Great tip from Troy Gates over at AUGI:

You could mimic the previous properties box by floating it over your working area and toggling it on and off with the keyboard shortcut (PP, VP or CTRL-1) or by closing with the X and reopening with right-click -> properties.

__________________
Troy Gates
Design Technologies Manager
http://www.lpainc.com
http://blog.lpainc.com
http://twitter.com/troygates

Issue

You want to know if Autodesk products are supported on non-Microsoft networks.

Solution

Autodesk products are designed to conform to Microsoft Network API standards. All other networks that are not Microsoft networks are considered third-party network connectivity products.For the Autodesk software to function properly, your network must provide functionality and performance consistent with the Microsoft network environment. This means that behavior not reproducible between a Microsoft® Windows® server and a Microsoft Windows client is considered a network product deviation, not an abnormality in the Autodesk software.
This is reposted from this support page.

In another post, I discussed the feedback form that allows you to make suggestions directly to Autodesk.

Yesterday, I made this suggestion:
When overriding a Category in view by using:
Select element
Right click Override – graphics in view
The resulting dialog should give focus to the relevant ‘line’. For instance, if I choose to override Railings, the dialog appears but the line for Railings is not visible – you need to scroll down to find this line in the V/G dialog. The dialog should automatically scroll and give focus to the appropriate line. Luke

And received this response:Thank you for contacting us with your feedback. When applying the override the category does get selected but the box does not scroll. It would be a nice touch if it did that action for you as well as selecting the category.
I will pass this suggestion along to the development team for further consideration.If you have a valid suggestion, I recommend that you click on the feedback form below and make yourself heard:

It looks like Firefox 4 is going to have some very nice features, but they might be old news if you are an Apple fanboy.

To download Firefox 4 Beta (codenamed ‘Minefield’ hehe), go to this link.

Then, click on the OS version you are running (I clicked on tryserver-win32), and then download and run the appropriate ‘installer’ package.


I finished this post in the new version, so it seems to do the basics ok!

Wouldn’t it be nice if we got an update version of the Revit Families Guide?
Well, sadly, we don’t have it yet.


You can still access the 2010 version here and the 2009 version here.

I don’t know about you, but I would love an updated Families Guide for 2011.

Some of the information in this guide is invaluable. I have actually requested that Autodesk put together a comprehensive guide relating to Revit Categories (SR# 1-9298685321 – The help file does not describe the unique properties of each Category).

Here is an example of the information in the 2010 guide (this is copyright to Autodesk obviously):

In order to have its content indexed, it seems that the website ‘Experts Exchange’ allows its paid content pages to be cached by Google.

Unfortunately (for them), this means you can access the content simply by clicking on the ‘cached’ button from a Google search.

When you get to the cached page, scroll down to the bottom of the page. All of the responses and solutions should be visible to you.


I’m very surprised that Experts Exchange and Google have not established a more ‘secure’ solution to this problem.

If there is a particular Experts Exchange page, and you would like to view the Google cache of that page, copy and paste the URL into a Google Search. This should expose the ‘cache’ link for that page.

I guess it proves that these ‘Experts’ + cutting edge technology (Google), doesn’t necessarily = smartness.

For some of you, this will be old news. However, it is a very important yet not very well known procedure. How do you accurately rotate an existing section view accurately?

Here are the steps:

  1. Draw a reference plane from the ‘tail’ of your existing section to (or through) the head point. The Reference Plan should snap to both of these. This is the current ‘plane’ of your section.
  2. Draw another Reference Plane that is parallel to the way you want the section to face.
  3. Move this new Reference Plane so that it also starts from the tail of the section.
  4. Select the Section.
  5. Rotate. Move the rotation marker to the tail of the section.
  6. Use the two reference planes to accurately rotate your section!

If you are interested in trying out the new, supposedly improved, beta of Microsoft Security Essentials, head over to this link and see if you can become part of the limited beta program.

There are 32 bit and 64 bit versions available. You will need to sign in with a Windows Live account.

I found out about this over at this post at Lifehacker. Check it out if you are interested in more details.

Interesting video on AutoCAD Exchange over at this link.

The main point of the video is – if you want to work with Solids in AutoCAD effectively, you should correctly set the DELOBJ system variable. What does this variable mean?

From Autodesk online help:

As Revit users, if we ever use AutoCAD for 3D modeling, we want to try and create a form that is a true ‘solid’, something that Revit can understand properly (as opposed to messy meshes).

It seems that this workflow is becoming easier. Of course, Revit itself is becoming a more powerful 3D modeling tool. Check out my post on Bending the Rules with Adaptive Points.

Steve at Revit OpEd has posted about how he feels about the Properties Palette and other interface items here.

I recommend you also check out the comments – Troy Gates makes a very interesting comment where he refers to this AUGI thread. In this thread, Troy mentions a registry setting that some of you (particularly those deploying Revit 2011 to lots of Clients) may be very interested in…a setting that allows the ‘default’ or preset Properties Palette to be set without opening Revit!