A man on a bike...

I skim over the library of my new Archicad.

A toilet-roll-dispenser, a new man on a bike. And a woman too, both vehicles gender appropriate...

Still, another year gone by, another version developed and another lost opportunity to do something with the libraries.

Surely someone, somewhere in the past had made a conscious decision not to play in the hands of manufacturers and suppliers of building materials and products and consequently the developers keep refusing to open up the product to accommodate them.

I’m not thinking GDL or any serious programming here. API’s have existed for a long time, the technologically savvy suppliers had the means to clone their products digitally for equally long.

If they were interested enough and prepared to put the funds in.

Despite of some stand-alone-solutions and the occasional branded object hitting the market, and even with the support of elaborate websites selling such products, this opportunity has gone nowhere really, in the last 15 years.

First step is quite simple:

Provide generic objects with the off-the-shelf library but also means to easily brand them, lock them and supply back to users within the same interface.

How hard would be to have a kitchen sink object that allows for a branded name (logo) to be added and some custom measurements?

Or branding tool attributes, materials, composites, fills for walls, slabs, roofs?