While nobody likes getting error messages when installing software, getting one that isn’t that descriptive makes things far worse. Luckily we can rely on installation logs to fill in the missing pieces, though, truth be told, sometimes a little sleuthing is required as well. At the end of the day people are generally happy when a problem is fixed, but often are curious as to why the issue happened to begin with. So while this blog post has an easy answer, the steps to arrive at the answer are worth knowing. (more…)
Ok, so maybe no Toreadors are involved, but we had an interesting support case the other day. A client with a newly installed copy of Revit 2014 (from the Building Design Suite Premium) was crashing directly to his desktop simply by opening an RFA file, or trying to save an RVT file. Picture John Madden hitting his hands together and saying “BOOM”. No error reports to send to Autodesk, just a one way ticket out of Revit. His journals files did not contain anything either.
Well, as I had the product successfully installed and working on my computer, as usually is the case, there was something different about the two systems, but what? After we tried all possible solutions short of reformatting his hard disc (I was tempted), we contacted Autodesk tech support. And once again they came through with flying colors.
Lance Coffey, the Autodesk tech, wrote me: “I have seen “Constant Guard” (a security program Comcast provides to its customers), cause this issue (Revit crashes when any File dialog is accessed). If they use Comcast for their ISP, check if they are using this program, and if so have them try disabling or uninstalling it.”
Well, you guessed it, they did have this installed and once it was uninstalled, Revit 2014 worked perfectly. So remember you should always be on guard, but maybe not on Constant Guard. Toreador, en garde….
Move over paper napkin! The I-pad (or android device) is here!*
This video is a little test run to see if my rusty sketching skills** would get any better on an I-pad. (Sadly, it does not). But sloppy sketching aside, the Autodesk Sketchbook Designer App has all the tools you need to record ideas (architectural or otherwise) on the fly. I find another app ‘Paper‘ to be a better suit for journal type recording in terms of its interface, but the sheer range of drawing options along with a ‘correction’ option for those shaky hands make this a handy tool to have at your disposal.
*poor quality pun intended (with due apologies)
**No, I don’t sketch that fast – I sped up the video 3x
~Sorry team, I broke the office camera recording this video 🙁
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