An analyst figures Adobe will ship Acrobat v10 in the first quarter (Jan-Mar) of next year.
Another 2010 product, Visio, was announced this week. This site has 10 screen grabs, showing Visio as we remember it, just with the ribbon UI and other modernities.
Alibre will be announcing the beta of Design R12 tomorrow. Only Alibre customers on active maintenance can download it after signing a non-disclosure agreement.
In an interview with Steve Evans of CBR, Amar Hanspal (svp platform solutions and emerging business) said, "It’s possible that in four or five years time the Web 2.0 approach will be a much bigger part of the business." He was referring to Autodesk's desktop software.
I think it will be a hybrid between the two, partial cloud delivery and partial traditional desktop software. The design element would be on the desktop with the heavy calculations being done in the cloud.
How to make revenues from cloudy software? Mr Hanspal figures on charging customers pay-as-you-go or an ad-like model, where suppliers are charged to participate in the software.
Former SolidWorks ceo John McEleney is appointed ceo and president of CloudSwitch. The year-old company is raising money and writing software to let companies use cloud computing without worrying about lock-in.
The marketing emphasis for Inventor Fusion is "speed." The press release Autodesk Unveils Inventor Fusion Technology to Help Engineers Speed Time to Market uses the following adjectives:
All speed aside, what I find more interesting about Fusion is its collection of user interface tools that have new names and new looks:
Marking Menu -- an eight-segment icon menu that appears when you hold down the right-click menu.
Gesture -- a way of accessing a Marking Menu item directly: right-click and drag the mouse in the direction that you've memorized the menu segment to be positioned.
Triad -- combines AutoCAD's 3D move, scale, and rotate gizmos into a single gizmo.
Selection Strip -- lets you select overlapping entities through a filmroll-like strip.
With Autodesk's emphasis on making all of its software similar to one another, I would expect to see these UI elements in the next release of AutoCAD. You can read more about these UI items and see color figures of them in the Getting Started PDF.
Kubotek USA is calling their KeyCreator software the "leading geometry based engineering software."
New in v8.5 are updated 3D CAD translators for Pro/E, NX, CATIA V5, Inventor, ACIS, and Parasolid, as well as support for AutoCAD hatch patterns. There a new way to do section views, and the ability to create wireframe cross-section entities from dynamic cutting planes.
Nigel Davies is director of Evolve Consultancy, and took a few minutes to explain the AEC (UK) BIM Standard. How did this differ from, say, IFCs? I wondered.
This isn’t the same kind of thing as the IFC initiatives. It’s about grass roots BIM usage standards.
Just like the AEC (UK) CAD Standards was an “off the shelf” convention for all those 1001 companies out there writing their own layer standard yet trying to communicate with other companies using different standards, the AEC (UK) BIM Standard is being aimed at all those people who’ve had Revit or Bentley Architecture (or ArchiCAD or etc etc) installed and sit there, drumming their fingers thinking, “OK, now what?”
It’s being put together because there is a need in all of our committee-represented companies (and many others) for answers to these questions that no-one is stepping up to answer except at a large cost (consultants, pah, who’d employ them!?) and on an individual basis:
I’m sure we’ll be referring to the work of initiatives like IAI/BuildingSmart (particularly for object hierarchies), but this is about providing a “starting point” of understanding and commonality for companies adopting BIM to a level of project-biased necessity that IFCs will never be able to convey.
We’re still at the formative stages ourselves in terms of content, but we’re trying to keep this real. We can’t solve all the big BIM questions, but we can start people off on the right footing.
Further details about the Committee’s work can be found at www.aec-uk.org.
Siemens PLM Software is today announcing that "Solid Edge with Synchronous Technology 2" (yep, that's the official name) is due to ship this summer.
The primary new feature is its synchronous technology has been extended to sheetmetal design -- ST being history-free feature-based modeling. In an interview with Siemens, they confirmed that future releases will continue to extend ST to other areas of Solid Edge, NX, Femap, and so on.
One naming change: Femap Express is now called "Solid Edge Simulation Express" and is free with Solid Edge.
There is a nicely laid-out Web page of all the new and improved features here: Press Kit.
Steve Johnson's blog nauseam blog alerted me to the problems AUGI is facing. For the last ten years, the Autodesk User Group International's operations have been run by SolidVapor. In exchange for giving advertisers access to 50,000 software users, SolidVapor organized and helped fund the Web site, now-defunct print magazine, electronic magazine, regional CAD Camps, the annual Autodesk University user group conference, and more.
The ten-year agreement ended last December, and now it's a bit of a question of how these services will continue -- tough decisions for the AUGI board.
Having served on a number of boards of volunteer and non-profit organizations, I can understand the difficulties the AUGI board has been facing since December. I propose that AUGI's primary problem was that membership had been free, and so AUGI now has no independent source of revenue. With no indie income, AUGI cannot on its own afford to hire the full-time workers needed to maintain the Web site, plan conferences, and all the rest of the good work it does.
Free-in-exchange-for-advertising is the devil that AUGI paid, and who publications like WorldCAD Access pay. The difference is that this blog takes 30 minutes a day and is like a hobby; serving 50,000 170,000 members takes an organization of full-time, paid staff -- and that ain't no hobby for nobody.
Unless AUGI can find another sugar daddy (as Autodesk used to be, before SolidVapor), it's going to have to start charging an annual fee to members -- and face the plunge in membership number from 170,000 to ????.
Finite element software is best known for the colorful images of simulated strain patterns on 3D model -- ranging from blue (no problems, mate!) to red (danger, danger). This software finds weak points where the model might break -- or where the manufacturer can ensure the product breaks to generate repeat sales, for the cynically inclined.
Anyhow, material science engineers (generically called "scientists" by C|Net's Candace Lombardi) at University of Illinois have moved FEA from software simulation right into products. As she describes in Color-changing materials react to force, Bend or stretch the item and it begins to turn orange -- and progresses to red close to its breaking point. Or, it turns purple while being compressed. Once the stress is removed, the color changes back to normal.
Next step: self-healing parts.
Recent Comments