April Fools Day Confessions

By Tim Grimm

Here on Revit Add-ons, we often sit down on Sundays to draft and publish our weekly Autodesk App Store roundups and week in review articles. This past Sunday, realizing that it was April 1st, or April Fools Day, I spontaneously decided to have a little fun, and mix in a prank post or two alongside some real ones.

The first post was for Dumbit, a faux app for converting 3D RVT files to 2D DWG with "full" fidelity and to your CAD standards. I've had this name in mind for a long time, thinking that the simple play on the name "Revit" would be fun and ironic. And I really like the tagline, Revit up, Dumbit down! Kind of describes the whole process nicely, doesn't it? So yeah, I actually had an idea to develop such an app for a long time, but Autodesk's recent release of their own free Autodesk Enhanced DWG Exporter for Revit (probably) rendered it moot.

The icon for Dumbit was a swipe, with just a little color added. I was pleased that it coincidentally came out looking kinda like me, except minus the crossed eyes.

Yeah, now THAT looks A LOT like me.

The second fake app I thought of was Building Designer for Autodesk® Revit®, a one-click building design solution, including all building disciplines and full documentation. It was squarely targeted at those in our industry who feel they shouldn't have to learn complex design software well to be able to use it effectively. You know the ones, those who think the design of complex virtual buildings that meet local and customer requirements and conform to their own personal aesthetics should be achievable by clicking an "Easy" button. 😝

The last one I thought of proved to be the most popular, SpankMyRevit, for punishing Revit when it doesn't do what you want. It was really fun to watch the reaction to this one. A Facebook user mentioned another in a comment to alert him of it. The reply? "I'll be installing this app first thing tomorrow morning." 😆

Revit Add-ons friend Juan Osborne mentioned that SpankMyRevit had a big impact on a "huge" Spanish Revit channel where most of the people seemed to think it was real.

Within a day, all three fake posts charted in the top four of our trending list, with SpankMyRevit even knocking Revit API Docs out of the #1 spot:

For some perspective, our post about Revit API Docs has spent all but perhaps two weeks total in the #1 spot since it was published last August!

The response to SpankMyRevit has been so strong that it will probably become a real app, so keep an eye on Revit Add-ons for that.

We most enjoyed John Pierson's reaction on Twitter to our April Fools shenanigans:

My reaction when seeing @RevitAddons series of #AprilFools #Revit add-in tweets, then seeing real ones right after. pic.twitter.com/muJf8Cygb7

— john pierson (@60secondrevit) April 2, 2018

We had a lot of fun with this. Thank you for being such good sports!

Ye ole editor,

Tim Grimm
Greater Seattle area, WA, USA
Not bad for a reformed Bentley guy
April 3, 2018