Yesterday (19 March 2019) I attended the Australasia BricsCAD Conference 2019 (ABC2019) at the Brisbane Conference and Exhibition Centre. The presenters were Michael Smith, Heidi Hewett, Pieter Clarysse, Damian Harkin, Jason Bourhill, Ralph Grabowski, Jonathan Taylor and myself. I wasn’t entirely happy with my own presentation, which I shared with Heidi Hewett. It started with an uncooperative PowerPoint wasting too much of the short time I had available.
This led to me abandoning my painstaking preparations and winging it in order to finish in time for the closing address. I hope my talk was informative nevertheless. To see what went. I will be presenting alongside at the (ABC2019), to be held at the Brisbane Conference and Exhibition Centre on 19 March 2019. Presenters will be arriving from USA, Canada, Belgium, Australia and New Zealand.
These include Ralph Grabowski, Michael Smith, Pieter Clarysse, Damian Harkin and Jason Bourhill. If you’re using BricsCAD or contemplating moving to it, I believe the day of your time and will be a sound investment. Among the subjects covered will be the business case for BricsCAD, parametric constraints, mechanical design, BIM, structural steel and site design. Heidi and I will be demonstrating some of the new features in V19. Third-party products will also be on display. Last year there was no Autodesk University Australia and I don’t expect we’ll see one in 2019 either. So if you’re in Australasia and interested in attending a CAD or BIM conference this year, you should give this one serious consideration.
BricsCAD is a powerful CAD software platform unifying the familiar feature set of native dwg with advanced 2D tools and intelligent 3D direct modeling. Choose the BricsCAD version that best suits your needs, from basic 2D drafting with LISP support in BricsCAD Classic to advanced 3D direct modeling and the foundation for BIM and Sheet Metal in BricsCAD Platinum.
Disclosure: will be covering my flight and accommodation expenses and providing a per diem payment. I did my third and final (for now) BricsCAD Unplugged webcast about last Wednesday. Here’s the video: Before I dig into DCL, I start with a brief description of an absolutely brilliant feature that was added to BLADE in V19. If you code in LISP, you’ll love this feature. Then I move on to some ancient history.
Did you know that we can thank the far-sightedness of some slightly renegade Autodesk OS/2 developers in the early 1990s for the dialog boxes we use today? Did you know that you could program dialog boxes for AutoCAD for Mac in 1993 but you can’t today? Can you spot the items of interest in the background? The rest of the video is dedicated to describing DCL programming and debugging, and I explain how BLADE is the best tool for that job using examples. If you want to watch all three of the BLADE videos in a row (that’s 1 hour 49 minutes of viewing), Matt Olding has created a for this series. It has been an absolute pleasure working with the Bricsys people in putting this series together.
Torsten Moses has informed me about yet another bunch of enhancements that are coming very soon to BLADE, so maybe you haven’t heard the last from me on this subject on BricsCAD Unplugged. Robert Green recently made this announcement in his CAD Managers Unite Facebook group: On March 1 I’ll be joining Bricsys (the BricsCAD company) as their Director of Implementation. That’s a fancy way of saying it’ll be my responsibility to make sure BricsCAD customers are technically and financially successful as they migrate to BricsCAD. This will involve managing everything that impacts implementation including installs, customization, best practices development and product requirements analysis. It’s going to be a different challenge for me – one I’m looking forward to. “Why Bricsys?” you may ask? Because I like the company, their products.
As, In December I made a guest appearance on the BricsCAD Unplugged webcast series to discuss the LISP development environment,. I made another appearance last week describing debugging using BLADE : If you’re dealing with LISP code for AutoCAD and/or BricsCAD, you really should be doing it in BLADE. It’s the best development environment for AutoLISP/Visual LISP that you’re ever going to get. I have another appearance scheduled for later today (13 February) in which among other LISPy things, I will be discussing using BLADE for DCL programming. Again, even if you’re AutoCAD-only, I believe this is worth a watch.
BLADE is better for DCL programming, too. Even if you’re AutoCAD-only and not a programmer, you might find my brief ancient history lesson of interest. Did you know that BricsCAD for Mac users can thank a far-sighted early 90s Autodesk OS/2 team for the dialog boxes they use today? The BricsCAD Unplugged webcast broadcasts run on the and are then quickly transferred to. Today’s session will start at about UTC 14:15 (2:15 PM) on Wednesday, 13 February 2019. My Real World BricsCAD series of posts on the continues with more from the in-depth interview at. I hope when people read these things they can see that I’m probing for problems, issues, difficulties, and so on.
That’s the sort of thing that those people who are considering switching to BricsCAD are going to want to know about before diving in. I’m grateful that Bricsys is OK with me covering their products like this on the Bricsys blog. Some CAD companies only allow super-positive things to ever be uttered about their products from their corporate sites.
Bricsys is different. This post is an addendum to a post from June, Why every AutoCAD CAD Manager should have a copy of BricsCAD – part 1, fixing drawings.
This post provides new information about useful functionality added in V19 of BricsCAD that is useful for any CAD Manager or power user who ever has problem DWG files to deal with. Yes, even if your site is still purely AutoCAD-based.
In this post I’ll describe the (inspector) LISP function. This was added in the V18 cycle but was significantly enhanced in V19. It’s probably the most useful LISP function you’ve never heard of. Last night I made another guest appearance on the BricsCAD Unplugged webcast series. This time I was discussing the LISP development environment,. Here’s the video: Bonus points will be awarded for identifying three items of interest in the background. No, not counting my dog asleep at lower left.
Despite going way over time, there was still nowhere near enough opportunity to describe the full LISPy awesomeness that BLADE represents. I am therefore scheduled to return for another two or three episodes beginning in February. In those, I’ll be doing more of a step-by-step demonstration rather than the overview and V19 new feature description I did in this episode. If you have any particular requests for what you want covered, please comment on this post. I also showed how the tools in BLADE (e.g. The (inspector) function) are still worth having for any DWG-based CAD Manager or power user, even if you’re not a full-on LISP programmer.
If you have to work out what’s going on with dodgy DWG files, you’ll want to have (inspector) in your set of tools. The BricsCAD Unplugged webcast broadcasts run on the and are then quickly transferred to. This was the last episode for 2018 because of Christmas and New Year. In September I was the special guest on the BricsCAD Unplugged episode BricsCAD Unplugged – Steve Johnson 5 surprises moving to BricsCAD.
Next Wednesday I will return, this time to wield BLADE, the best thing to happen to CAD LISP in nearly 20 years. I’ll be introducing it and demonstrating a few things, including the new features that came with V19. These live broadcasts are run on the Bricsys Facebook page and are then quickly transferred to YouTube. This broadcast will start at UTC 15:00 (3 PM) on Wednesday, 19 December 2018.
Here’s that time in a few handy time zones.
The BricsCAD V19 release has not only given us a new software release (an excellent one – and I’ll be writing about that later), it’s also given us a and a. In some cases prices are actually slightly lower, but in the vast majority of cases the movement is up.
The price movement varies by product, market and currency, and depends largely on whether you choose to opt for All-in Maintenance. The aim of this post is to clarify exactly what has happened to Bricsys prices. One significant change across the board is the way All-in Maintenance is priced. It was previously a fixed amount (e.g. US$220) to pre-emptively keep up to date with each of the three BricsCAD types (Classic, Pro and Platinum). Now it’s a percentage (e.g.
30%), which means All-in is now cheaper than it was for Classic users and more expensive for everyone else. You’ll also note that the subscription (rental) pricing is now much easier to find on the web site. The annual cost equates to about 40% of the cost of a perpetual license. Those 30% and 40% figures look high, but remember that they’re a percentage of much smaller sums than you get with Autodesk. For example, the difference between buying BricsCAD Pro with and without All-in is US$255. Going Subscription (rental) for a year is $488. For comparison, keeping an old perpetual AutoCAD license up to date is in the region of US$500+ (it varies considerably under different circumstances) and the current annual AutoCAD subscription cost in the USA is US$1575 (bear in mind that this now includes access to various AutoCAD-based verticals).
Let’s compare the BricsCAD prices before and after these changes. First, US$ prices without All-in. Note that none of these prices include taxes. US$ BricsCAD Classic BricsCAD Pro BricsCAD Platinum BricsCAD BIM BricsCAD Mechanical V18 590 750 1110 1760 1630 V19 590 770 1110 1720 1630 As you can see, there is very little price movement at all here. Note that these V19 prices are promotional, which means they won’t stay at this level for ever. (Edit: the promotional prices apply until 16 December 2018).
The Euro prices have moved up a little more: Euro BricsCAD Classic BricsCAD Pro BricsCAD Platinum BricsCAD BIM BricsCAD Mechanical V18 480 640 990 1540 1440 V19 525 725 1050 1590 1500 A more useful comparison can be made by comparing the prices including All-in, because this is the cheapest way of keeping up to date, and the way I’d usually recommend paying for BricsCAD. I’ve included the post-promotion prices here so you can get an idea of the total movement. I am a professional Santa Claus, &I usually get paid in a Lump sum at The End of The Year. Even Tho The price will be higher by Then it is still an excellent bargain compared to Ottercats.
I will try to get around To sending You some of my old basic Lisp routines (for your evaluation), here is a basic Template that allows fairly quick input, (I use a right-handed mouse Left-handed long story.