AutoCADder

The people in Autodesk Labs are working hard. Yesterday they have released a new version of the web-based DWF viewer - Freewheel (see also my older posts 1 and 2). Now you can not only view your 2D and 3D DWF files anywhere on the Internet, but you can also redline and share the markup sessions with your customers and collegues.

Another (even better) enhancement to the Freewheel service is the ShareNow utility. It is an add-on (three separate add-ons) for AutoCAD 2008 (and related products), Inventor 2008 and Revit 2008. ShareNow heals the pain of publishing the DWF file and uploading it to Freewheel. In any of these three main CAD applications you can just click a single button and your project is published to a DWF file, uploaded to Freewheel and displayed in your Internet browser - all in one step. So you can immediately start a collaboration session with your collegue.

With the ShareNow add-ons comes also a commandline utility which uploads a DWF file to Freewheel and views it in MSIE - FreewheelConsole.exe. You can use it in your own procedures:

FreewheelConsole /upload /view [/style ] [/section ]

More information on labs.autodesk.com

Please note there are two Freewheel servers - the freewheel.autodesk.com (standard site) and the freewheel.labs.autodesk.com (beta development site).