The Building Coder

I have been in Cairo, Egypt, now, for the past couple days, giving a Revit API training course at Kemet Corporation and practicing my meagre vocabulary of a handful of Arabian words. I do love learning languages! I also visit the mosque twice a day in the breaks. I learned from my participants that the word is a complete misnomer, and it should really be called مسجد (masjid).

There, my first blogged word in Arabic, and my first attempt at formatting Arabic script in HTML.

The rest of this post has to do with the opposite end of the world, from my Swiss point of view, from Sweden, and is slightly more of a commercial nature. Well, not quite, it is informative as well, and I thought it might be of interest to quite a number of developers, and it also seems to be free. So here you are, some interesting news from Carl Hoffstedt of Astacus AB:

I just want to tell you about the Revit AppStore for Revit 2011. If you create Revit add-ins, please have a look and follow the steps under "Are you a Developer?"

There are no applications in there yet. I will go live once some have been posted. I will create some myself and I hope for other developers to do the same...

There are many possible use cases for this kind of site.

First of all I don't like the current Add-In Manager. It is easy for you and me but when it comes to an architect with zero experience of Revit it is kind of hard to even install new extensions.

The second thing is that it is hard to protect extensions you write. Anyone can just copy them and that is a problem.

Another thing is when team members in a project need to use the same extensions that might be updated during the projects. It is hard to know that everything is updated.

The Revit App store solves it all...

Here are some more examples of use cases:

1. A single developer (basically anyone) that wants to earn some money in the same concept as Apple App Store. They can create an App and sell it for lets say 10 € to a lot of people.
2. Team members in a big project: there is one huge Revit project in Sweden right now where the different team groups need different extensions. Anyone can create the extensions and upload them into Revit App Store and then share the Apps in the group.
3. There will be one App called Request new Apps where anyone that has an idea can suggest a new App. The description will then be published on the Dev Pages to all developers so they all can develop the App. Some might cost a lot, and some might be free. It is up to the users and developers.

If I can get 10 developers to write 5 to 10 Apps each, just small ones, I will go live and offer regular users to use the Revit App Store. At the same time it will be possible for the developers to earn money on their apps.

Since all Apps are in the online database, they are available from all your computers wherever you are, it's 'in the cloud'.

If you login on a new computer the App-DLL files will be downloaded and protected. This means that only you can execute them from your account. No one else can do so if they don't have them.