Retirement of ForceEffect family of apps

[ChrisHall]

On August 31, 2016 we will be retiring the ForceEffect family of apps, this includes the following:

• ForceEffect
• ForceEffect Motion
• ForceEffect Flow

FAQ's:

• What is happening to ForceEffect™ , ForceEffectMotion™  and ForceEffectFlow™?

As of August 31, 2016 Autodesk is retiring Autodesk® ForceEffect™ , ForceEffectMotion™  and ForceEffectFlow™ applications. Users will no longer be able to download and install the iOS or Android apps and the Google Chrome plug-in will also be retired.

• Why is Autodesk retiring ForceEffect™ , ForceEffectMotion™  and ForceEffectFlow™?

Autodesk seeks to address more critical customer needs in the core engineering industry. Moving forward, we will focus development efforts on the Forge platform.

• Will the mobile apps still work after August 31, 2016?

Yes, the apps will still work; however, you will no longer be able to download them from the app store. 

• Can I still download ForceEffect applications after August 31, 2016?

No, you will not be able to.

• What will happen to my diagrams that are stored in the A360 drive?

You will be able to access them until August 31, 2016 . We strongly suggest you download them to your mobile device prior to August 31.

• Will there be any additional releases of Autodesk ForceEffect™ , ForceEffectMotion™  and ForceEffectFlow™?

No, the current versions available are the final versions of the product.

[mkgrugl]

I see that you want to vent your displeasure. I felt it too, to be honest. Seeing a very useful tool for teaching and learning taken away, and in that way, is unfortunate. But I don't think it's warranted to condemn the whole company over this. In my practice, which I maintain besides teaching, we are subscription customers, swallowing the steep payments each year. But in turn, this may allow Autodesk to offer entire suites for free to students. This is marvelous, considering how much they already have to pay for tuition etc.

I still don't fully get why FE was shut down. It sounds like a board-room decision to proclaim an end of life was reached. I'd have preferred to see the concept evolve, and integrated in other packages. It seems to be too valuable to be just thrown away. But I guess it's time to just accept it, and move on.

[weiser]

Hello,

I am teaching mechanical classes at a public school and really love to "give" the web-application to my students for prooving their results in mechanical calculation.

So when looking at the forge-platform the questions which are popping up in my mind are:

- Will a "force-effect"-like app be availibe soon on the forge-platform

... and the most important thing:

- will it be still for free for educational use?

When reading about the forge-platform it seemt to me that this will be a cloud-based engineering platform, which will be only acceable through the browser. So Autodesk can tell the users: "you are using our computers to caculate and store your models, so you have to pay for the usage (per hour / per job)". But most of the users might not have the need of those cloud services because their mechanical problems are rather small and so their own computing-resources will do very fine ...

I would be very pleased to get some further information about the future strategy of autodesk.

Regards

[Anonymous]

Are you adding ForceEffect to Inventor 2017 or future versions?, as you did with Inventor 2016 with the R2 update.... Or is any new about including a similar app in the Forge platform? 

After an exhaustive research, there is no app like ForceEffect, there are some similar softwares very out of date, or more complicated, or very expensive... For teaching, it is a great tool and honestly, after all the replies you have been receiving, you should reconsider the retirement of this family apps, you can make it simpler, maybe just the web app, and I will say even is better to have the app without the option of saving the mechanisms, that have no app at all... 

Please let us know if there is a chance or a future for ForceEffect...

[paul.mcnam]

This app was extremely useful for me last year when i was trying to prove some hand calculations that seemed completely out.

Turned out the geometry of a complicated door geometry let to a sort of inflection point where the forces increased exponentially as the movement approached zero.

Moving the arms around and watching the forces change was a great way to realise it wasn't an error in my calculations.

But now finding out just now that the app has been deleted... why on earth would you remove it?

Surely you could simply just keep it in it's last state for use as a chrome extension... perhaps with a note: This free application is no longer supported etc

Anyway i have a question, it is simple to search for android *.APK files that are all over the web on this and install the app still, however it doesn't have the motion capability that i had with the chrome extension (or inventor 2016). i.e before i could change to motion, and move the frame to a different position and then I could see the new reaction force. But the version I have on the android tablet doesn't have this. I have 2.7.13. What is the version with the motion capability?

How might i be able to get a copy of the later version? 

Thanks,

Paul

[paul.mcnam]

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@gavbath wrote:

In the meantime, I discovered algodoo (as someone else mentioned and more recently, Geogebra. Neither of these are direct equivalents, but they can perform some of the functions that ForceEffect could.

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Has anyone found a good alternative?

Algodoo seems more like a kinematic environment for creating games and for having fun with.

Geogebra is more technical, but don't think it is suitable for this, perhaps not without heavy manipulation (or a deeper understanding)

We have Solid works at a division in our work which i can access, does solid works have something similar?

I don't quite understand why Inventor would give us a product, then take it away which only leads us to search for alternatives/competitors/Solidworks.

Someone in head office didn't think that one through, what a wast of time developing it in the first place!

We're hoping to get both our departments on the one CAD software in the future... things like this does not help the Inventor case.

[paul.mcnam]

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@paul.mcnam wrote:

Anyway i have a question, it is simple to search for android *.APK files that are all over the web on this and install the app still, however it doesn't have the motion capability that i had with the chrome extension (or inventor 2016). i.e before i could change to motion, and move the frame to a different position and then I could see the new reaction force. But the version I have on the android tablet doesn't have this. I have 2.7.13. What is the version with the motion capability?

How might i be able to get a copy of the later version? 

Thanks,

Paul

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Ok I worked out half of this issue, for android seems you needed both ForceEffect and ForceEffect Motion, both available around the web as versions 2.7.13

Unfortunately unlike the tutorials for ForceEffect Motion, I don't have the "export to ForceEffect" option next to the play buttons so I can't do this like i did on the Chrome app and Inventor 2016 😕

Basically all I need is to be able to drag the geometry to different positions (as you can in ForceEffect Motion), and have it calculate the reaction forces that i want... Only way to do that now is to screenshot the different positions, import that image in ForceEffect and draw the simulation multiple times. Pretty messy