upFront.eZine News Archives

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Welcome to the archive pages of upFront.eZine, the e-newsletter that for 20+ years has been reporting on the business of the computer-aided design software industry. We launched 1 May, 1995 and today bring thousands of subscribers our edgy opinion, weekly news reports, and beloved travelogues.

 

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Read the Back Issues

We keep all issues since 2012 posted -- in full! -- for your browsing comfort right here on this Web site. Use the links to jump to the first issue of each year:

• January 9, 2017
• January 5, 2016
• January 12, 2015
• January 6, 2014
• January 8, 2013
• January 9, 2012

Download All the Back Issues

Ever since 1995, upFront.eZine has been working hard at keeping alive the history of our beloved CAD industry. These our back issues are for your convenience bundled by year into a single ZIP file.

1995            2005

1996            2006

1997            2007

1998            2008

1999            2009

2000            2010

2001            2011

2002            2012

2003            2013

2004            2014          

After you download these files from Dropbox and unzip them to your computer, use any Web browser to read the newsletters.

 

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Copyright 2015 by upFront.eZine Publishing, Ltd. All right reserved worldwide. "upFront.eZine," "The Business of CAD," and "WorldCAD Access" are trademarks of upFront.eZine Publishing, Ltd. All trademarks are acknowledged as belonging to their respective holders.

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W. F. H. (Work From Home): Here's who's helping you

Issue #1,048 | March 30, 2020 by Ralph Grabowski With an estimated three billion people asked/ordered to stay at home, many of us in the CAD industry are fortunate to be able to continue working remotely. Someone like myself has... Read more →

Q&A with ODA's Neil Peterson

Issue #1,047 | March 23, 2020 As the Open Design Alliance gets busier and busier, I thought I'd get an update from CEO Neil Peterson. We talk about LOT Network, proxy objects, the latest APIs, and open cloud. LOT Network... Read more →

Readers Respond: Letters to the Editor

Issue #1,046 | March 16, 2020 Re: The Limits of BIM Thanks for your informative gatherings of insight and innovations in our AEC universe. The Snyder discussion is thoughtful, trenchant. However, I'm (easily) puzzled by this model-vs-drwg "conflict." Ignorance is... Read more →

The Limits of BIM: Jettisoning the Idea of Models Replacing Drawings

Issue #1,045 | March 9, 2020 by Rob Snyder [From the editor: This article is the first of a series that I hope to run in upFront.eZine examining the limits of human understanding, and the related field of epistemology, which... Read more →

The Test That Failed

Issue #1,044 | March 2, 2020 by Herbert S Grabowski The first job my father held was apprenticing in an aircraft factory. Later he became a drafter, for which I also had a knack, and that's why now you read... Read more →

Autodesk at 2020

Issue #1,043 | February 24, 2020 by Ralph Grabowski Life is good for Autodesk. This year the 38-year-old software firm will finally pulled out of its US$2-2.5-billion-a-year doldrums and is guiding analysts to expect $3.25 billion this year, up a... Read more →

Documentation in ArchLINE.XP 2020

Issue #1,042 | February 17, 2020 by Ralph Grabowski The 2020 release of ArchLINE.XP (the XP has nothing to do with the old version of Windows) enhances the way it documents BIM models -- "documents" being the industry-wide term for... Read more →

Electrical on the Cloud

Issue #1,041 | February 10, 2020 by Ralph Grabowski with Thomas Yip Radica Software has grown since I first interviewed CEO Thomas Yip and his electrical schematic software that runs on top of Visio -- Electra. For this kind of... Read more →

Interactive Site Design: TestFit from Building Forge

Issue #1,040 | February 3, 2020 Ralph Grabowski interviews Clifton Harness TestFit is unique among software programs in that urban planners can interactively design and change site plans, taking into account building densities, offsets, parking lots, road alignments, and more.... Read more →

Readers Respond: When Generative Design Backfires

Issue #1,039 | January 27, 2020 This is in regard to Roopinder Tara’s editorial in upFront.eZine #1,038, "When Generative Design Doesn't Work." The orange Microbus wheel design demonstrates the pretension of programmers who have never maintained a car. Drive those... Read more →

When Generative Design Backfires

Issue #1,038 | January 20, 2020 Guest editorial by Roopinder Tara On proud display at last year’s Autodesk University, the biggest CAD conference in the world, was a VW Microbus retrofitted with wheels like none we have ever seen. The... Read more →

Upon Onshape Turning 100 Updates Old

Issue #1,037 | January 13, 2020 by Ralph Grabowski When it came out in 1995, Solidworks was a gamble. It was the first serious CAD program to run only on Windows, an operating system considered by other CAD vendors back... Read more →

ITC vs Gstarsoft, Round 2

Issue #1,035 | January 6, 2020 by Ralph Grabowski Some years ago, Autodesk launched a law suit against CAD software vendor ZwSoft. The American company alleged that the Chinese one had copied its source code. The suspicion arose after a... Read more →

Why Graebert Entered BIM

by Ralph Grabowski There are nearly three dozen CAD programs on the market that work like AutoCAD, but there is only one that comes close to AutoCAD’s market size. Autodesk executives speak of 10–12 million versions of AutoCAD in use,... Read more →

The Berlin Conference: Q&A with Graebert Executives

transcribed by Ralph Grabowski Executives from Graebert GmbH took questions for nearly two hours from the CAD media during the company's Annual Meeting. The focus of the questions was on the company's surprise announcement that it was getting into the... Read more →

The Stockholm Conference: Q&A with Bricsys Executives

Issue #1,032 transcribed by Ralph Grabowski Stockholm skyline, as seen from the Brewery At last month's Stockholm conference of BricsCAD users, the CAD media had the opportunity to quiz Bricsys executives on the topics of the CAD replacement market and... Read more →

Readers Respond: Why Does CAD Hate CAM?

Issue #1,031 Moderated by Ralph Grabowski I really enjoyed your newsletter addressing the still-troubling aspects of CAM [computer-aided manufacturing]. Frankly, I was starting to think that no one cared about the subject any more. As someone who spent many years... Read more →

PTC Bought Onshape, for $470 Million

Issue #1,030 Assessment by Ralph Grabowski That Onshape would one day be sold was certainty. The only questions were When and By Whom. The 'When' was last week, and the 'Whom' was PTC. [This article is based on speculation. Do... Read more →

Why Does CAD Hate CAM?

Issue #1,029 by Ralph Grabowski CCAD ought to love CAM, but it doesn't. The whole point to us designing things is so that things can be made. And so it's kind of weird how much of CAD is hostile to... Read more →

The Black Swan Story Behind BricsCAD - Part II

Issue #1,028 As told by Ralph Grabowski [In part I last week, we learned about the first strand of history that involved Cyco Automation. Their breakthrough in directly reading DWG files lead to a series of black swan moments in... Read more →