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.