Yesterday we held a live Google+ Hangout with Autodesk's Project Chronicle Product Manager Eric Stover and myself. It was a casual and fun time with Eric and I in the Office of the CTO brainstorm room complete with lawn chairs on fake grass, but there was one big issue. We had over 50 people wanting to attend but found Google+ Hangouts have a limit of ~10. We want to thank everyone that was able to attend from as far as New Zealand and interact and ask questions, but also those that tried to attend.
Some of the highlights of the Hangout:
- Project Chronicle records video of anything and those products that have been instrumented like AutoCAD, Inventor, and Revit as well as a few others in the works for this Spring can show a timeline of the commands and keystrokes the person used to create it.
- Project Chronicle is not going away or are there any plans to charge for it when it becomes a mainstream Autodesk product.
- The sweet spot for a Chronicle is 3 minutes. This is not mean to be a 45 minute polished video with music backing track and fancy transitions but instead it is intended to be a quick recording with steps to show how to do something.
- You can use multiple products such as using AutoCAD to Revit then to Photoshop to other software even PowerPoint with audio and video.
- You can cope the open standard video format from your machine where it is stored and view it on any browser even without an Internet connection.
- There will be an open API for anyone even other CAD and design software companies to use to instrument their commands and keystrokes to the timeline.
- Chronicles can be private or public.
- In the future you will see more Chronicle integration in support, knowledge base articles, and product help content.
- I will be gong back through many of my older product tutorials and making them available as Chronicles. We should se more of this in the future and I hope all Autodesk University classes or online learning offer Chronicle as it provides a more detailed look at what someone is teaching you and how they did it than a plain video and reading text scripts or listening to them telling you in audio what to do.
Most of you trying to attend seen this ominous message that the Hangout was full.
We will hold another live event in the very near future but will use the On Air YouTube method which will allow everyone to attend without a limit and also give us a recorded version on YouTube for those to watch later. In the meantime please give Project Chronicle (https://chronicle.autodesk.com/) a try either watching some of the available Chronicles or making some and posting to your blog or email me your Chronicles on Autodesk products to publish in a blog post with credit.
I will begin planning to host several other Hangout sessions with various Autodesk teams.
Cheers,
Shaan
