lot in the last few post on this blog

The concept of Past Present and Future got into a mucking fuddle when for some unknown reason the company that supplies the beast to us upgraded her driver software beyond the point that she should be upgraded too.

Thus It transpires that the imminently available driver (The Future) for our KIP 3000 was actually already available (The Past)

There are two IT support companies between us and the manufacturer, so to find this out I went straight back to KIPUK the manufacturer and their Customer Support Manager Greg Jackson who was great. He even downloaded Revit 2012 and checked it all out.

If you look at or print the build sheet and your restore version on your KIP is greater than or equal to 7.0 xxx then you can utilise driver 3.165 or above but KIP are still waiting for Microsoft Certification of the current drivers. Which is why no one knows when they will come out of the Bermuda Triangle, that is Microsoft, and that is why the term imminently is being used!

If however you are below 7.0 then you cannot update the driver beyond 3.165. (Which is what some silly billy had done with our KIP) 

KIP may release additional drivers in the future which can be used across all restore versions.

Products which are able to utilise IPS restore version 6.5 and greater are KIP 3100, KIP 7100, KIP 7700, KIP 7900, KIP 9900.

Greg communicated with both IT companies between us and them, we tested the downgrade two Wednesdays ago and last Wednesday the servers were downgraded back to driver 3,165 and in the Present everything appears to now work OK.

.

Autodesk Givith and Autodesk Taketh Away

The Gumby Award goes to the Autodesk Revit Structure Development Team for yet another .

We’ve had

• The Inability to turn off the content library from being installed.
• Missing Templates
• Missing Content
• The wrong shortcut Icon used on Insulation
• And Now…. Where have the Localisation Enhancements Gone? 

With the release of 2010 there was a lot of fuss made about Localisation Enhancements from Autodesk.

What are Localisation Enhancements? I hear you cry…

Basically because Revit is a USA produced and based product and the Americans speak “English Jim but not as we know it” they use construction terms that are different to those that we use in good old Blighty

So Localisation Enhancements really means country specific terms

The following USA terms that have been in the product pre 2010 were changed in the UK installation, but just to confuse the user the online Help, CHM and shortcut files still reflect the US terms.

USA Term	UK Term
Girder	Primary
Joist	Secondary
Horizontal Brace	Plan Brace
Purlin	Tertiary
Coping	Notching
Coping Distance	Notching Distance
Remove Coping	Remove Notching
Coped	Notched (mostly appear in warning messages)

Spot the Autodesk Givith and Autodesk Taketh Away

If you would like to see the reinstatement of UK terms within Revit Structure – Don’t forget that we are still waiting for stirrups to be renamed links in the RC detailing side.

Then send an email to Ralph Pullinger, using This Link that will automatically generate a subject title which will enable Ralph to collate the amount of people that are unhappy about the removal of UK construction terminology from within Revit Structure. Please add any other concerns you have to the email.

Ralph has assured me that not only will he will read them, that once he has collected them all, that he will pass them onto the Autodesk development team in USA to support the request he has made to have this fixed.

If you don’t email Ralph then you are not supplying him with the UK ammunition he needs to do his job which is helping us, the UK Users get from Autodesk and Revit what we need.

 

10 Days in the Future there was a Hotfix for the Missing UK Termonology 

Loading Revit 2012 Missing Content

.
I reported about the problems with not installing and missing content back on the 15th April - David Light has posted about it on his blog on the 10th May, however his process was for Windows 7.

For Windows XP

1. Open the Windows Control Panel > Add or Remove Programs.
2. Highlight your 2012 Revit product and choose Change/Remove
3. In the subsequent Revit dialog, choose Add or Remove Features.
4. In the Select Content section, choose US Metric.

IMPORTANT - Make sure that you keep the United Kingdom ticked because if you don't it will remove all your UK Content so you end up with the missing templates but you will have lost all of your UK families.

How do I know this, because I didn't and after 15-20 minutes I had lost my UK Content.

5. Click Next to install the content.

We the UK users should not have to install USA content, and this does not address the missing European Specific content that is also missing see my review document click HERE to download

Autodesk - what you should have done was fixed the problem and not have recommended a bodge. The UK Library should have been fixed and a download made available.
.

KIP 3000 Printer Problems with Revit 2012 Update!

.
See original post about the Printer and Plotter Bugs in Revit 2012

After some investigation we have been informed that a Revit 2012 compatible driver is to be released “imminently” so keep on checking the KIP website for updates:-

I'm still trying to find out how imminent "imminently" is?

http://www.kipuk.com/software_downloads.asp?sid=4

Printer & Plotter BUGS with Revit 2012

Computers and Bugs have always gone together, I have written a number of computer programs in various languages and one of the things I love is trying to solve code problems and sort out Bugs. My final year project for my degree in civil engineering was a suite of surveying programs called SUE (Surveying Utilities Ensemble) written in Turbo Basic ....yep that’s pre windows visual basic.

I’ve always found it very satisfying to get these little buggers resolved (see what I did there Mum!)

These days I don’t need to write complicated spreadsheets, databases of code, accounts packages but I still like to find bugs and assist in the eradication, that’s why I like to Beta test programs.

I also think that software companies should be very open about bugs in their software and getting as much help as they can to help resolve them.

My current little bugger is that in AutoCAD and Revit Structure 2012 when printing to the KIP 3000 if you press the properties button to the right of the printer name you get an Unhandled Exception Error and the program crashes and bombs out.

Exception handling allows developers to detect errors easily without writing special code to test return values. Even better, it lets them keep exception-handling code cleanly separated from the exception-generating code. It also lets them use the same exception-handling code to deal with a range of possible exceptions. So, it is always a good idea to handle exceptions rather than leave them unhandled.

So when Revit Structure 2012 crashes in a spectacular way it invokes a reporting system that allows you to send information to Autodesk so that they can investigate.

Now if you complete you email address and they have seen this before they have a system that sends you a suggestion on how to fix the problem. If it’s a new problem or one they have not solved yet then you get one of these back:-

Which is basically “Thanks, our products aren’t crap, and thanks for letting us know you have found a new bug that we missed during beta because we can’t test every bit of equipment and set up on the planet. And when we actually figure out what’s happened and have found a fix or possible fix we will let you know."

Now you either leave it there, or you officially submit a request for help via support.

Then you get a nice email saying

"Dear Alan James Wooldridge,

Thank you for contacting Autodesk Support. Here is the recommended resolution to your case:

As the crash happens after pressing the properties button, it seems to indicate an issue with the plotter driver. The dialog box accessed when pressing this button belongs to the driver interface.

Please download and install the latest driver and firmware for your precise device, from your printer's manufacturer website.

Please let us know the outcome.

Best regards,

Name Supplied
Autodesk Support Team"

Now you have already told them when you submit the help request that the driver is the latest driver and that you have done the same in Revit and AutoCAD 2011 and they don’t crash, but they don’t seem to have taken that on board.

This is what is called the” Indian Support Centre Syndrome”

The "don’t we look good" if we respond to you really quick with a reply that might work and if that does not then someone who actually knowns or has half a clue has given us a tick list to work you down, until we find a solution or you get fed up keep coming back to the call centre.

The blame the operating system or someone/thing else is another good wiz As in “As the crash happens after pressing the properties button, it seems to indicate an issue with the plotter driver. The dialog box accessed when pressing this button belongs to the driver interface.

However the fact is that Revit and AutoCAD 2012 should not crash if you press the properties button when printing, and that release 2011 works fine escapes them. Also If you did not need to do this then the button would not be there in the first place!.

A quick round robin email to LRUG London Revit User Group members has resulted in establishing that at least one other member is also having printing problems with Revit Architecture 2012

"All our HP printers don’t batch plot correctly from RAC2012. You get text boxes around all text. If you print singular sheets all is well."

I asked if they had made a formal support request they did and the Autodesk solution to that one is

“Yeah I did a support request but they pushed it back to us saying that we need to rollback our HP drivers from what is the latest version. The problem is we can’t do that as it would have a knock-on effect to other internal softwares that need the upgrade of the driver.(ie office2010, etc..)”

Autodesk must have picked up on the fact that they already had the latest version, thus it's the blame the printer driver but get them to try an older version. Same trick different direction ;0)

That’s when you have to find a work around

“So for now from revit 2012 we batch plot to our Xerox machines for A4/A3 size and then the OCE machines for the larger scales.”

With regards to our problem, yes short term I can do everything outside Revit using Control Panel, but if I forget and press that bloody properties button it’s CRASH CITY!

The reason I know that we have the latest driver is that we have just had to pay to get it because it supports plotting adobe pdf that the last driver didn't

I have offered to try anything and send any files Autodesk might need but this is their problem, not a driver problem, an operating system problem or a network problem.  

There is something different between 2011 and 2012 and it is supposed to be improvements not more bugs to contend with. Now this is why a lot of people still wait for Service Pack 1, and for idiots like me that want to get on and roll out new (and better?) software to find these things and get Autodesk to resolve them.

I will keep you all posted with developments as they happen, If you are also experiencing problems or have a KIP 3000 and you can press the properties button without Revit crash and burning please let me know.

CLICK HERE TO READ UPDATE.

Another little up-cock from Autodesk - UK Shortcut Icons

.
So, Autodesk missed out some of the metric templates from the UK library then publish that the way to get the missing files which are standard metric files is that they can be obtained by downloading the US Metric content. Ummmm US and Metric

DoH!

The latest blunder is more easily fixed ........

When you install AutoCAD Structural Detailing you should get two shortcuts, one to just AutoCAD 2012 and the other to AutoCAD Structural Detailing 2012.

The one for Stuctural Detailing has a SD in the corner, Ummm they both have an SD in the corner!

The AutoCAD 2012 Icon is there, you just have to go to properties and change the icon......It's in the program directory.
.

SFB Beams Have Not Been Updated!

.

In August last year just after Service Patch 1, I found problems with CSC Fastrack software and Revit., We were designing a structure in CSC Fasttrack using SFB Beams and when the CSC to REVIT program was run it was reported that:-

Warning Type `305SFB197’ needs to be created in Family SFB-Beams’
Warning Type `305SFB259’ needs to be created in Family SFB-Beams’
Warning Type `305SFB218’ needs to be created in Family SFB-Beams’

Slimflor Beams SFB
Serial Size SFB Mass per metre of compound section found under:-
Metric Library \ Structural \ Framing \ Steel ~ SFB-Beams include the sizes:-

356SFB732, 648, 563, 488, 435, 381, 328, 292, 267, 220, 196
305SFB365, 321, 279, 238, 217, 178, 156
254SFB258, 204, 161, 143, 127
203SFB134, 119, 108, 100, 94
152SFB79, 72, 64

Metric Library \ Structural \ Framing \ Steel \ Corus Advance ~ SFB-Beams
Included in Upgrade 1 to RST 2010 include the sizes:~

356SFB707, 624, 539, 464, 411, 358, 305, 270, 244, 220, 196,
305SFB344, 301, 259, 218, 197, 178, 156
254SFB222, 186, 161, 143, 127
203SFB176, 162, 148, 134, 119, 108, 100, 94
152SFB93, 86, 79, 72, 64


I posted this problem on the AUGI thread

A couple of points:-

1) The CSC Fastrack conversion utility looks in the Metric Library \ Structural \ Framing \ Steel and NOT in the Corus Advance folder.

Quote last August from CSC on the AUGI Thread “Yes it is frustrating that Autodesk seem to prefer putting new files in different locations rather than just correcting the original one, and that causes problems for the Fastrak import in Revit - we just look for the family in the Steel folder, not the Corus one.”

2) Quote last August from CSC on the AUGI Thread

“Autodesk seem to have been confused by the use of 20mm and 15mm thick plates - we have allowed for both in Fastrak for historical reasons, but I think Corus only have the 15mm range on their web site now.”

So I set about solving the problem and posted these files on the AUGI Thread, sent them to CSC and Autodesk

SFB-Beams Corus Advance.txt ~ backup of SFB-Beams from the Corus Advance folder
SFB-Beams Steel.txt ~ backup of SFB-Beams from the Steel folder
SFB-Beams.txt ~ A Combination of the two SFB-Beams.txt files.

Note: as the Corus Advance beams are only based on a 15mm plate and there has been some minor modifications to the basic section sizes between these two files, where the same serial size existed in both files the properties of the Corus Advance has been used in my merged file.

However I have not checked the properties of the ~ SFB-Beams under Steel folder with 20 and 25mm plates which needs updating, I have just merged the two files provided by Autodesk together.

CSC Fastrak looks for the family in the Steel folder, so that is where I've placed my new merged SFB-Beams.txt file.

I finished that post with the comment “I'm hoping that next upgrade or version that the Factory will correct the sections above 15mm plate and place a combined file in one location where Analytical Software looks for it.” How wrong I was. Nothing has happened; I notified Autodesk and CSC who are Resellers who informed me they passed the problem up the line.

Come on Autodesk, get your butt in gear and sort these kinds of things out. I have campaigned for a long time for a simple TXT file in each folder in the Revit Library structure that informs the end user:~

What files have just been migrated to the new version
What files are new (with some background info)
What files have been deleted and why
What files have been upgraded and why

Again this is not Rocket Science, very easy to do, and would be very useful to the end user.

What are the chances that I shall be reporting this again next year?
.

Dimension Arrow Bug in exported dwg file after SP3

Here is a little BUG we have found in Revits Structure 2010 exported dwg files after SP3 has been installed.

Before Service Pack 3 was installed into Revit, when we exported or saved as a dwg file the arrows on the dimensions were set up the same in the dwg as the Revit model i.e. closed filled arrows.


















Below is another dwg from the same model After Service Pack 3 was installed and the closed filled arrows translate as architectural ticks even though when inspected they think they are closed arrows!

And you can't seem to make them turn into closed arrows.




















This has been checked out by our reseller and passed up to Autodesk who we are told have replicated the problem (March 2010).
.

Light Gauge Steel Sections are 10 x Overweight!

It appears that the Light Gauge Steel sections are 10 x Overweight.

---

This has been reported to Autodesk and the Support Team are currently investigating ......

---

I will let you know what their answer is, and when we can expect a fix when they reply.

-----

-----

------

-----

---

Autodesk Support Update .... Error in the txt file confirmed, currently no indication when a fix will be released, instruction on how to edit the txt file to correct the error provided!

--