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AutoCAD Coming to Mac (and iOS) for First Time in Nearly 20 Years
- gibsonf1 16y agoAnd please don't forget, Autocad was originally written in Lisp :)
- abecedarius 16y agoAutoLisp was added on in a later (albeit pretty early) version.
- pmarin 16y agoNO. AutoLisp has been used only at scripting level
- msisk6 16y agoActually, it was written in C. Why? The other choice was Pascal and that required swapping floppy disks to do the compile on a dual floppy PC: http://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/www/chapter2_112.html#11286 http://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/www/chapter2_112.html#11286
- crgwbr 16y agoI know AutoCAD is 2D, but can you imagine how awesome Autodesk Inventor or Solidworks on iPhone would be? They could make use of the Gyro to rotate the 3D model on screen. That way, if you modeled a building, you could put the camera 'inside' the building and look around just by moving and turning the device. You could completely visualize and walk through your house before building it
- iuhjytgfbnjhmk 16y agoIronically I first used Autocad on SUN Sparcs. We bought a Sparc 5 just for Autocad because PCs of the day (386) couldn't really handle the graphics needed. Then they dropped Unix support, then dropped OpenGL support.
- msisk6 16y agoBack in the day Sparc was the development platform for AutoCAD and the DOS, Mac and other UNIX versions were ports. Once Windows took off in the marketplace the writing was on the wall and the anemic sales of the Unix ports in contrast to Windows made keeping those ports unprofitable.
- blhack 16y agoWhat possible use case is there for autocad on the iPhone? This seems unnecessarily silly to me. Unless I missed something from that article...Is this just a client for viewing renderings or something? I cannot imagine a designer sitting down at an iPad to do any real work... (although as a sort of digital paper, it works)
- flatulent1 16y agoBesides supplemental uses on the current iOS devices, if there were to be an iMac with touch down the road, this would be a good first step getting ready for it.
- WiseWeasel 16y agoThe main use case is that you've been trapped in an insane asylum, for various reasons we won't get into, with nothing but an iPhone and access to the Autocad iPhone app, and you really want to impress the administrators with your pitch for a new swimming atrium on the south wing.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- arjuan 16y agoArchitects will love using this on the iPad once the construction phase begins on a design and they have to do their Punch Lists.
- sliverstorm 16y agoIt certainly could be great as a viewer- an interactive blueprint- but are you suggesting they will do actual design on the iPad?
- tedkimble 16y agoNo, but AutoCAD isn't used by designers anyway.
- absconditus 16y agoWhy not link to the actual source? http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/31/technology/31autodesk.html?_r=3&src=busln http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/31/technology/31autodesk.html...
- gphil 16y agoGood call, maybe I should have gone to the source. I just linked to the article I came across myself.
- absconditus 16y agoThere is a link to the NYT article in the article you submitted. The article you submitted seems to be nothing more than a rewording of the NYT article.
- tedkimble 16y agoA step in the right direction, I suppose. But as a hacker and an architecture grad student, no industry infuriates me more than the architectural software industry. If you're looking for a new startup idea and you can build a cross-platform 3D modeler that: * is compatible with existing file formats * can cut real-time 2D plans and sections * provides a well documented API in multiple modern languages (please no more BASIC) I will hand you $1,000 right now. And that's coming from someone who has $3,000 in the bank thanks only to his latest loan check. Seriously, I think there is real money to be made here.
- ciupicri 16y agoSpeaking of Basic, didn't AutoCAD use Lisp for "macros"?
- jokermatt999 16y agoIt still does. As a younger programmer, it was my first taste of Lisp. Still, it would be nice to have more language choices.
- olefoo 16y agoUp until the mid 1990's yes. Then they switched to Visual Basic and C++ which were considered easier to integrate with the Windows environment or something.
- fredliu 16y agoI agree AutoCAD might be hard to use on a tiny screen per se, but the more important message here I guess, is that 3D object modeling/manipulation capability on mobile device (hardware and software) has come closer to what a desktop could offer to do something slightly more sophisticated than just bubble drawing and lame gaming. Also, with the introduction of OpenGL ES 2.0 support in Android earlier this year, there should be no surprise the Android version should also come out very soon.
- roel_v 16y agoAutocad has advocated DirectX over OpenGL for years, and OpenGL support has been removed from Autocad 2010 all together. The OpenGL support in earlier versions was emulated on top of DirectX. See for example this paper from an Autodesk engineer: http://archicad-talk.graphisoft.com//files/autodesk_inventor_opengl_to_directx_evolution_788.pdf http://archicad-talk.graphisoft.com//files/autodesk_inventor... . So I don't know how they're implementing this, I hope they didn't make some poor sod reimplement the whole rendering engine or worse yet write a new DirectX -> OpenGL layer that works in a Java stack...
- fredliu 16y agoI think they have to be using OpenGL, as they are "coming back to Mac" and AFAIK directx is no where to be found on Mac. Also with the simultaneous release for both the Mac and the iOS version, I'd think there must be lots of reusable code around OpenGL that'd made the porting to android not an extremely daunting task.
- roel_v 16y agoYes I expressed myself wrong, they must use OpenGL. I assume they have different rendering engines as the paper I linked to mentions an option for software-OpenGL (MESA-like). Also my 'OpenGL is emulated on top of DirectX' is wrong it seems from re-reading that paper, I misremembered.
- riltim 16y agoDoes this mean AutoCAD is going to be shipping with Mono? Quite a bit of AutoCAD functionality is now written in .NET.
- iuhjytgfbnjhmk 16y agoUnlikely Acad is heavily DirectX
- riltim 16y agoNo. Recent version of AutoCAD are customizable via .NET and core libraries that ship as part of AutoCAD are written in .NET too. If you have AutoCAD installed look at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Autodesk\AutoCAD\R18.1\ACAD-9007:409\Applications, all of the sub entries that have a entry MANAGED of Type REG_DWORD with a value of 1 are .NET extensions. With that being said they either have to ship Mono with the Mac version or rewrite a ton of code in C++.
- rodh257 16y agoAs a .NET developer for Autodesk Revit (and soon to be Autocad) I am interested to see if they are going to make us rewrite our applications in a different language to be compatible with the Mac.
- gibsonf1 16y agoAutoCad is a dying technology - the real thrust is toward Building Information Modeling away from 20 year old 2d drafting software. When Autodesk's Revit is available on the Mac, that will be an impressive announcement.
- Groxx 16y ago>Autodesk will soon introduce a free mobile version of the software that will run on the iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch. Why do I get the feeling that that was the motivation for bringing it to OSX?
- kls 16y agoTouch interface and CAD has been a powerful combination for a long time. When I work in simulation, Wacom tablets (while not traditional touch) where used extensively in both 2D and 3D work. I think the iPad is the huge motivator for the porting work. If they don't get there they could loose a whole market segment to an upstart.
- angusgr 16y agoWill be interesting to see what variant of AutoCAD is released. My Dad is an architect, very long-term AutoCAD veteran, long term disliker of Windows. IIRC the previous cross-platform AutoCAD was the stripped down LT (is that right?) version. Useful for some things but not a viable choice for heavy AutoCAD users at the time.
- sandGorgon 16y agoIs this endgame Linux ? For all intents and purposes, this is the market that Linux should have. High performance *nix, highly stable, can run huge programs on it. Coming from the silicon IC design industry, there are huge IC layout tools which run exclusively on Linux. They work a lot similar to AutoCAD-like software - they do a lot of automatic layout, place-and-route, 3D design, etc. These tools run for weeks at a time on linux machines and are highly optimized for Linux. That existing market could have been so easily translated into software like Autocad for Linux. But something went wrong somewhere - probably the OS graphics API was not good enough (a frequent enough complaint for Linux)... I really dont know what. But even after a proven 4.4 billion dollar market (EDA industry market cap) for Linux based high-performance design tools, Autocad went after Mac. Knowing fully well that TCO for a Linux based system is far, far lower than a Mac based.
- wmil 16y agoIt's also possible that Apple offered to help them. If Apple has been putting together dev tools to help track down Windows dependencies. On the other hand Maya already runs on Linux and Mac OS X. So they may be using Maya numbers to calculate sales and difficulty porting. Since it's used for video work you'd expect more Mac sales.
- rbranson 16y agoMac is a more commercial software friendly platform. While Apple isn't quite as friendly as Microsoft, they're going to do a lot more to keep things stable and friendly for developers than the wild wild west that is graphics and/or GUI-intensive development on Linux.
- sandGorgon 16y agoMost commercial software for Linux is standardized for RHEL or UBuntu LTS platforms. I think stability is not the main reason - it may be perceived market or the graphics API problems that I was talking about (especially with third party drivers - nvidia and ati)