There’s a new App in the Autodesk App Store for Civil 3D 2013. This gem of a program creates a visual representation of structures and I’ve dubbed it Create Structure Report. I know you are all jealous of my creative skills as demonstrated by this glorious name. It’s also a steal at $25 for the download.
The sample output of the report may be found at this link. The user selects the structures they wish to have a report created for. The incoming and outgoing pipes are then shown in the report. You can tell the direction of the pipe by the words IN and OUT as well as the fancy colored arrows. The width of the pipe is also shown so you can visually see how far apart the pipes are going to be. The enormous white space at the top gives you plenty of room to draw doodles, or if you are more practical have your companies logo. There’s even a place to put some job information on the form. If you have numerous structures the report sheets may be put into an open Sheet Set. Plus if you ask really nicely you can get the source code of the project. This app is open source project, so feel free to contribute any bug fixes or additional features.
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8 comments:
Maybe I am missing something, but why charge for the app if you are going to make it an open source project?
Either way, nice program and continue to look forward to what you end up creating.
Nice app Chris. Very creative idea.
@Keith, charging for the apps helps to recoup some of the time developers are putting into these apps. I also write apps for the app store and am charging less than $5 an app. Seems to me it would be well worth the money for a small purchase with no licensing file.
There are a lot of complaints about what AutoCAD and Civil3D are missing and now Autodesk has created a way for developers to help provide some of these things. Many of us developers are working on these outside of our day jobs, performing many trial and errors to ensure the app is working well. Seems to me a low cost app would be worth purchasing.
If you are purchasing the app you are purchasing the convenience of not having to compile the source code and then use it. Many, many, many users don't know how to do it and don't want to learn how. You'd be purchasing convenience and having me maintain the software. Open source doesn't mean free.
Just clicked the link to download for review. Something wrong with your paypal email address it says...
It looks like the App store is having difficulty. I tried another vendor's app and got the same error.
I understand the idea of charging a fee for the creation of the app, no one works for free. The idea of keeping it open source and then also charging for the app was what confused me.
If you give out the source code of the application, which you haven't made publicly available either way, then what is to prevent someone from compiling the code and charging $5 to download it or simply giving it out for free?
I did not mean to come off like I was criticizing the idea, but was just curious.
There's nothing stopping anyone from doing what you mentioned. I'd hope they'd differentiate their product from what is already available in the source code so they'd be adding value to the product and then add the improvement to the source code.
The app store should be fixed now. Autodesk apologizes for any inconvenience this may have caused.
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