Is Dassault Systems' Catia V6 coming to OS X?

News out of the Catia Operators Exchange, currently taking place in Seattle, is that Catia V6 might be ported to the OS X platform. Neil Littell, posts that V6 will run on Ubuntu and OSX. According to a quick Google, Neil is the Product Lifecycle Management Coordinator for the Center for Advanced Vehicular Systems (CAVS) at Mississippi State University. I've asked Dassault Systemes for more details on this and will post them as soon as I get 'em. In the meantime, here's a little video of Imagine & Shape. UPDATE - SEE NEXT POST

LG, CROWDspring and Autodesk partner for the future of personal mobile communication competition

LG Mobile Phones, crowdSPRING and Autodesk have announced a new competition to define the future of personal mobile communication. While it's just for US residents (18 and over), you can have a chance to design your vision of the next revolutionary LG mobile phone and compete for more than whopping $80,000 in awards, $20,000 for the top prize, $10,000 and $5,000 for second and third, then 40 prizes of a grand for the runners up.

According to the particpation web-site, the LG are looking to "Predict what's next." and want to know what you, the designer, thinks mobile phones should look like in "2, 5, or 10 years?" as the web-site says, they're not looking for a "long list of specs or phone ideas that already exist," but rather new concepts or big ideas - but you do have to incorporate the LG logo must be included somewhere.

Entries will in judged on the basis of Need Fulfillment/Market Potential, Creativity/Originality/Innovation as the to leading criteria, then feasibility and Polish/Appeal. Submissions may be "illustrated or rendered in any format - hand sketches, digital drawings, or renderings – rendering tool used will not affect judging process. You may submit as many entries as you like." Autodesk are sponsoring the event and providing a 15 day trial of SketchBook Pro to anyone that enters here. If you're a twitter user, then you can follow it at @LGcompetition

SolidWorks, OS X, Bootcamp and the Certification Quandary

SolidWorks and Mac. There's something that's been discussed a lot on various forums and boards over the years, but as yet, there's nothing coming except eDrawings as we've already covered. There's been some pretty inaccurate reporting and inevitable smackdown ) then the petition started by Dominik Hoffman starts to resurface and apparently, its got over 4,000 signatures. For those unaware, the petition intro letter reads:

To: SolidWorks Corporation

With Apple continuing to deliver screaming-fast hardware in their G4 line of computers and the new Mac OS X's Unix underpinnings, the Macintosh would be an excellent platform for the SolidWorks 3D CAD system. By porting SolidWorks to Mac OS X, SolidWorks could truly make their flagship "The Standard in 3D Modeling Software" in eliminating its single-platform limitation. SolidWorks could quickly capture the No. 1 marketshare for Mac OS X based CAD systems. SolidWorks and Mac OS X share a common "Ease-of-Use" philosophy, without surrendering power, which would make them a perfect match.

As a user of Mac OS and/or SolidWorks on Windows I would like to make known to SolidWorks Corporation my great interest in seeing SolidWorks on Mac OS X.

Sincerely,

The Undersigned

What's interesting is that many of the signatories are students (remember that fact for later) but there's also a bit of meat in terms of commerical user comment. William J. Underwood at Tesla Motors, who felt that "A lot of us are Mac users, forced into PC by nature of available apps and Nazi IT managers!" Elsewhere, David L. Stalling, KC BioMedix commented that "Having Soliworks running natively on the iMAC would greatly aid our medical device development. Make it happen." Final one that grabbed me was Alex Wood at Ishida (an organization with over 200 seats of SolidWorks), commented that "The only thing keeping me on a Windows PC is Solidworks, i'd swap tomorrow if Solidworks was made compatible with OS X"

I shot a few questions over to SolidWorks about their Mac plans, if any and got some interesting answers from Shaun Murphy, CAD product manager at SolidWorks.

Are there any plans to extend your range of Mac offerings?

Shaun Murphy: Not at the present time. We continually monitor our customer base to gauge the level of Mac usage and at the present time there is no pressing need.

I did wonder why it was dimissed quite so easily, so I asked if Murphy could expand a little on the reasons why not. His reply was:

Shaun Murphy: Support for an operating system is a major undertaking for a CAD company due to the legacy support implications. There has to be a demonstrated need for the new operating system by the company’s customer base. Our current research indicates that support for the Mac operating system is not at a level that makes business sense, less than half of one percent of our installed base.

Shaun Murphy: We will continue to monitor this situation and respond to any movements by our installed base to increased support of the Mac platform. If enough of our users want Mac support SolidWorks will provide it.

Are there any resources available for those looking to run SolidWorks under Bootcamp?

Shaun Murphy: Running SolidWorks on a Mac using Bootcamp is not a supported option. Once Bootcamp becomes a supported option resources will be made available.

I get that it's a huge undertaking to port to OS X. SolidWorks' Windows history doesn't help at all (its easier to move unix-based code across - as Siemens has done with NX) but this last one confused me. Bootcamp lets you dual boot a Mac and running Vista or XP pretty nicely and the latest generation of hardware is pretty speedy and powerful. So why no support?

Help?: Lou Gallo over at SolidWorks HEaRD has a few things you should know about. Firstly, he's been covering SolidWorks + Mac for a good long while (here's a link to a good podcast that discusses the pro's and cons). The other thing he's done is put together a guide to patching your graphics driver (when running bootcamp) that will replace your drivers with 'professional' card drivers and let you use all that RealView goodness to its fullest extent.


RealView: it don't work on Bootcamp - unless you get down with Lou's patch instructions.

So, SolidWorks runs fine on Bootcamp, the latest chipsets are up to the job (even if RealView doesn't 'officially' work) and the machines are blazing fast. So why is SolidWorks holding back on certifying the hardware?

Questions and thoughts: What this raises for me is perhaps the whole problem with perceptions. With the release of Bootcamp and the Intel/Nvidia based machines, Apple's hardware is pretty competitive these days and we'll be carrying out some tests to see just how fast these machines run in the next month or so.

But alongside this, there are teams within many organizations that want to go Mac, but because one or two tools are Windows-native, they can't - and SolidWorks is a perfect example. Take the design teams at Trek. Mechanical design is all done using SolidWorks, but if you read this interesting story on the Apple web-site, you'll find that the graphics-based Design team uses mac exclusively. Surely there should be the potential for some consolidation. Single source hardware, the ability to use both OS X and Bootcamp - but that's being held back by SolidWorks and its seeming reluctance to certify SolidWorks for running on Bootcamp.

But I think there's also some short sightedness; particular in the lack of resources for those looking to run SolidWorks using Bootcamp. While the company's research indicates that OS X represents less than half of one percent of their installed base, I'd predict they're going to see that rise in the next few years. Why?

Remember all those students that signed the petition? That's a key thing for me. Informal research we've done and from conversations with other vendors jumping into this space, it's clear that while the desire for OSX or even just Bootcamp support isn't big in today's market, it certainly is going to be in the future - and why?

Because the kids are using Macs. And sooner or later, Kids become Professionals. And Professionals become Buyers. And that generation of potential SolidWorks users is going to be one hell of a lot more fussy about what hardware they run than previous generations. The good news is that peeps like Lou Gallo are here to help out and get this working - certification or not.

iRhino: Quick update with Bob McNeel

If there's an organisation in the world of Product Development Technology that consistently does intriguing things, long before the others even get close, its McNeel & Associates. Founded in 1980, McNeel is a privately-held, employee-owned company with sales and support offices and affiliates across the globe.

When the company started out developing the Rhinoceros system was in public beta for four years or so, gather numbers of users (in the order of 100,000s). When the Beta ended and commercialisation began, it had a userbase that still outstrips most 3d modelling systems, one that had come to rely on it in their daily working processes. The clever bit was the pricing. Rhino has always been priced relatively low in comparison to other systems that do similar things, so it didn't take a lot to it was off to a good start - a user base that's become reliant on a product, then sell them that product at a much lower price than anyone else can.



Two years ago, at an educational event in Mexico, Bob McNeel, CEO of the company, stood up and announced that the company was bringing Rhinoceros to the Mac platform. The work had been underway for some time and almost immediately available at the website (which is www.irhino3d.com) for beta test. That beta is still underway, it's open to anyone, even for commerical use. You register, get your link and download. Install it and away it goes. It'll have an expiration date on it, but a new release comes out long before your license does (and even if it does, you just get the download and install again). I shot Bob some questions over to find out how things were going - and of course, the first question is, why now?

Bob McNeel: Why not? Actually it has been a market we have been watching for many years. The trick was finding someone that was both a killer OS X and killer Windows programmer. When Marlin showed up and was ready to start on the project we gave him the green light.

What potential market share do you think the mac platform has with the various industry sectors Rhino is working within?

No idea. Well, actually we have a good idea from the WIP (Work in Progress) users what industries they are in, but WIP/Beta users are often very different from the people that actually buy.

How is the development process going?

As expected. We are in no hurry. There are no unexpected bottlenecks.

What stage are you at?

The stages are:

1. Core functionality with a prototype U/I.
2. OS X U/I design and development
3. SDK and macro/scripting language
4. Plug-ins

Currently, we are about 80% of Stage 1.

What are the challenges you’re facing/issues that you’re seeing?

OS X U/I design and development will be something completely new for us. Apple has offered to help. We really have no idea how long this will take. Our goal is to have a real OS X application.

We expect Rhino OS X will feel very different from Rhino for Windows. Also, the SDK and marco/scripting language is all new work. Currently we use all the of the standard Windows tools like VBScript, .NET, C#, etc.

None of these are available for OS X, but there is a very rich set of development tools… just completely different. All the plug-ins will have to be rewritten. Not just ours but all 3rd party products. Many will not be ported, but hopefully there will be some new ones that are OS X only.

Are you going to implement multi-touch support and how?

I think it is already in. Just a few things that work as expected.

Any idea of a commercialization timeline?

Sometime after Rhino 5 ships. I expect it will be a couple of years. Hopefully we will already have more than 100,000 users by then.

What's the ultimate goal?:

Most important. Our goal is a real OS X application that OS X users love… not a weird Windows port.

Final Thoughts:



iRhino or Rhino OS X is intriguing compared to some of the complex shape description and surfacing based tools coming on stream now. Firstly, it runs on the most basic of hardware and runs very well. I've been using it, without issue at all in terms of stability, on a first generation MacBook Air - which has all the graphics processing of a chocolate bar. That can't be said of other tools at all.

There's absolutely no doubt that this system will be released and made commercially available only when its reach a state of near perfection in terms of linking into the OS X UI and interaction methods. How its being developed, in a public manner, with constant consultation with users from Rhino's wide spectrum of users is fascinating. But ultimately, it's the fact that McNeel that's developing this tool means it'll be something special, fairly priced across the globe and it'll work. I've just got updated and I'll put together some thoughts in the next few weeks to give you an idea of what it can do.

Sign up now and get working www.irhino3d.com. After all, it's free. For a good long while yet.

Review: eDrawings for Mac

Launched back in 2005, eDrawings for Mac has been around for quite sometime and maybe has fallen a little on the quiet side. Developed by the team at SolidWorks, it brings a native viewer to the Mac platform and gives you a pretty wide range of functionality. For those that haven't come across them before, eDrawings technology allows you to create easily distributable datasets which can contain a mix of 3D and 2D geometry, which you can view, inspect, disassemble - then mark-up, measure and such.

There are eDrawings publishers for the majority of 3D design systems alongside SolidWorks, including Pro/E, NX, Inventor, Solid Edge, Catia and AutoCAD (DWG and DXF). When it comes to actually reading data, the systems supports eDrawings files from these systems as well as DXF/DWG, and native SolidWorks parts and assemblies.



In terms of 3D-based functioanlity, you can pan, zoom and rotate in full 3D (even on a first gen MacBookAir), drag parts out, hide and show or make them transparent and switch quickly (with nicely interpolated animation) between standard views. If the generating system has it stored, it'll auto explode or reassemble an assembly. 3D geometry can be sectioned and inspected.

In terms of drawing support, if the data is output with it in place, an eDrawing can contain both multiple drawing sheets and the underlying geometry, so you can switch between the two to get a real feel for both the form, the assembly as well as inspect dimensions, manufacturing information present.


Drawing views can be worked with and inspected. If the 3D data is present, the two work together very nicely indeed.

One of the interesting things eDrawings gives you is the ability to create mark-up files (which can be stored in the same dataset and redistributed). It has the usual array of redline tools, as well as measurement tools. On that subject, eDrawings publishers will allow you to disable that ability, to protect your IP if that's a concern.


eDrawings has a full range of view, mark-up, redline and inspection tools

Mac limitations: If you look at the base spec sheet for eDrawings and then compare it to the Mac version, then you'll quickly see that there are a number of key things that the system can't do in an Appley-flavour. The big one is the restrictions on data import we've already discussed. If you're working with password protected DWGs, then those won't work at all. The STL out option isn't available (although I would imagine this is something that most people aren't too comfortable with using anyway). Another big one is, if you're working with and passing around simulation data, then while the system can view it, there are none of the specialised tools are available such as Mesh, Legend, etc. Finally, while the original press release claimed otherwise, there is no Professional version of the application.

Final Thoughts: While there are obvious moves across the 3D design technology industry that indicate that there's a rebirth of interest in the Mac platform for design, what is lacking right now, are the tools that allow those involved in the process, but without access to CAD, to involve themselves and participate in the development process. File viewers are few and far between. While eDrawings for Mac doesn't have the full range of file viewing options that its Windows variant does, it does offer some basics and if your organisation is using them, it'll make life much easier. The simple fact that there's a DWG/DXF vieweris intriguing on its own. Oh, and did I mention that this is Free?

Is Autodesk bringing AutoCAD to OSX?

It seems that someone's flicked the switch at Autodesk, with OS X implementations cropping up across many of its industry division. Media and Entertainment has new versions of Mudbox to compliment the existing tools like Maya. More recently, the Manufacturing Solutions team has launched the 'mother of all surfacers', Alias on OSX to go along side the existing SketchBook Pro product (all of which we'll be covering in some depth shortly).

But now it seems that the grandaddy of them all, AutoCAD, is going to get a look-in too, if customer demand shows there's a market. Shaan Hurley, over at his Between the Lines blog, has a Customer Survey, where the team is looking for interest in an OS X port, what industries and demographics that interest comes from. From there, one assume, they build the justification case (or not).

But what I found truly intriguing was the comments below the post, which go from the benign "i cannot install my autocad 2009 on apple mac.why?its for windows only?" and while there's a fair amount of anti-mac sentiment, there are some fascinating details, such as:

I represent an international yacht design firm and we have been with Autocad and other Autodesk products for nearly 2 decades. Last year we have been moving over to some Macs because we getting just too fed up with hardware/software interface and stability issues. We use a lot of very specific Windows developed software because of our niche industry but we manage to get everything running just fine in VM ware using either XP32 or Vista64bit versions. However it remains a pain running in a shell, disk access through the virtual network link for one slows things down. Anything which can run in the native operating system would be a massive plus. Autocad still remains our core program to push out 2D working drawings and as a result remains the single most used program in the office. Getting that native on a OSX instead of windows would be a big plus. The cost of the hardware is irrelevant in a professional environment compared to any downtime due to software/hardware problems. In the office you just want a machine which works and keep working Macs have proven to be far more reliable to us than any Windows based PC in the past year.

Posted by Alexander Simonis of Simonis Voogd Design

There was one common negative theme there, with one commentor questioning market share, with "you're looking at 3~6% of the computers in the world" - from talking to the Alias team in particular, there's a much much larger percentage when you boil it down to the Creative user, whether they be in architecture, industrial design or elsewhere.

coming soon...

honest