Over the years, I've been patiently waiting for Autodesk to take DWF sharing to a higher level. At first, they were gearing DWF to be the PDF replacement. Now they've taken DWF to be more as part of an information/design workflow tool, and not so much as a publishing format. I have to say DWF has come a long way, but sharing DWF with those that don't have a viewer has always been a bit of pain. Yes, you could send them the link to www.autodesk.com/dwfviewer but for some reason, Autodesk insists on making a user fill out a form to download the dwfviewer. (what's the emoticon for annoyed?)
On the plus side for DWF users, Autodesk has been doing the right moves to promote the file format. First, they enhanced the viewer and made it have more features than the free PDF reader. Then they made the enhanced viewer free (Design Review 2008). Now, they give users a way to share DWF on the web to users that don't want to install the viewer. A smart move, because the need is there. Casual users don't want to download a 30MB viewer to view a 10kb file. In the past, I was looking for a way to convert DWF to SWF. Almost everybody uses flash now. But with the power of AJAX, Autodesk has a neat way to share DWF files to non-technical users. This is what autodesk's new service, FREEWHEEL, is all about. Check out the samples from AutoDesk's site.
2 comments:
Thanks for the review. Once your design is on Freewheel, it is easy to share. We have a utility on Autodesk Labs, "3D/2D ShareNow for AutoCAD, Inventor, and Revit," that publishes a design to Project Freewheel, the Labs version, with one click. So with one click, you can be sharing your design with others that don't have a viewer. Project Freewheel even lets the others markup your design.
Scott refers to "Project Freewheel" at
http://freewheel.labs.autodesk.com
And Autodesk Labs is at
http://labs.autodesk.com
Post a Comment