SolidWorks + iPhone 101

The evil-mastermind that is Josh Mings at SolidSmack.com has just posted a rather delightfully concise and in-depth tutorial on how to model up an iPhone case in SolidWorks. Check it out here.

How Suhr Guitars is creating music with the Mac

After taking a mooch around the Mac Pro web-site, I came across this rather interesting story in the Profile's section - on Suhr Guitars. Having paid his dues as a Senior Master Builder at the Fender Custom Shop, John Suhr opened up his own small factory building custom guitars to order in 1997. Partnering up with Steve Smith whose background is in CNC programming, John finally had total control over the entire process of building the ideal electric guitars and basses and with the company building building 150 custom instruments on a monthly basis, things are looking good. According to the story, "Everyone at Suhr Guitars agrees: the Mac has enabled them to advance the business in ways they never considered in the past."

Of course, the story discusses where the Macs are used, what software they run, but aside from a few mentions of CNC machining and a mention of Eagle PCB design (which runs not only OSX and Windows, but also Linux) there was no mention of the hardcore design tools we're really interested in.

So, to find out how they are driving product development, I shot the company over some questions to find out what the deal was, are they using their macs and windows-based design software? Well, I got a pretty rapid response from John Suhr, Founder of the company, who set the record straight.

Unfortunately some of my 3D programs I use on a daily basis are resisting getting with the program on the OSX platform. Such as Solidworks..... I do run Solidworks on my Macs with no problems but find the only reliable way is using boot camp and Windows XP. You also have to "fool" the graphics card to take advantage of "Real View" but that is more of a luxury anyway.

My other main 3D program is Rhino3D which is my go to program to get things done quickly. Rhino3D does have a Mac version in beta which functions very well so far but they are looking at another year for an official release. For Printed circuit board design for our electronics I use "Eagle 5.6" which is available in all operating systems, I wish more software companies would think this direction. I used to use Vellum on the Mac years ago when I worked at Fender Musical.

For business we use Filemaker heavily for all CRM, invoicing etc.

Being all Macs now for the internet, it has easily saved me 5 hours a week dealing with software and operating system problems.

Anything I can do to help spread the word and make these companies like SolidWorks realize they really need to get with the program, or many people like me will look elsewhere.

Thanks

John Suhr

There you go. I think we're starting to see something of a trend here, right? Particularly with SolidWorks. Last thing I want to do is turn this is a crusade, but having spent the last few months going over and over this issue with a great many people, there's a gut feeling that just adding or working out the issues with regards certifying Apple hardware, running Bootcamp, or working with the graphics vendors, makes huge sense. As John says, RealView is nice to have but "more of a luxury anyway".

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.

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?