Welcome Back to Dezignstuff

Welcome back to the Dezignstuff blog! I thought it was appropriate for my first post returning to independent status would be made on July 4th, Independence Day (in the US). This is probably where I really belonged all along, and it feels good to be back. It’s a little funny because I’ve had a lot of Linked-In messages from people congratulating me on my 4th anniversary at my previous position, just days after leaving.

Some of you will be interested, and if you’re not, at least I’m interested, to see if the great corporate experiment has changed me at all, or if we’re just back in the same place where we left off, a little over four years ago. I guess we will learn the answer to that question together, but I would like to think that I’m a little more measured, with a little more respect for the range of nuances that go together to make a great piece of software. And maybe a little smarter about a lot of things, being now on the other side of 50, and married, if you can believe that.

Have a look around, peruse the categories, thumb through the archives, do some searches. I’ve combined what I could resurrect of the old Dezignstuff and the On The Edge blogs. I’ve got material going back to 2007. I’m slowly getting some of the images re-linked. The good news is that a lot of the old gems are still in there, and they still have a lot of value, even today. The bad news is that some of the old gems are still in there, and they didn’t get any better sitting on a hard drive somewhere. Regardless, it’s fun to look back at things and see the state of things several years ago.

What have I been up to the last four years? The one product that I’m actually pretty proud of has been the Synchronous eBook. I don’t want to get into partisan CAD politics, moving forward I hope to spread it around more evenly, but I do think that Synchronous Technology doesn’t get its due. There are a lot of different reasons for this, but what it boils down to is that people don’t understand it, or they try to oversimplify it and miss the point. The Synchronous eBook tries to correct that. If you read the book – or even the first two chapters – and still can’t say what sync is, then it’s my fault, but I think you’ll get the idea.

Some of the most interesting stuff I’ve written here has been on how flawed the concept of a history-based CAD software is. It served us well for the time when we needed it, but we no longer need it, and I think a lot of people are refusing to acknowledge the faults. Anyway, that’s going to be a topic I’m going to explore more in this incarnation of this blog.

Let’s see. What else. Can’t really make a blog from just bashing history. I’m also going to have a look at some reverse engineering techniques. Digital scanning, working with point clouds. This is a new interest, or an old interest reborn, to be more accurate.

I’m not sure that I’m going to recreate the level of “train wreck” that we used to experience around here. While that brought in an awful lot of traffic, it also brought with it a level and type of attention that was not welcome. I think these days VPs of CAD companies are more educated about how to work with/around/in spite of social media, and we shouldn’t see any immolations of that sort going forward. I can’t guarantee that I’ll shy away from a controversial opinion here and there, however.

The CAD challenges that we used to have here were some of my favorite series of posts. I learned a lot from seeing 20 different ways to model a dodecahedron, or how to model women’s shoes, or propellers, or the infamous Puffy House. …but, going forward, we’re going to try to do this in a more CAD-inclusive sort of way.

But maybe the biggest question I’ve heard in the past couple of days is if we are going to see more versions of CAD bibles. Tentatively, I can say yes, although it will have a different name. Same publisher, same software, initially anyway. Some of my old work like the video tutorials I was able to find very skilled people who wanted to take that over, but over the course of four years, there were no takers for the book.

I’ve made one thing clear with this post. I’m still as long winded as ever. Welcome back to any former readers, and to new readers, please have a look around. Most of what made this blog fun and exciting was user participation. We’re gonna talk about product development, design, CAD, technology, and whatever else gets in the way.