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Can I get a raise of hands for Fusion 360 users out there that currently like the offline experience? Okay, I can’t actually see you, but I’m willing to guess that you find our current offline mode about as effective as me asking you to raise your hands in a blog.

This ineffective offline experience was exacerbated last month, when we had a serious unplanned outage. The overwhelming reaction of our users that day was that of frustration (we hear you!) but the silver lining -as noted by longtime Fusion 360 user, NYC CNC– was that this will bring about positive change, and much-needed attention.

So let’s get to the positives, and explore how we’re going to take steps to make offline mode a seamless extension of the Fusion 360 environment. As many of you highlighted, the data panel experience when offline is a bit of a pain. That because even the most organized of hubs get mashed together and “sorted” in unexplainable ways as soon as connection is lost. This makes it difficult to just find files, which makes their ‘cached’ status irrelevant. That’s why we’ve made this behavior one of the first thing we’ll address.

Check out the QUICK TIP below, for a preview of how the next release will maintain project, folder, and file locations in the data panel:

In addition to this, under the surface we’re going to modify Fusion 360 to preemptively detect outages or connectivity issues, and transition to the offline mode without requiring manual adjustment.

Looking further out are even more changes coming to offline mode. Stay tuned to the blog, because later this week Bryce is going to be doing a ‘Fusion Forecast’ on what to expect. As much as we’d like to pretend there will never be outages, or that we’re always be connected, the simple truth is that we’re not. Knowing this, we hope that once these efforts are completed, there is little distinction between offline or online mode for Fusion 360.

We hope you like the direction we’re headed in! If not, get on the IdeaStation with other solutions! 

~Aaron