I wrote my very first post on this blog on April 10, 2007:

Hear it for yourself: It's Alive MP3 (38K)

Welcome to my new blog. Some of you may already know me as "that DWF guy" from my work on the Beyond the Paper blog. I recently returned to my roots and accepted a new position within the company - software development manager for Autodesk Labs. This blog gets its name, "It's Alive in the Lab," from the original Frankenstein movie. I vividly recall Dr. Frankenstein's words as lightning sparked his creation to life: "It's alive. It's alive. It's alive."

Autodesk Labs is our home for new prototypes, experiments, applications, and technologies. Members of the Autodesk Labs team analyze and develop new and viable market driven business ideas. VP of Autodesk Labs, Brian Mathews, likes to point out: "We are not a think tank like Bell Labs." Created by the development teams at Autodesk, our technologies include everything from web services to plug-ins to new applications. Customer feedback from Autodesk Labs helps us decide the future of our projects. The Autodesk vision is to provide the solutions that allow our customers to experience their ideas before they are real.

This blog will highlight the people, processes, and technologies that bring you the latest technologies from Autodesk. At Autodesk, there's a lightin' storm a-brewin'. Regular readers of this blog will soon come to know - it's alive in the lab.

So here we are 9 years later and much is the same. Autodesk Labs is still home to our technology previews; however, instead of having a dedicated Labs team, the technologies come from all parts of Autodesk. Here are some stats:

Thanks to the Autodesk Labs community whose experiences continue to shape the future of our technology.

This wave of nostalgia made me realize that on February 14 of this year, I have had my own blog, in one form or the other, for 10 years. Here is my first post on Beyond the Paper.

DWF enables organizations to connect critical design information into product, project, and asset workflows without compromising the accuracy, security, and intent of the original design idea. The Autodesk DWF Viewer is our free application for sharing, viewing, and printing complex 2D and 3D drawings, maps, and models. Today DWF plays a role in all of our design products, as well as Lifecycle Management solutions such as Autodesk Design Review, Autodesk ProductStream (ERP integration), and Autodesk Buzzsaw (project management and collaboration). Despite the focus on keeping digital design data digital, we recognize that data captured in a DWF file will eventually make its way to paper. In this regard, DWF is an intermediate stop between an AutoCAD drawing (DWG) and plotted output.

The objective of printing a DWF file from the free Autodesk DWF Viewer (or Autodesk Design Review) is that the output should match the results of plotting directly from AutoCAD. Although ideally one could line up the sheets of printed output, hold them up the light, and observe that the inks align, in practice there are slight variations in where the ink is positioned on the paper, but the scales are the same. These small differences are artifacts of the different software components used to translate the data in the files to the ink on the paper.

DWF contains all of the essential elements necessary to get proper printed output; however, it also contains product, project, and asset data that allows it to the foundation for workflow solutions.

Although the topics of DWF publishing, viewing, and printing are fair game, this blog will highlight some of those extra elements that allow applications based on DWF to go beyond the paper.

Nostalgia is alive in the lab.