Hi FME'ers,

Here's a recap of what has been happening in the world of FME recently. It's actually quite a lot!

Sporks vs Socks

OK, let's handle this first. Which is better: FME Socks or FME Sporks?

I posted this question as a poll on Twitter, Reddit, and LinkedIn. Debate was fierce:

But in the end, on both LinkedIn (52%-48%) and Twitter (65%-35%) our users came down in favour of FME Socks!

Controversially, Safe employees were 60%-40% in favour of sporks! Crazy.

If you'd still like to have your say, head on over to the FME Subreddit where the poll will be open for another day or two, and where you can tag yourself with either Sock or Spork flair!

New Articles

On the Safe blog this week we have a new article about Infrastructure Asset Management. According to the article, the four main challenges:

• Complying with standards
• Creating a unified data model
• Data delivery and sharing
• Process automation

Obviously, those are all well within FME's capabilities, especially when you throw in spatial data. So go and check out the article.

On the knowledgebase, a standout new article is Getting Started with the CityEngineModelGenerator transformer. CityEngine is Esri's software for modelling urban environments. The transformer lets you create 3D models from CityEngine rule packages and input vector geometry. So if you're into urban modelling, this is probably worth a try.

Elsewhere, Aurelien Chaumet has written an article about the AttributeManager transformer, available in both English and French.

His question is why does FME still have several attribute transformers when there is the AttributeManager transformer that does everything. He wonders if it is for performance reasons and produces some graphs to demonstrate:

His theory is that the AttributeManager is faster when you need to carry out multiple tasks, but individual transformers might otherwise be quicker.

Personally, I seem to recall that we left them in at first because we didn't want to confuse users by removing their favourite transformers. We expected to remove them at a later time, but now I think it's just simpler to leave them in!

The performance aspects are very interesting though, so thank you Aurelien for this great article.

Community Ideas for FME

Activity on the community Ideas section is always steady, so I thought it would be a good idea to highlight a few suggestions that have been made recently.

This week I saw that a reader and writer were suggested for Spotfire Binary Data Format. If that's a format of interest to you, then go and vote for it.

One idea I particularly liked is to change the icon on a writer depending on the operation being carried out (Insert, Update, Delete). That way you can see better what is happening on the canvas itself. I love a great GUI idea and if you do too, then go upvote this one.

Finally, I saw an idea to allow a workspace to be split up into pieces so that multiple authors could work on separate parts. That way it would be easier to use Github and similar repositories. I can see the point, but I think you can already do this by splitting a workspace into custom transformers. Also, I know that we're putting in a lot of work on workspace "change detection" (i.e. what has changed in this workspace) so this idea might not even be necessary. Still, you can go and vote for this idea to signal your approval of the concept.

As always, feel free to post your own ideas, or to browse other ideas and vote them up (or down). Of course, if it's functionality that just can't wait, maybe a hub transformer could be created? Just like this new one called the FMEServerListRepositoryAndWorkspace transformer!

Who Is the Masked Revit User?!

Do you watch live streams on YouTube or Twitch? We're hoping to make more use of these platforms for streaming FME content in the near future. If you want to get ahead of the game, you can find me here on Twitch and here on YouTube. A follow on those channels (especially Twitch) would be really useful to get us up and running.

But what has that got to do with Revit? Well, we're planning a live stream of an FME and Revit webinar sometime in October. The Masked Revit User is an FME'er whose identity we're keeping under wraps! Will they be revealed during the webinar? You'll just have to tune in to find out!

One Last Thing...

Happy 25th birthday to our co-founder Dale's website. Actually, it's worse than that - it's 25 years since he made any edits to it!

So go ahead and visit for authentic 90s website feelings!