Moving to the Mac

I have been quiet for a whole week now, busy setting up my Mac, learning new functionality, techniques, keyboard shortcuts, editors, you name it.

Under Windows, I was already using quite a number of batch files and command line Unix-style tools, so I am very happy to have a real Unix shell to play with now.

On the other hand, each batch file needs some fixes applied to convert it to a shell script, and every keystroke needs some additional neutrons firing to switch from the Windows habits to new Mac conventions.

Several of my colleagues are also using Macs nowadays, although they seem to be mostly remaining inside a Windows environment and using Parallels to run it on the Mac.
I am going native :-)

I installed the Xcode environment to have access to standard development tools like make and gcc, the
Komodo text editor,
TrueCrypt to manage all my secret stuff,
Firefox, Skype, Office, Parallels, and much more.

Some of my own command line tools are in C, others in Python.
Everything works fine, so far, many things required some tweaks or cleanup, and much remains to be done.

AU Material Submitted

I managed to keep the deadline yesterday for submission of the Autodesk University material.

For your delectation and the pleasure of online search engines, here is a reproduction of it in its current state.

I may and probably will update it a bit more before the final event, but this should give you a rough idea of everything:

All done on the Mac :-)

Meanwhile, Joe and Saikat brought a case to my attention and asked me to publish a quick note on it, since the answer is apparently not completely trivial to find:

Determine Whether Project Document is Workshared or Not

Question: I’m creating a utility to copy central (workshared) RVT files to a specific folders on the user laptop to make a local copy, then open it in Revit.

How can I determine whether the RVT file is a central file (workshared) or stand-alone before copying it?

If stand-alone, it would not require copying; it could just be opened in Revit.

It could be opened in memory first, but that would increase the time to eventually open and activate it for work.

I looked into the TransmissionData, but I can find no solution.
Is there one?

Answer from Joe: I think BasicFileInfo.IsWorkshared property is what you are looking for.

The BasicFileInfo class can retrieve some metadata file information without fully opening the RVT file in Revit.

This was briefly mentioned between the lines when recently discussing how to

detach and discard worksets
.
I hope it helps to highlight this fact for itself as well.

Create Radial Dimension

Saikat published another example on the AEC DevBlog, showing how to access the sketch of a circular extrusion in a family document and make a call to

NewRadialDimension to create a radial dimension
.

There, my first blog post completed and published on a Mac.

Now to get back to real work again, gradually, at least for a short period before sinking into the gory mess of conference time.


Comments

12 responses to “Moving to the Mac”

  1. Hey, gear up for some opinion. I use bootcamp and like it much more than parallels. Bootcamp is native, parallels is more like a half baked wrapper.

  2. Dear KR,
    I love opinion, the more the better, especially well founded like yours :-)
    Aha, very interesting. I fiddled a bit more with parallels now and got it to work well for me, except the synchronisation is messed up somehow.
    As far as I understand it, bootcamp provides dual boot, but not side by side working on the two systems. Is that correct?
    The working style I am currently developing is to do all I can (almost everything) on the Mac, and switch to parallels only for the things that cannot be achieved there currently running Revit and Visual Studio).
    I guess your use case is different, since you do real work? :-)
    Cheers, Jeremy.

  3. Hey Jeremy,
    Thanks for the complement. Yes, bootcamp provides dual boot, but you cannot use it side by side like parallels. I prefer this as it gives me the native windows feel and rebooting is not majorly an issue as most of my work is around Autodesk products and I have to somehow stay within the windows environment for the most part.
    KR

  4. Dear KR,
    I made you a compliment. Happy you liked it. Happy it was a complement to something as well for you :-)
    http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/compliment-versus-complement.aspx
    Yeah, we have different use cases, then.
    I would love more mac tips. And I find all I need on the internet. A lot of what I am doing is on the command line and using shell scripts.
    Cheers, Jeremy.

  5. Hi Jeremy,
    I can’t believe that nobody asked about the elephant in the room yet. The elephant of course being Revit for Mac OS X. Naturally, even if it was going to happen, you wouldn’t be able to tell us about it right now. However, if you were to advise on the most future-proof language for Revit development, would you say we should stick to .Net or start exploring other possibilities, like Python maybe?
    Cheers,
    Piotr

  6. +1 Revit for Mac OS X
    I just started experimenting with coding add-ins for Revit and as a novice programmer this insight is going to be massively influential for me.
    Cheers,
    Ryan

  7. Dear Piotr,
    I know nothing of any such plans. Right now, the Python add-in for Revit is also based on .NET via IronPython. Hmm, no idea, really. Interesting question. Maybe you can hunt down some Revit development insiders at AU and ask them in private. I hope I will remember to do so.
    Cheers, Jeremy.

  8. Jeremy,
    I certainly wish I was going to AU to hunt down all sorts of more and less official Revit info. Unfortunately, I’ll have to follow it remotely and hope for others to share their findings. :-)
    Cheers,
    Piotr

  9. Dear Piotr,
    Well I’ll certainly keep you in mind when I’m there and do all I can to share what I discover.
    Cheers, Jeremy.

  10. Be sure to install quicksilver, it’s one the biggest little things on the Mac. Application launcher plus more, all from the keyboard

  11. Dear Andre,
    Thank you very much for the tip. I can certainly use all the advice I can get.
    I installed quicksilver and cannot see any use of it. So far, I have been using
    open -a application_name
    from the command line to launch an application, and that serves me pretty well.
    If I need it frequently, I create an alias or a shell script for it.
    For other things, I create other scripts.
    What more than that does quicksilver bring?
    Cheers, Jeremy.

  12. Since you comfortable with the command line, it may not prove as useful to you, but I use it to perform finder actions without leaving the application I’m in or touching the mouse, launching applications, keeping desktop uncluttered, and getting to things faster. There are also plug-ins available but I haven’t tried any of them yet.

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