As ever, it looks like Josh beat us to the jump with this one, but its worth covering a little. Autodesk just pushed out the 1.1 release of SketchBookMobile and it addresses some of the issues with the initial release, namely, layer perservation (you can now push out a .PSD file out to Photoshop) and for me, the big one, importing landscape image (which is something I'd asked about when it launched) and brush preview when you're resizing them. It's available now on the App store. Josh also has a very handy comparison chart looking at other sketching apps for the iPhone.
Finally, here's a slick little vid* that shows a workflow with moving data from concept to 3D with SketchBookMobile and Inventor.
* nice video, but honestly. Where the hell are they getting this music from?
Image Courtesy of Andrew Meehan, industrial designer
Tomorrow (if all goes according to plan), Autodesk will launch it's first commercial application for Apple's iPhone platform. Taking its technology based from the SketchBook products that have been Windows and Mac-based for sometime, the system strips things down to the basics and provides a mobile platform for sketching - using iPhone (or iPod Touch) multi-touch interactivity.
I had the pleasure of having this application (which has been in Beta for sometime) on my iPod during my recent travels and it's compelling indeed. Sketching is perhaps the one thing that connects designers, engineers and civilians - everyone doodles, sketches and draws - it's just that some are better than others. So let's take a look at what we're got to play with.
A quick download from the App Store and an install (the app will cost 2.99 in the US, 1.79 in the UK, 2.39 euro) later you're ready. Hit the Icon and up it loads. The system gives you a quick walk through of the key functions and shortcuts and interactivity (as well as their being a complete help system embedded in the tool). The interface is pretty transparent. You're presented with a full screen drawing surface. While the iPhone's display runs at 480x320 pixel, what you're actually look at is a 600x400 pixel drawing area. two fingered pinch gives you zoom, dragging those dual digits gives you pan, allowing you to work at the level and in the area you choose. Images can be brought in from the iPhone gallery and used as the basis for a sketch (or as I used it for, for mark up - making it a slick workflow tool) or you can dive in and start drawing.
The tools and options are all accessed through the small icon to the bottom of the screen, tap this once and a marking/radial menu pops up. This gives you the most commonly used commands. From the top and clockwise, you have pencil, airbrush, paint-brush, eraser. You then have the brush control (more on that shortly), layers (the system supports transparent layers - six for the iPhone 3GS but three for other variants - due to lower processor speed), the colour wheel (controlled using swatches or a colour wheel) and perhaps most interestingly for the technical/ID user, Symmetry.
Symmetry lets you build up both sides of a sketch quickly and easily, then you turn it off to add detail. Image courtesy of me (which is why it's crap)
Depending on your orientation (portrait or landscape), SketchBook Mobile will take readings from the iPhone sensors and assign symmetry centrally and vertically (if you have it in landscape, it'll run the axis of symmetry up the centre of the page). In the centre, you have the brush resize control - tapping, holding and dragging left/right will change the size of your brush, with a value readout.
Brush presets and control is first class and something often missing from other iphone drawing apps
In terms of brush options, there's a veritable feast of options, using the same brush engine as the desktop version of SketchBook Pro - you've got full control over size, width, transparency for pencil, brush, airbrush, different stroke type and texturing tools - there's also, of course, the flood fill command too.
The layers are a tool that's going to make life much easier, as we've already said, there's 3 available on the Ipod Touch while the 3GS gets 6. Even with 3, that's pretty usable and the ability to merge layers down gives you added flexibility and control. Multi-touch and multi-tap is used where sensible, the corners of the UI are 'hot' - for clearing a layer, fit to view, undo and redo (10 levels of both), while tap hold brings up a colour picker tool.
Alongside preset swatches, the colour wheel gives you full colour control.
All in all, the whole experience is pretty wonderful. There are other drawing applications out there for the iPhone, but this is a professional grade tool, layer control and symmetry bring the tools a design-led user might need and you're working on an image big enough for real communication, rather than a quick thumbnail.
There's a video tutorial coming shortly, but in the meantime, take a look at the Flickr page for the beta testers, download the application (come on, it's only 3 bucks - probably the cheapest Autodesk product out there) and have a bash.
Sketching is still the predominate method of communication all the way through the design process and while the moleskine and pen combo isn't going to go away and this isn't going to change the status quo, it is a nice indicator of where things might be headed. As Carl over at Core77.com said in his post on the app, "the tactile feedback that makes paper such an enduring medium is unchallenged here, though they've given it a good shot: there's some very good brush rendering technology that makes pencil strokes look like pencil strokes, and "synthetic touch sensitivity" to simulate the effects of increased pressure, despite the lack of true pressure-sensitivity in the iPhone screen."
Simple tools are often the best and while SketchBook Mobile has a few things missing (text would be handy, as would a sync app - you currently need to email or post images out), it's as near a complete set of sketching tools as anyone would need. The best thing is, it's cheap as chips, so if you're iPhoned up, then have a bash. And post your results on the Flickr group if you dare.
Just remember, if you do happen to be sketching Stonehenge, remember to put the correct dimensions on it.
With many rumours now linking Autodesk product development with Apple OSX ports, the company has created a web page to guide Mac users best-run Autodesk applications on their Intel-based Macintosh computers.
For those non-Mac users amongst our readers, Apple's switch to Intel processors enables Macintoshes to run either Leopard OSX (a UNIX-based operating system) or Windows XP, Vista or Windows 7 using an boot utility called BootCamp.
There are Windows emulation tools for the Mac, namely VMWare Fusion and Parallels Desktop, which enable Windows and OSX to run simultaneously. These are not supported directly by Autodesk although bloggers such as Autodesk's Shaan Hurley has had some success in running AutoCAD software under emulation.
It's a small but important statement by Autodesk. The company is now serious about Apple and looks set to develop more native CAD applications for this growing platform. Insiders at Autodesk have told me that AutoCAD for OSX is actively being considered, while Inventor for OSX would be a challenge but not impossible. The high percentage of Macs with students in Universities is being taken a lead indicator that there will be increased popularity of the platform in coming years, at the expense of Windows-based workstations.
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.
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
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.
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.
