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Issue #435 : : June 14, 2005 |
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C o n t e n t s CAD Going Mac; Mac Going PC IronCAD Invades China Encryption of Data
FIles Under the Radar and other
regular columns. |
Write the Editor. Donate to upFront.eZine with Paypal. Access nearly-daily CAD commentary at our blog: WorldCAD Access.
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In the last week, three CAD vendors announced four products for the Mac: IMSI's TurboCAD, SolidWorks' eDrawings and Cosmic Blobs, and Autodesk's DWF Toolkit. All products ran previously only on PCs. Is this part of a trend? Apple's news last week may help. The company is transitioning its computers from IBM's PowerPC to CPUs from Intel. Apple customers endure frequent shifts: from Apple II to III to Mac, from Motorola 68000 CPU to IBM PowerPC CPU, from home-grown OS 9 to Unix-based OS X. With some embarrassment, Mac enthusiasts come across nostalgic headlines cached in Google: "Architosh: Features > Apple G5: Smokes Intel Competition." The changeover is not without grief, even though an emulator allows old software to run on the new CPU. The emulator imposes 50%-80% speed penalty as it translates CPU instructions. Developers spend money on re-writing code, lowering profits. Users see the need for two hard drives for programs on each of the two code bases. This does not mean that all PC-based CAD software will suddenly run on the Mac, because the operating system is different. The situation is no different than Windows-based CAD not running on PC-based Linux. Tech Soft America says that its HOOPS 3D Application Framework helped SolidWorks bring eDrawings to Apple’s MAC OS X platform. In the case of Autodesk, it's just the API that's ported to Apple and Linux, so it's up to others can create products that read DWF. upFront.eZine asked a couple of CAD vendors for their thoughts. Nemetschek North America VectorWorks Sean Flaherty, CEO: "NNA is committed to the Mac platform and to supporting the new Intel machines that Apple will be introducing. Right now, however, we can't offer any real details since Apple is still in the very early stages of providing information to developers. We have staff out at WWDC investigating what this will entail and Apple has already offered their support to us as they have on a number of recent projects that we've undertaken. I don't think users buying G5 machines now have much to fear since Apple and its developers have a large installed base of those machines that they'll need to support during some period of overlap. I know NNA (then Diehl Graphsoft) continued to support 68K machines for many years after the release of the PowerPC-based machines. "We'll continue to keep you updated with our plans and progress in this area, but I wouldn't expect a lot of news until the beginning of next year. Right now we're still focusing on adding the improvements you've been requesting and will be integrating the new processor into our plans in the coming months." SolidWorks eDrawings Efrat Ravid, product manager: "There will be a minor effect on eDrawings and we will re-compile eDrawings for this new target platform. Apple already has it up and running on the Intel-based prototype Macs in the lab at WWDC."
Shaun Murphy of IronCAD brought me up to date with the company formerly known as Alventive, Visionary Design Systems, and originally as 3D/eye. The employees purchased all IP [intellectual property] licenses, and the company is now self-owned. Well, not for long. A year ago, IronCAD merged with CAXA, one of the largest CAD vendors in China. To make it interesting, CAXA is also the Chinese distributor for Dassault Systemes. Which may result in conflict due to CAXA's desire to become the dominant PLM provider in China. IronCAD has 23,000 seats worldwide, of which 7,600 are commercial. In contrast, CAXA has 150,000 seats, and trains 20,000 annually, plus gives exposure to 100,000 high school students each year. CAXA has its own 2D CAD software (second only in popularity to AutoCAD), but more important it its FEA [finite element analysis], CAM [computer-aided manufacturing], CAPP [computer-aided process planning, and MPM [manufacturing process management] software. All these will link into IronCAD, which is known as IronCAD Solids in China. Mr Murphy feels that IronCAD (US$3,495) bridges the span between CAD and industrial design, because the software adds free form conceptual design to parametric product design.
Encryption of Data Files, Part I Guest Editorial by Evan Yares As the president of the Open Design Alliance, I spend a good amount of time dealing with the technical issues of improving interoperability, but of recent, I've been thinking quite a bit about the non-technical issues -- probably because that's where most of the problems are. Consider, for a moment, a bit of the history of the CAD industry. The commercial CAD industry pretty much started with a program called Adam, created by Dr. Pat Hanratty in 1971. Before he ever wrote a line of Adam's program code, Dr. Hanratty spent a long time defining the functional architecture and data file format of the program. From day-one, he made the specification for Adam’s data file format readily available. (And he has continued this practice for better than 33 years, up to and including his current product, Anvil Express.) Pat’s decision to make the specification for Adam's file format available had nothing to do with generosity on his part. It had to do with his understanding, based on many years of experience developing CAD/CAM software while working at General Electric and General Motors, that the data belonged to the customer. In the early 1970s, Pat licensed his software, on an OEM basis, to ComputerVision, as the basis for their product, called CADDS. They subsequently changed the CADDS data file format, but never made the specification for it readily available. If customers wanted to access their data, they pretty much had to use CADDS. Some years later, ComputerVision was one of the first CAD vendors to add support for an intermediate data format called IGES (the Initial Graphics Exchange Specification, which was interestingly based on Pat's then-current product's data file format.) Translation errors between native CAD file formats and IGES were serious enough that a whole industry grew up to address them, and to make interoperability between major CAD programs practical. In the late 1970s, Mike Riddle wrote the first PC-based CAD program, Interact, based on his experience with ComputerVision CADDS. From the start, he made the specification for Interact's data file format, called DWG, readily available. (And 26 years later, he has continues this practice, up to and including his current products, FastCAD and EasyCAD.) In the early 1980s, Mike licensed Interact to Autodesk, as the basis for AutoCAD. Over time, Autodesk made many changes to the DWG file format, but never made the specification available. Autodesk created an intermediate data file format of their own called DXF (Drawing eXchange Format.) DXF was a poor enough a solution that it found only limited acceptance. It wasn’t until some of Autodesk's third-party developers created libraries for directly reading and writing DWG files that interoperability between AutoCAD and other important CAD programs became practical. (The Open Design Alliance is the successor to Marcomp, one of those original Autodesk third-party developers.) The fact that both Pat Hanratty and Mike Riddle make their native data file formats specifications available is meaningless as a practical matter, because their companies are rather small in the grand scheme of things. However, it does demonstrate that there are no legitimate technical impediments to doing so. The choice is made based on business considerations. Four out of six of the major CAD vendors -- Autodesk, UGS, Dassault and PTC -- do not make their native file formats specifications available. Intergraph published the file spec for IGDS in the 1980s. (I cannot say with certainty if they make specifications for their other file formats available.) Bentley based their DGN format on IGDS, but then added proprietary extensions. With MicroStation V8, Bentley rewrote the file format, and made the DGN V8 file specification available to its customers and developer partners. (Bentley also supports the Open Design Alliance’s work in developing standalone program libraries to read and write DGN V8 format files, which is why a number of members of the Alliance -- including Bentley competitors -- have been able to add support for that format to their applications.) The failure of a vendor to make their native file format specifications available is not a fatal blow to interoperability, but it changes the nature of the problem. Anyone who wants or needs the information is put the position of having to figure it out, through reverse engineering. This is exactly what has happened in the CAD industry with most of the major file formats. (Evan Yares is president of the Open Design Alliance. www.opendesign.org )
A summary of CAD industry news you may not have read elsewhere, or that I found interesting: - - - LineType Software releases the Banjo Digital Signature plug-in (US$99) for engineers and architects using Adobe Acrobat. The plug-in customizes the digital signature's appearance to comply with licensing standards for signing and sealing construction drawings and specifications. Alterations cause the signature to be visibly invalidated. www.linetype.com/products/banjo/download.htm Alibre Design v8.2 3D parametric solid modeling software is 5x faster (working with parts and assemblies) and has a new user interface toolbar for controlling the visibility of reference geometry, markup and sketches. /www.alibre.com Informative Graphics Corporation says their ModelPress Desktop is in open beta release. The software views AutoCAD 3D DWF/DWG/DXF, Inventor, SolidWorks, Solid Edge, IGES, STL, VRML, OpenHSF, XGL, SAT, 3DS and IGC’s content secure 3DF format. www.modelpress.com Autodesk launches its Location Services Developer Program with standards-based APIs for the Web, BREW APIs for handsets, technical documentation, and support. www.autodesk.com/locationservices/partners/developerprogram.cfm Also, Autodesk launches Revit Structure for structural engineers. It integrates a 3D model with independently editable analytical models using steel, precast concrete, cast-in-place concrete, masonry and wood. www.autodesk.com/structure DRCAUTO SOFTWARE ships Smart Architect LT PRO 2006 for AutoCAD LT 2006, with smart walls, elevations and sections, roof builder, shadow diagrams, surface terrain. 30-day demo from www.drcauto.com McLaren Software ships Enterprise Engineer 3.1 release for the FileNet P8 platform. www.mclarensoftware.com - - - And these news items were posted during the last week at our WorldCAD Access blog <worldcadaccess.typepad.com>:
And on the Gizmos Grabowski weblog <http://worldcadaccess.typepad.com/gizmos/>
Seminars & Conferences 3rd Annual Digital Manufacturing Symposium is June 15-16 in Dearborn MI USA. www.ugs.com/forms/symp_dig_mfg.shtml
People/Companies on the Move Vellum Investment Partners LLC (Robert Bou and Julie Bou) have offered to buy 100% of the assets of Ashlar-Vellum. The deal has been approved by the board, and is awaiting approval by stockholders. Nemetschek North America is 20 years old, being founded as Graphsoft in 1985 by Richard Diehl. The first product was named 'MiniCAD' for the Macintosh, later renamed 'VectorWorks' for Mac and PC in 1996. The company subsequently renamed as Diehl Graphsoft, and then bought out by Nemetschek of Germany.
Redo "You are correct: the number you found on our web site was
'old and low.' The actual seat count is 402,000."
Market News AVEVA Group had annual revenues £57.5 million (US104 million), up 51% from the previous year.
Brand New CAD Books/eBooks "Overcoming the PLM Dilemma" by John Stark
"Doctor Walt’s KEYCREATOR 4 Sizzling Solids" by Walt
Silva
"RenderWorks Recipe e-Book, 2nd Ed." by Dan Jansenson
"The Art of Maya, 3rd Ed."
"What's Inside? AutoCAD 2006" by Ralph Grabowski
Letters to the Editor Re: Inventor's Installed Base "[Autodesk's] total includes Mechanical Desktop seats that were upgraded to the Autodesk Inventor Series: 133,000 MDT seats with subscription service were automatically upgraded to AIS [Autodesk INventor Series, which includes Inventor and MDT] when it was announced. So, the Inventor installed base includes the MDT installed base, which goes back to at least 1993. "What is truly remarkable is that by 1999 Autodesk had more
than 250,000 MDT seats and at least another 1,000,000 AutoCAD users
in manufacturing, but seven years later, they only have 450,000
3D mechanical customers. Furthermore, Bud Kross claims that
over half of the Inventor seats have been new seats and not upgrades."
"I wouldn't assume that folks who bought Inventor aren't using it, and thereby discount the number of users. "When HP was selling ME10, they pooh-poohed the claims of the enormous AutoCAD user base, saying that a lot of those copies were 'just sitting on shelves.' In fact, the opposite was probably true: far more people were using AutoCAD than had paid to use it. "I don't know if it's as easy to pirate Inventor today as
it was to pirate AutoCAD back then, but I sure wouldn't assume that
people aren't using software they paid to buy."
"As you probably already know, counting the education units
makes little sense. Many schools have enough licenses to offer each
of their students a copy of SolidWorks, Inventor, Pro/E and CATIA."
"When we first sold the AIS packages (5.3), only a few used Inventor. This has changed in the last two years. Most people buy this
package because they want to use Inventor. The argument you still
buy Inventor, Mechanical Desktop, Mechanical and AutoCAD in one
package is no longer necessary in the selling process. And if the
users install the 2D products, they use AutoCAD and Mechanical to
support their old drawings." - - - Re: What is it with FEA companies having all-uppercase names? "FORTRAN. I'd say on average FEA [finite element analysis] code is less complex than, say, ACIS [solids kernel]. FEA has two areas that can be very complex: the theory underlying the types of FE they offer (basically, material science), and the matrix solver. "Implementations range from rather primitive to fairly complex. Pretty much every FEA package has a sophisticated solver by now. How much material science you get out of the box depends on the package, but for anything really interesting you'd have to write your own elements anyway. Both the solver and element types are pretty stable, each company probably has one or two people who take care of that stuff. "When I was doing FEA, NASTRAN was considered a good tool
for huge linear models, ABAQUS was good for heavily non-linear stuff
(Goodyear uses it to analyse tires), Ansys had the best GUI, COSMOS
had a fast solver and was a lot cheaper. I suspect this is still
how it is." The editor notes: "FORTRAN was the first programming language I learned." - - - "Always enjoy reading upFront.eZine."
Spin Doctor of the Moment "The decrease in revenue in the second quarter of fiscal
year 2005 from the comparable quarter of the prior year was primarily
due to continued competitive pressures on the Company's UNIX products
and services."
Notable Quotable "When critics have real arguments, they use them. When they
don't, they sneer."
Copyright 2005 by upFront.eZine Publishing, Ltd. All rights reserved worldwide Article reprint fee US$250.00.
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