WorldCAD Access

In upFront.eZine this week: about PTC's immediate future

In upFront.eZine this week, we have for your reading pleasure... 

1. PTC Faces 2012 with Cuts, Reorganization

2. From the PTC Q1 Earnings Call Transcript

3. Out of the Inbox, and other regular columns.

You can read all about the business of CAD at www.upfrontezine.com/2012/upf-720.htm

 

foto of the sunday: daughter and friends launch their first commercial art gallery showing

Friday evening 7pm. Fort Langley BC, Canada. Our youngest daughter is one of the organizers, getting nine of her 4th-year art school friends to pitch in $60 each to host their art in a commercial art gallery for three weeks.

The show is called Continuum, and doing my best to decipher the artist-speak, it represents the graduation from making and showing art in school to selling works commercially. As my daughter told me that evening, the part she hates is having to write the Artist Statement that accompanies each piece. It's difficult, because you have to write a paragraph that no one will ever understand.

Each artist is showing two pieces. One of my daughter's in under the M in Continuum. It had been hanging with pride on a wall of our newly renovated family room, but then she kidnapped it, and now it's in this gallery, together with an $800 pricetag. The winter tree scene to the right is $5,300 but that's because the artist doesn't really want to sell it. When it comes to selling your soul, there is a price.

(Stitch photography by Ralph Grabowski.)

From France, it's iPocketDraw, now with DXF editing

It's not just the Big Boys who are CAD viewings and editors for portable Android and iOS devices. Eric Pousse has been writing CAD programs for handheld devices for years now, and just last week he emailed me that a new version of iPocket Draw for iOS devices is available at Apple's AppStore.

"It is not only a viewer," he reminds us. Due to the memory limitations of the iOS operating system and Apple hardware, many CAD products are only file viewers. "iPocket Draw is a full 2D CAD app for iPhone and iPad."

DXF Support and Limitations 

"New with version 1.90, iPocket Draw reads DXF files -- and edits them, of course," he adds. The size of DXF files that can be opened, however, is limited to about 20MB, and the software does not handle some complex objects, like splines and hatches. Because iPocket Draw works with a specified scale factor, you need to specify the scale and units upon opening the DXF file.

Speed Differences Between iOS Hardware

He ran some benchmarks, and came up with large differences between different models of iPhone and iPad.  In general, iPad 2 is twice as fast as iPhone 4.

• 8.6MB file with 103 layers and 44,494 objects 
  iPad 1: 33 secs -- iPhone 4: 40 secs --  iPad 2: 20 secs 
  
  
• 15.7MB file with 54 layers and 32,107 objects 
  iPad 1: 35 secs --  iPhone 4: 44 secs --  iPad 2: 21 secs 
  
  
• 20.3MB file with 32 layers and 79,533 objects 
  iPad 1: 53 secs -- iPhone 4: 66 secs -- iPad 2: 35 secs 

He found that on the iPad 1 and 2, the 20.53MB opened only after he closed all other applications and restart the iPads.

adx-online.com/prog/ipocketdraw/ipocketdraw.html

 

In upFront.eZine this week: about that new CAD webzine launching this week

In upFront.eZine this week, we have for your reading pleasure... 

1. New Webzine Launched

2. KeyCreator Compare 
- Q&A

3. Out of the Inbox, and other regular columns.

You can read all about the business of CAD at upfrontezine.com/2012/upf-719

 

foto of the sunday: learning to fall

My daughter's working through the diamond level for ice dance, the highest level in Canadian figure skating. She's been skating for 15 years now (see photo below), continuing on after graduation from high school -- the point at which most other figure skaters stop.

 

When figure skaters first start, they fall a lot. Over the next decade and two, they keep right on falling. Falling means they are pushing their limits, and pushing themselves means they get to excel. So, figure skaters learn how to fall, safely.

(Photography by Ralph Grabowski)

Infoworld: 3 big screw-ups you can expect from cloud providers in 2012

As just one or two CAD vendors roar full throttle into cloud services in 2012, Infoworld writer David Linthicum reminds us that there are three issues that he sees being/becoming the problem:

Blunder No. 1: Security "specifically, the need for identity-based security down to the fine-grained service layers. Most cloud computing providers aren't yet smart about this."

Blunder No. 2: Cost of Migration "is that adopters who underestimate the costs will end up with project overruns that in turn cascade into failures as the cloud migration projects get larger and larger."

Blunder No. 3: Performance as "the providers need to increase their numbers of subscribers, thus providing more for less, as competition gets heated."

You can read his full rationale at m.infoworld.com/d/cloud-computing/3-big-screw-ups-you-can-expect-cloud-providers-in-2012-183253

 

Extending Bricscad through user-written .net commands

From the Universitätsbauamt Heidelberg in Germany, Konstantin Sakellaris writes to tell me about three commands that he programmed using the C# .NET API of Bricscad. As much as V12 is an advance over earlier releases of Bricscad, it lacks commands like Sweep, Loft, and Slice (cut a 3D solid using a surface. And so he wrote them for Bricscad V12:

• SWEEPX and LOFTX sweep and loft solids and surfaces as swept and lofted ACIS surfaces.
• SSBS is short for "slice solid by surface" and it slices solids.

He recommends that you look to the Bricscad Support Forum thread for documentation, comments, screenshots, and newer versions: https://www.bricsys.com/common/support/forumthread.jsp?id=17053

1. Use the NETLOAD command to load the SweepX-LoftX-bc12.1.12.dll file

2. Then use the commands -- SWEEPX, LOFTX, or SSBS 

Note: this .dll works only with the latest sub-release of V12, 12.1.12. 

 

In the figure below, I used LOFTX; the properties bar shows the resutl is a LOFTEDSURFACE object. 

Why CAD Will Wither on Apple

A serious flaw in iPad is that it is not engineering-oriented; well, the problem lies with Apple, who doesn't understand the special demands of our industry.

Some of what we need are listed below, and none of which is offered by iPad:

• lots and lots of RAM
• full OpenGL implementation
• intimate access to the graphics chip
• speedy development
• direct access to between customers and CAD vendors 

To their credit, generic computer suppliers like Microsoft, Intel, HP, nVidia, and AMD/ATI made the effort to understand our market, and then populated their products with features we require. Early examples include the math chip for slow CPUs that allowed vector CAD software to operate 5x-10x faster, and expanded/extended memory so that CAD programs could access more than 640KB of RAM. Newer examples include an open API so that any external device can be hooked up to the computer, and 64-bit computing for "unlimited" RAM. 

Perhaps the new ceo of Apple will understand the problem; if not, then this gives hardware vendors who work with Android OS the opportunity to become the preferred mobile platform for CAD.

In upFront.eZine this week: CAD vendors target iOS with new APIs and SDKs

In upFront.eZine this week, we have for your reading pleasure... 

1. Exclusive! sgCore from Geometros

2. TurboViewer SDK for iOS
    - Q&A

3. Out of the Inbox, and other regular columns.

You can read all about the business of CAD at upfrontezine.com/2012/upf-718

 

Exclusive: First native CAD engine planned for iOS -- and Android, too -- this summer

No, it doesn't depend on the cloud for performing its calculations. Geometros (of Russia, naturally) is porting their sgCore C++/C# solid geometry library for CAD development to iOS mobile devices, and then to Android. Since 2006, the library has been available for OS X and Windows. (Why not Linux? "No demand," they tell me. "But it can be compiled for any platform.")

A stripped-down CAD system, right, like AutoCAD WS? "It will not have any limitations compared to Windows or Mac versions," Geometros tells me this morning in an exclusive interview.

But, they admit, sgCore itself is already stripped down: "It provides a minimal sufficient set of mathematical functions and classes for developing a full-fledged geometric modeling system. sgCore is pure mathematics without object rendering, data entry or any other UI tools. Just math."

They also have a CAD program, Solidgraph, and a ray tracing program, rtEngine.

www.geometros.com

 

You can read the full interview in today's upFront.eZine. Subscribe at no charge by sending an email with 'subscribe upfront' to editor@upfrontezine.com.