Welcome!

[Akos Pfemeter]

Dear Archi-Talkers!

Welcome to the new Developer Forum!

This forum is intended to provide a discussion platform for everybody who is interested in Graphisoft's Independent Developer Program ( http://www.Graphisoft.com/support/developer ). Both professional and entrant developers can bring up their questions, problems, can give suggestion and share their own experience. Feel free to share your thoughts with us and your fellow developers!

Please also welcome Karl Ottenstein, one of our most enthusiastic independent developers, who was kind enough to take on the responsibility of ‘professional’ moderator for this forum.

[Fabrizio Diodati]

Thank you very much Akos and, of course, thank you very much Karl!

I really appreciate all these efforts to help the 3rd Party Developer.

Friendly
Fabrizio

[Oleg]

Great news !

Thank you Akos, Graphisoft API team and Karl of course.

I hope developers from Graphisoft will participate too and answer on questions sometimes.

[stefan]

Let's hope this becomes a positive experience for newbies (like myself) and more experienced Addon-developers.

I keep telling this, but it's the plugins & programming that made AutoCAD and 3ds max so popular. Let's see if it can give a boost to ArchiCAD as well.

[Dave Jochum]

This should do nothing but act as a booster rocket for AC. I'm very glad to see this development. Thanks to Karl for taking on this responsibility.

[Karl Ottenstein]

Welcome everyone and thank you, Akos. I'm pleased that Graphisoft is reinvigorating its support for developers, and it is good to see so many of you here already!

I hope that we will see many of the active developers as well as those with an interest in learning more about producing extensions and add-ons for ArchiCAD. Let's have an active exchange of tutorials, tips, techniques and wishes!

Currently, the developer tools support efforts in four areas: (1) general ArchiCAD add-ons, (2) rendering add-ons, (3) GDL add-ons [updated documentation and tools pending] and (4) the ODBC database driver. All of these tools and documentation are now freely available. (The only fee is if you want to sign up for priority developer technical support.)

Areas (1) through (3) require a reasonable knowledge of programming using the language C++. This forum is not the place to begin learning that language, but it is certainly a place to hone your skills as applied to the ArchiCAD APIs.

Areas (1) through (3) are of interest to Mac and Windows programmers. To compile add-ons, MetroWerks Codewarrier is required for the Mac OS X and Microsoft Visual Studio (or at least Visual C) on Windows XP.

Area (4), the ODBC driver, requires no C++ programming and only works on Windows at present. Discussions related to it are appropriate both here and in the Data Exchange and Information Sharing forum. My assumption is that discussions that are here will be more technical (or wishlist) in nature.

IMPORTANT: We have just this one forum for all of our discussions, so it would help all of us out if each post (once we get going!) addresses one particular topic with a meaningful subject line. Please try not to talk about two or more unrelated topics in a single post so that the threads are easier to follow. 😉

This forum should also be the place to discuss the broad strokes of 3rd party development for ArchiCAD. So, for example, if C++ programming isn't your thing and the current API doesn't meet your needs, start a constructive discussion.

Please share your own hopes and expectations for this forum in this thread!

Again, welcome!

Karl