Live Report: ITC World Conference 2006

I'm in Kelowna BC Canada, one of those vacation destinations most have never heard about. Think long, warm lake; huge wine-growing region; and free Internet in all area hotels. (Well, the hotel hosting the conference has Internet service in name only: it took an hour to get my email. The hotel's service is so bad that the ITC set up their own wireless connection in the conference room.)

Highlights from the first morning's addresses...

Dave Lorenzo is development director for the IntelliCAD Technical Consortium. The next release of IntelliCAD is v6.4, which will consist largely of bug fixes, along with compatibility with Windows Vista and AutoCAD's 2007 variant of DWG. Expect it next Spring.

Work on v6.x is winding down as the ITC shifts more of its 20 programmers to complete IntelliCAD v7. This is what IntelliCAD should have been all along. The DWG import/export will be handled by the OpenDesign Alliance's DWG libraries in such a way that the ITC no longer has to deal with Autodesk's changes to DWG.

Instead, the ITC can concentrate on commands. The new DRX (equivalent to AutoCAD's Object ARx) lets the ITC be more competitive:

* ITC can concentrate on adding commands, a task that's easier with DRX. (Most new commands in AutoCAD are just ARX code fragments that get loaded as needed.)

* IntelliCAD members can now create custom objects, which do specialized and/or discipline-specific operations. Dynamic blocks is one example.

* The ITC will be able to provide object enablers. (Not a great idea, but then that's how Autodesk solved the problem of custom objects.)