Autodesk on its Mac Manoeuvres

So, we've had a little chat with Paul Brown at Siemens about why the company has ported its NX product to the Mac, so I thought it only fair to have a chat with Autodesk about the same. In the last year, the company has ported a number of its Media and Entertainment applications across, such as Mudbox and Stitcher, but its the last few months that saw a much bigger move made to bring Alias Design to the Mac platform, so I caught up with Thomas Heermann, senior product line manager for Industrial Design.

What made Autodesk make the move to the Mac platform? The acceptance of and the market share of Apple hardware among creative professionals.

Why now?
Availability of high performance Apple hardware leveraging the Intel chip set and Nvidia high end graphic cards support.

Any figures or ideas in terms of market share amongst the professional market (I’m specifically interested in the product development market). We have not encountered statistics surrounding the product development market as a whole. But based on our data, and talking to a lot of customers over the years, we believe roughly 30% of creative professionals prefer the Mac platform over Windows.



Any plans for a more engineering/design type tool (ala Inventor) for the Mac platform?
We are continuously evaluating the hardware and software operating systems our customers are using and plan to use. While we can’t discuss specific future plans, as you have seen through recent visits with Autodesk and at Autodesk University, we are experimenting with different design and engineering technologies for the Mac platform.

I’m assuming that Mac hardware will be fully certified by Autodesk in some manner. Yes?
We have updated the Alias Qualification charts to include qualified hardware specifications. We provide system requirements for the Mac to run Alias and other software, but we are not certifying hardware at this point.

Also related to that do you think it’ll be possible to have the same for those users looking to run Inventor under Bootcamp.
As with all officially supported platforms, if we choose to expand official support to Boot Camp we would include system requirements.

Any plans for a viewing tool (ala Design Review) for the Mac platform? Some sort of Inventor/DWG viewer. SolidWorks have their eDrawings viewer for Mac.
Freewheel (freewheel.autodesk.com) is a free web service solution to view and share 2D and 3D design – all without the need to download or install any software – that lets Mac users review designs created using many of our software applications.

Are plans afoot to move Alias Design to a fully Cocoa-based user interface?
We continue to monitor user preferences on this.


Alias Design (and the other Alias variants) retain the familiar Alias user interface and experience rather than adopting an Mac-native UI style.

Plans to integrate fuller support for multi-touch?
Adding a tablet to Alias provides greater benefits especially for Sketching. Multi touch came along very nicely over the years. We are monitoring this technology closely and evaluate how it will provide value to our customers.

Any other Mac related news we should know about?
No other news at this time.

We're just working our way through relearning Alias Design as it's been a good 12 years since I used it last professionally, so once I'm through and up to speed, look out for a run down on how the system works and what it can do.