

AutoCAD Coming to Mac (and iOS) for First Time in Nearly 20 Years - gphil
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/31/technology/31autodesk.html?_r=4&src=busln

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tedkimble
A step in the right direction, I suppose. But as a hacker and an architecture
grad student, no industry infuriates me more than the architectural software
industry.

If you're looking for a new startup idea and you can build a cross-platform 3D
modeler that:

    
    
        * is compatible with existing file formats
        * can cut real-time 2D plans and sections
        * provides a well documented API in multiple modern languages (please no more BASIC)
    

I will hand you $1,000 right now. And that's coming from someone who has
$3,000 in the bank thanks only to his latest loan check.

Seriously, I think there is real money to be made here.

~~~
someone_here
I'm not familiar with 3D modelers, so could you explain what you mean by "cut
real-time 2D plans and sections"?

~~~
tedkimble
Most 3D modelers are solid modelers (i.e. I construct a solid cube or sphere).
When I aggregate many of these solids together (and possibly do some boolean
operations to them), I have a design.

Now I would like my 2D cuts. By this, I mean I would like to look at a 2D
cross-sectional drawing of my design. This may be at the XY plane, YZ plane,
or some other arbitrary plane.

Most 3D modelers can do this, but when you make the 2D cut, you're often
exporting the cut to a new file. If you change anything in the design, the cut
does not update, and you must "re-cut". This is what I mean by real-time.

Good 3D modelers don't do this well, and poor 3D modelers can do this
exceptionally (I'm looking at you Revit). Some can do both, but they're
incredibly complicated and cost tens of thousands (Digital Project)

~~~
roel_v
But for architectural design, you want to work at a higher level than solids.
You want to draw a 'wall' and then parameterize it - 8cm of outside brick, 2
cm of air, 5 cm of insulation, 14 cm of brick, 2 cm of plaster. Plus this
needs to have the right hatch in 2d views etc.

Have you tried Chief Architect? It works rather well in this respect, it's
really made for ease of use. I don't know how well it would scale for large
projects though, I've only toyed with it for small residential design. Plus
the estimating and electrical/HVAC tools are poor to non-existent.

~~~
tedkimble
I'm taking the view of an avant-garde designer in a firm that has a separate
team of drafters to implement designs and construction documents. My focus is
on the conceptual design phase, so I simply have different needs.

~~~
tedkimble
There are a number of programs, but most designers I know prefer Rhino
(rhino3d.com) and the Grasshopper (grasshopper3d.com) plugin. Rhino is now
adding Python (and OSX) support, but they still have a ways to go.

------
absconditus
Why not link to the actual source?

[http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/31/technology/31autodesk.html...](http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/31/technology/31autodesk.html?_r=3&src=busln)

~~~
gphil
Good call, maybe I should have gone to the source. I just linked to the
article I came across myself.

~~~
absconditus
There is a link to the NYT article in the article you submitted. The article
you submitted seems to be nothing more than a rewording of the NYT article.

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blhack
What possible use case is there for autocad on the iPhone? This seems
unnecessarily silly to me.

Unless I missed something from that article...Is this just a client for
viewing renderings or something? I cannot imagine a designer sitting down at
an iPad to do any real work... (although as a sort of digital paper, it works)

~~~
absconditus
From the NYT article (the source of this blog spam):

"Autodesk will soon introduce a free mobile version of the software that will
run on the iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch. That version has more limited
capabilities, Mr. Hanspal said. But with it, an engineer, for example, could
bring drawings to a job site on an iPad, rather than on a big roll of paper,
and make annotations on them."

~~~
rodh257
isn't the ipad screen very reflective and hard to read in sunlight (like that
which would be on a jobsite)?

~~~
roc
In practice it's not that big a deal. Sometimes you have to tilt the screen or
shade it.

But that's more than made up for in the added usefulness. For reference, i
have a far harder time reading an HTC Incredible in the sun.

------
crgwbr
I know AutoCAD is 2D, but can you imagine how awesome Autodesk Inventor or
Solidworks on iPhone would be? They could make use of the Gyro to rotate the
3D model on screen. That way, if you modeled a building, you could put the
camera 'inside' the building and look around just by moving and turning the
device. You could completely visualize and walk through your house before
building it

------
iuhjytgfbnjhmk
Ironically I first used Autocad on SUN Sparcs. We bought a Sparc 5 just for
Autocad because PCs of the day (386) couldn't really handle the graphics
needed.

Then they dropped Unix support, then dropped OpenGL support.

~~~
msisk6
Back in the day Sparc was the development platform for AutoCAD and the DOS,
Mac and other UNIX versions were ports.

Once Windows took off in the marketplace the writing was on the wall and the
anemic sales of the Unix ports in contrast to Windows made keeping those ports
unprofitable.

------
gibsonf1
AutoCad is a dying technology - the real thrust is toward Building Information
Modeling away from 20 year old 2d drafting software. When Autodesk's Revit is
available on the Mac, that will be an impressive announcement.

------
sandGorgon
Is this endgame Linux ? For all intents and purposes, this is the market that
Linux should have. High performance *nix, highly stable, can run huge programs
on it.

Coming from the silicon IC design industry, there are huge IC layout tools
which run exclusively on Linux. They work a lot similar to AutoCAD-like
software - they do a lot of automatic layout, place-and-route, 3D design, etc.

These tools run for weeks at a time on linux machines and are highly optimized
for Linux.

That existing market could have been so easily translated into software like
Autocad for Linux. But something went wrong somewhere - probably the OS
graphics API was not good enough (a frequent enough complaint for Linux)... I
really dont know what.

But even after a proven 4.4 billion dollar market (EDA industry market cap)
for Linux based high-performance design tools, Autocad went after Mac. Knowing
fully well that TCO for a Linux based system is far, far lower than a Mac
based.

~~~
rbranson
Mac is a more commercial software friendly platform. While Apple isn't quite
as friendly as Microsoft, they're going to do a lot more to keep things stable
and friendly for developers than the wild wild west that is graphics and/or
GUI-intensive development on Linux.

~~~
sandGorgon
Most commercial software for Linux is standardized for RHEL or UBuntu LTS
platforms.

I think stability is not the main reason - it may be perceived market or the
graphics API problems that I was talking about (especially with third party
drivers - nvidia and ati)

------
Groxx
> _Autodesk will soon introduce a free mobile version of the software that
> will run on the iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch._

Why do I get the feeling that _that_ was the motivation for bringing it to
OSX?

~~~
kls
Touch interface and CAD has been a powerful combination for a long time. When
I work in simulation, Wacom tablets (while not traditional touch) where used
extensively in both 2D and 3D work. I think the iPad is the huge motivator for
the porting work. If they don't get there they could loose a whole market
segment to an upstart.

------
fredliu
I agree AutoCAD might be hard to use on a tiny screen per se, but the more
important message here I guess, is that 3D object modeling/manipulation
capability on mobile device (hardware and software) has come closer to what a
desktop could offer to do something slightly more sophisticated than just
bubble drawing and lame gaming.

Also, with the introduction of OpenGL ES 2.0 support in Android earlier this
year, there should be no surprise the Android version should also come out
very soon.

~~~
roel_v
Autocad has advocated DirectX over OpenGL for years, and OpenGL support has
been removed from Autocad 2010 all together. The OpenGL support in earlier
versions was emulated on top of DirectX. See for example this paper from an
Autodesk engineer: [http://archicad-
talk.graphisoft.com//files/autodesk_inventor...](http://archicad-
talk.graphisoft.com//files/autodesk_inventor_opengl_to_directx_evolution_788.pdf)
.

So I don't know how they're implementing this, I hope they didn't make some
poor sod reimplement the whole rendering engine or worse yet write a new
DirectX -> OpenGL layer that works in a Java stack...

~~~
fredliu
I think they have to be using OpenGL, as they are "coming back to Mac" and
AFAIK directx is no where to be found on Mac. Also with the simultaneous
release for both the Mac and the iOS version, I'd think there must be lots of
reusable code around OpenGL that'd made the porting to android not an
extremely daunting task.

~~~
roel_v
Yes I expressed myself wrong, they must use OpenGL. I assume they have
different rendering engines as the paper I linked to mentions an option for
software-OpenGL (MESA-like). Also my 'OpenGL is emulated on top of DirectX' is
wrong it seems from re-reading that paper, I misremembered.

------
angusgr
Will be interesting to see what variant of AutoCAD is released.

My Dad is an architect, very long-term AutoCAD veteran, long term disliker of
Windows. IIRC the previous cross-platform AutoCAD was the stripped down LT (is
that right?) version. Useful for some things but not a viable choice for heavy
AutoCAD users at the time.

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riltim
Does this mean AutoCAD is going to be shipping with Mono? Quite a bit of
AutoCAD functionality is now written in .NET.

~~~
iuhjytgfbnjhmk
Unlikely Acad is heavily DirectX

~~~
riltim
No. Recent version of AutoCAD are customizable via .NET and core libraries
that ship as part of AutoCAD are written in .NET too. If you have AutoCAD
installed look at
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Autodesk\AutoCAD\R18.1\ACAD-9007:409\Applications,
all of the sub entries that have a entry MANAGED of Type REG_DWORD with a
value of 1 are .NET extensions. With that being said they either have to ship
Mono with the Mac version or rewrite a ton of code in C++.

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gibsonf1
And please don't forget, Autocad was originally written in Lisp :)

~~~
pmarin
NO. AutoLisp has been used only at scripting level

