Fusion 360 - What were they thinking -- Jumping the Shark

[Ray Price]

Not sure if anyone is following some of the latest sagas with Fusion 360, so I'll bring you up to speed.

In the last month or so, they've rolled out two or three things that have riled up the villagers (for a couple of them, I'm currently in line for my pitch fork and bucket of rotten vegetables).

1. I'll start with the one that hits closest to home and has me on the verge of looking for a new CAD solution.  Love it or hate it, if you've worked with Fusion 360 for any length of time, you've noticed that it explicitly assigns an  incremented version number to the internal name of any design at the time you hit the save button.  So, for my "Atomic Hinge" design, when you look at it in the data panel or open the design it would show something like "Atomic Hinge v7" as the display name.  It would automatically increment to "v8" when I next saved.

That was until this week when they rolled out the latest collaborative hub update and removed the version indicator in the hopes that everyone can just get along with a  simple date and time the design was saved, as well any comment you added when saving.  You can still roll back to a previous iteration, but you have to depend on your date / time memory and comment, as opposed to just knowing that "V6" was the good version you need to roll back to.  Additionally, you have to burrow further into the UI in order to find the date/time - comment list and act on it.

So, you might be thinking, "no Version, no muss, no fuss", well, the downstream impact of that is their nice little capability to automatically append the version number to the filename when saving a mesh (STL), 3MF, etc has gone the way of the Dodo.  You have to rely on your own memory to fabricate a version on the fly during save (since they don't use standard OS save dialogs) or just overwrite the existing version.  Neither one of which seems like it makes any sense and just makes it harder (at least for me) to use the platform.

I've been in the Fusion 360 ecosystem for 8'ish years and have honed end to end workflows and SOPs that rely on the presence of the "Vx" appended to the file name.  Replies to date are that they have users complaining about the version tag and so they dropped it.  Why this couldn't be a flag to turn on / off at the user's or hub manager's discretion is beyond me, but there you have it.  If interested, you can follow along in the discussion I have on their forum Bring back the Version Number - Autodesk Community

The other things have been:

2.  Introducing new file types to encourage the use of components vs assemblies vs hybrid instead of just always having a "hybrid" model that contains components and / or assemblies.  This one I did appreciate since it encouraged me to get a better grasp on the component concept and start incorporating it into my designs.

3. Puking out a new AI assistant onto the workspace with nagging messages about how to write a prompt, and professing to answer all your questions.  This one splattered all over the main workspace and always seemed to open with full regalia when you started Fusion, requiring you to minimize it or "close" it, but it just came back the next time you opened Fusion.  They did roll out an update and provided specific directions on how to close it for good so it remains out of sight from session to session.

You really have to wonder what they were thinking.  Back to the version numbers, I have no idea if Fusion 360 was a unicorn in how it handled this and they just got back in line with everyone else or if other solutions do give you versioning that is helpful.  Appreciate any input on that front.

[3D Printing Tips and Tricks]

Is this only with the Collaborative Hub? I'm looking right now at a bunch of things I just did and all the versioning info as you have described is still there. I do not use the collaborative hub thing.

[Ray Price]

Sorry, missed this when this came in.

Technically it is only for the Collaborative hub, but the personal hub (which I think you are probably on), is no longer being offered.  Even individuals that sign up today will get a collaborative hub of 1.  There is no way to "undo" or roll back from Collaborative Hub.

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