Next, in previous articles I had mentioned ZDU, one of the new online schools that are popping up. Since I had suggested people might want to try them in the past I wanted to let people know of some of the problems they are having. At first glance, this is a great opportunity, small fees, easy access, learn when you want to, no trying to find a parking space in the rain on a cold winter night, etc. However, rather than spending time learning, I ended up spending hours online writing emails or sitting on the phone trying to get the book for the class. It turns out they are having problems supplying the books in a timely manner. Also when they did arrive they were printed in black and white, not in color, as was the example. It took about 6 weeks, countless phone calls and emails but I was able to finally get a refund. If you are in the same boat as I was, try calling 1-888-321-1357 between 9:00 a.m. and 5:00 p.m. New York time, Monday thru Friday. I'm still waiting for the refund to be credited. If you were interested in taking online classes, I'd suggest looking elsewhere, or at least waiting for a few months till they can get their shipping problems with Barnes & Noble sorted out.
Ok now, to the real reason you're reading this article. You want to know about Architectural Desktop. You want to know if you're ready to consider upgrading to ADT? Well, we were too and this article is on what we found in the box, what it took to install ADT, and some of the things we've found that are good as well as bad during our first 2 weeks of usage.
We started by going in the morning to AEC's demo of Viz at Kinetix in San Francisco followed by an afternoon at AEC in San Rafael looking at ADT, LT98, and other nifty stuff. As soon as we got back to the office we called back to place our upgrade order for 2 copies of AEC to ADT. Within about one week we had the new boxes sitting on our desk. First thing we were concerned about was destroying our current copy of r14 AEC. We had spent allot of time setting it up with AutoCAD, M-Color, Facade, countless customizations, and other programs tossed in here and there. We knew we wanted to keep these as a "just in case" measure.
