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.

Dassault to Launch 3Dvia iPhone App

#2: At the recent DEVCON event at Dassault Systemes unvieled a forthcoming application for the iPhone that allows users to connect to the 3d data respository, view data and manipulate it in 3D. There's also an interesting looking feature which takes a photo from the phone's camera and allows you to position that part or product within that photo (which is semi automated because of the iPhone orientation awareness and the fixed focal length of the camera). While it might sound a little gimmicky, what I found most interesting is that almost every vendor I've been talking to has iPhone ambitions and while this isn't the first 3D and product development related app or iPhone tool from a traditionally CAD focussed vendor, you can bet your bottom dollar, it's not going to be the last. Word has it that this app should ship on the App Store by the end of the month once Apple has approved it (which is apparently the major challenge for anyone developing iPhone apps).

RCA Student makes Toaster from Scratch

Photo Credit: Daniel Alexander

Loving this press release and while it has bugger all to do with anything Apple or Mac related, I'm pretty much going to republish it verbatim.

A design student at the Royal College of Art in London has made a toaster - literally from the ground up. Thomas Thwaites has travelled to mines across the country to get the raw materials for his toaster. Processing these raw materials at home, (for example he smelted iron ore in a microwave), he has produced a 'kind of half-baked, handmade pastiche' of a toaster you can buy in Argos for less than five pounds (for those non-UK readers, Argos is like walmart, except everything is hidden underground and accessed via a combination of small slips of paper, small pens and trolls that guard the booty). Thwaites' toaster has cost 1187.54 ounds and has taken him on a 9 month quest around Great Britain. The project web-site is here http://www.thetoasterproject.org/

Why?

The project is a reaction to the idea that it's possible or desirable to be self-sufficient, but also to the view that having more stuff, more cheaply is better. "The steel parts in a shop bought toaster probably came from rock mined in Australia. Now they're on my kitchen worktop - for the price of less than an hour’s work. Quite amazing," says Thwaites.

"The real cost of objects is hidden. You wouldn't want iron smelted or plastics being melted in your back garden, trust me. Though my neighbours have been quite nice about it," he continues. "It seems the need to buy more stuff to save our economy and the need to buy less to save our environment are on a collision course. So, we either have to value what we've got a lot more, or spend as much time and effort taking things apart and disposing of them as we do putting them together."

As well as visiting disused mines in the Forest of Dean, England, the Knoydart Peninsula in Scotland and the Isle of Anglesey in Wales, he has consulted experts in mining, oil drilling and recycling (as well as a drunken deer stalker) to turn his vision of a making a toaster from scratch into a reality.


Photo Credit: Daniel Alexander

However, the practicalities of the project came as quite a shock when he realised that he'd need to find and process nearly 100 materials to make a true likeness of the Argos Value Range toaster he used as his model. Thwaites' toaster uses just five materials; iron (for the grill), copper (for the pins of the plug and the wires), plastic (for the casing, plug and wire insulation), nickel (for the heating elements) and mica (around which the heating element is wound).

Step 2:Smelting Iron Ore in a Leafblower Furnace from Thomas Thwaites on Vimeo.

Steve Furlonger, the former Head of Sculpture at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, and Director of Windsor Workshops, described Thwaites' project as "disguised information", adding, "Under his toaster making project he is saying profound things, of a different order. The 'failures' he encounters, during his toaster making, point to the success of his real message; that we have become disconnected from how our world is supported and sustained."

Thwaites completed the project as part of his MA in Design Interactions from the RCA and will be displaying his toaster (and making toast with it) at the RCA Show Two, the College's annual graduate showcase for new designers from 26 June. He is also working on a short film and book which documents the toaster project in full.

The Toaster Project will be displayed at RCA Show Two, Royal College of Art, Kensington Gore, London SW7 2EU - 26 June - 5 July, 11am - 8pm daily (closed 3 July, closes at 5pm on 30 June, 1 July, 5 July) - admission is free.

Step 2, Attempt 2: Smelting Iron Ore in a Microwave from Thomas Thwaites on Vimeo.

Simply wonderful eh? I think while this is an interesting and from my perspective, very amusing story, there's a salutary lesson here about consumption of materials and sustainability. I'm just not entirely sure I know what it is.

Final Word from Dassault on Catia + OSX

After much speculation, the final word from Dassault with regards Catia on Mac OSX and it's:

"There needs to be a business case. We are examining a variety of options, but there are not yet any plan for delivering CATIA on OSX."

Jacques Leveille-Nizerolle, CEO CATIA, Dassault Systemes.

Oh well. So to make up for it. Here's a gratuitous video of Catia's Imagine and Shape. Not coming to OSX. But which is pretty bloody wicked anyway.

Siemens NX on OS X is a-go-go

So those eagle-eyed amongst you will have noticed that there's been a lot of discussion of Siemens PLM launching its long awaited NX system on the OS X platform. According to some of the press release "NX is used by leading companies around the globe to design and manufacture some of the world’s most innovative and sophisticated products. Its wide adoption throughout the global manufacturing industry is due in part to its ability to support a wide range of operating environments – including Windows, UNIX and Linux – in a heterogeneous or single operating system deployment." I've been playing with the system for a couple of months, but I wanted to find out a little more about the plans for the system on an on-going basis, so got in touch with Paul Brown, senior director of NX Marketing, Siemens PLM Software.

MacDesign: What functionality will be included and excluded from NX on Mac OS X?
NX on Mac OS X features virtually all of the CAD and CAM functionality in NX 6 along with synchronous technology. This includes all feature and free form modeling, rendering, drafting, assemblies, routing, sheet metal, turning, milling and much more.
The primary functionality not available with NX on Mac OS X is the CAE suite of tools. This is based on initial market demand expectations as well a number of required third party applications that are currently not available on Mac OS X. In addition, some specialty applications such as Mold Wizard and Progressive Die Wizard have not yet been fully tested in this environment. We will continue to monitor and evaluate the business case for these items.

MacDesign: Any insight on development plans for OSX in terms of synchronising platform and OS releases - will there be an OSX lag? NX 6.0.3 is being released and made immediately available on Mac OS X, Windows and Linux simultaneously. The plan is to maintain this synchronous platform release schedule, however, there will be one exception to this before it fully takes effect.

While the next major release of NX for all platforms will be NX 7.5, we are planning an interim release that will be targeted at delivering more Synchronous Technology functionality. This interim release will be limited to the Windows platform. With the NX 7.5 release we will resume shipping concurrently on all platforms.

MacDesign: Any plans to move to a fully cocoa/aqua based user interface rather than using X11/Motif?


Siemens NX runs using X11 to enable the interface and cross platform (as pretty much the same code is used across Mac and Linux) - on the mac front, it does require some tweeking of windows and cursor priorities to get it to work effectively.

We have several customers who use multiple platforms mixing Windows and Linux hardware to suit their needs. To ensure all customers can maximize their productivity our goal is to maintain a common user interface. We will continue to monitor our user community and adjust our strategy if necessary based on the best interest of our customers and our business.

MacDesign: Any other OSX planned releases? Native JT viewer that sort of thing? We have not announced any other plans at this time.

MacDesign: Any insight on user interest would be good too. Size of beta community?
We have experienced strong interest from our beta user community as well as others outside of that community with an interest in the Mac OS X environment.

MacDesign: Lastly. Why now?
Delivering NX on Mac OS X has been an important part of our strategy to give customers their broadest choice of platforms. We have been conducting extensive development and testing to ensure that the product met our standards for performance and quality before it was released. The timing of NX 6.0.3 for the other platforms we support made this a sensible choice to be the launch platform for NX on Mac OS X.

There's some interesting debate going on around this subject all over the place - things have got a little bit heated over at SolidSmack.com (with our old buddy Joe Moak from Formlovesfunction.com wading in at the end with the most reasoned response yet). From my perspective, there's two key things on of late. Vendors are porting older code, that's much easier (typically with a Unix-based) to port to the Apple platform to gain some market share. Then there are new vendors jumping to the space. Gut feeling tells this is something that's going to grow and we'll see more and more in the coming months and year.

Oh and some video joy for ya too.