Project Butterfly Takes Off!

One of the great resources Autodesk users have, but I am always surprised to hear how many don't know is the Autodesk Lab. This is a circulating development group internal to Autodesk where our developers that might routinely work on one of the core Autodesk products gets the opportunity to develop new technologies and add-ons to the Autodesk product line. An Autodesk Lab project is posted to the website and available to users for FREE, for example one project that I have used a lot is the Google Earth plug-in for AutoCAD Map 3D.

Recently, a new project 'Butterfly' was just released which has huge implications in benefiting many users. The project allows you to share and edit drawing files through a web-browser. Without the need to install any software a group of designers could view a design at various stages and even edit and make changes. One immediate benefit I see is to the utility community of users. Part of day-to-day operations involves the ability to take field notes and update them, this is often a tedious and error prone process. However, using Butterfly in the field could allow easy sharing and markups of DWG information without redigitizing information. Check it out!