TAD Docs

TAD was stared in 1989, so its been a long time. This page is devoted to those who have helped further the dream called TAD.

More than anything else, I must bow to my family, especially my three little ones (Anna, Audrey and Andrew) from whom I must have stolen their precious time with their father; and my ex-wife, Dr. Jessy; my brother Baburaj Francis; my dad, V V Francis, my mom, my sister, Dr. Faby Sunny and the ever helpful Dr. Nobhojit Roy; all of who stoically bore through all my tantrums … and in fact, still go through them now and then.

Past contributors (before 2006)

TAD could not have been done with the help and criticism from innumerable others. I am grateful to the JIIA (Journal of Indian Institute of Architects) for giving me recognition in this esoteric field. I am also grateful to the ex-chief planner of CIDCO, Mr. D.G. Parab, the various users of the earlier versions of TAD, specially Mr. Mahagaonkar and the late Subhash Padhye, Mr. Govekar, Mr. Chitnis amd the Homework duo: Deven Mehta and Shabbir Lillamwalla.

The past and present employees of Sabu Francis & Associates have also helped tremendously. The earlier versions was also flogged by my then staff Yashoda Thadani (Fernandes), Vijayan, Kabir, Santosh, Vibha Khandekar(Nadkarni), Mohan Dasannacharya and Nagesh Kulkarni.

Then how can I forget the IIT Kharagpur youngsters: Nasheet Siddiqui, V-Cubed, Srinivas and Vishwanath Gondi, Arvind Thanvi and Deepak.

Pius Lazar had been a long time user, tester and idea generator of TAD (though he may not have known it) He used to construct curves in TAD painfully and that inspired me to invent some unique algorithm which is internally codenamed as “Pius routines”.

Raphy Paul, Anjali Iyer, Hardik Pandit, Kailash Dattakaya, Soyuz Talib, Zubin Zainuddin, Kavita Talib, Nagesh Kulkarni, Darshan, Kartikeya Date, Ranjan Das, Sonawane and Sadis Rajan are those who helped during various phases of their career.

Let me also not forget my fellow IIT Kharagpur alumni, especially those in Mumbai. All of them dutifully used to troop into each and every one of my seminar and workshops.

The list includes Arvind Saxena, Shivaji Patil, Ramesh Bhaskar Pethe, Sukhatme, Vinayak Nabar, Hussein Varawalla, Milind Moghe … and those in Delhi: Pavan Gupta, Prakasham and Bhavesh Dixit.

And of course, there were many others at those seminars/workshops (like Bobby Vijaykar) and I was not wise enough to keep their names. Acknowledgement is also due to my seniors: Dr Paul Varghese, Dr. Arif Merchant, Prof. George Varkki

I must express my gratitude to Prof Dr. J.K.Nayak, Prof. Hazra, Prof. Athwankar, and others at IIT Bombay to allow me to conduct seminars and workshops there. Also immense gratitude to everyone at the ministry of non-conventional energy sources, Government of India for sponsoring a couple of research projects around TAD.

Also, from outside India; Prof. Pentti Routio of Finland, whose nice and encouraging emails kept me going. And Prof. Diego Matho from Boston has been a user of TAD since quite a long time. He was instrumental in getting IDC (Industrial Design Centre) of IIT Bombay and especially Prof. Athwankar of IDC, to set up a project for improving the interface of TAD.

Other acknowledgment

Also acknowledgement is due to the people and works being carried out at Berkeley, MIT, Stanford and some universities in Australia, notably the University of Sydney.

V.Srinvas and Naresh Iyer checked some of the philosophical underpinnings of TAD and I am grateful their inputs. Dr Lachmi Khemlani gave the diagram to explain the SFA classification system

I should also not forget my clients of my architectural projects who funded this project without having any knowledge of the same.

Help from the Internet

TAD has little dependence on a large set of technologies from the Internet (One of the reasons why its development has remained unbroken for so many years). Much of the work is quite original yet at the root, a couple of core technologies helped. So I must be grateful for those wonderful languages that has assisted in its development. One is Visual Prolog and the other is Delphi 5.0

TAD briefly used a fantastic photorealist renderer called Virtualight which is developed by Stephane Marty. I am ever grateful.

I hope all of them are doing well and are pursuing bigger dreams than even TAD.

2006 era

Contributors to TAD: Shilpa Kakde, Shraddha Thakekar, Sonali Pagade and Eleza Boban. All the above contributions were in the form of usage, criticism, unit-testing and documentation. Actual coding was completely done by me with a bit of Ardela coding done individually (for which acknowledgment has been given separately in the Ardela code). Recently some extra coding has been started by the three esses: Shilpa, Shraddha and Sonali on an specific application of TAD.

2013, 2014, 2015 era

Ar. Dinabandhu Patra, Ar. Debopam De

2016, 2017 era

Ar Ayodele Arigbabu, Shripad Deshpande

2019
The 2D CSG and offset algorithms are now using the excellent Clipper Library by Angus Johnson, See http://www.angusj.com/delphi/clipper/documentation/Docs/Units/ClipperLib/_Body.htm Enormously grateful!

2020
Inputs from Praveen Pai, V.Srinivas and Ayodele. Ar. Jayakumar of College of Architecture, Trivandrum (Kerala) who invited me for a keynote speech for their International Metagreen conference

2022
Prasad Menon, CMD of CIBA (Centre for Incubation and Business Acceleration)

2023
IIA centre Thrissur (Kerala) for their encouragement and feedback after my workshop I had conducted there. Prof. Surya of Government Engineering College, of Thrissur, (Kerala) who invited me to deliver a keynote speech for their International conference; ICETEST'23 http://icetest.gectcr.ac.in/ceaside-2023/

Note: An older version of this page was maintained at http://www.sabufrancis.com/tadcontributors. Some names were removed due to unethical behaviours that caused harm to the project; that surfaced later on

Acknowledgements for graphics/icons in the UI
I am grateful to the following authors who have their excellent graphic art at https://flaticon.com Elzicon, Freepik, Irfansuanto20, th studio, LAFS, Smashicons, alfanz, Muhammad_Usman, Andrejs Kirma, mynamepong, Roman Káčerek, PIXARTIST, IconMarketPK, Icongeek26, Circlon Tech, PLANBSTUDIO, Prosymbols Premium, Flat Icons, smashingstocks, bsd, IdeaGrafc, Pixelmeetup, Good Ware, iconixar, mavadee, Ranah Pixel Studio, icon wind, Vitaly Gorbachev, kerismaker, Cap Cool