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The future of AutoCAD

mkirklions 8y ago
IMO that sounds like one of the worst management decisions Ive ever heard. You know what AutoCAD needs? It needs to work on Apple. I have never seen an Apple computer at any company Ive worked at. Have a team spend multiple years working on cross compatibility instead of automation in 2018? This sounds like someone in management saw that 10% of computers are apple and wants that market share. Whoever made this decision was not a designer.
- unrealchild 8y ago
  AutoCAD has a MacOS build, last I checked.
- rurban 8y ago
  AutoCAD works fine on my Macbook Air, native. Even in a trial version for free. Since about r2013
  - 2_listerine_pls 8y ago
    Still a worse version.
    - rurban 8y ago
      Nope, everything is fine. Same version as on Windows. I prefer FreeCAD though. More functionality, better BIM and better parametric constraints.
- bryanlarsen 8y ago
  According to the article it was the port to Mac that made the web port possible. Once they had nice portable code paid for by the Apple porting effort they then used it for web assembly too. I really doubt that creating the portable code just for web assembly would ever have been justified.
  - mkirklions 8y ago
    This seems like its going to be more limiting than anything. For basic apps, cross platform is needed. For AutoCAD you dont casually buy it. You probably knew weeks or months in advanced you would need AutoCAD. You have the infrastructure or are planning to buy it. What designers need is features and automation, not web/apple access. I only imagine that having a web app and cross platform capabilities is going to mean updates/new features take more manpower, more time, and are limited by conflicts.
    - bryanlarsen 8y ago
      They appear to be using the new code in Windows too. I suspect that it's now a lot faster to do updates and new features because they've rewritten using modern techniques rather than a mish-mash of code accumulated over the last 35! years.
      - mkirklions 8y ago
        fair point :)
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
tempodox 8y ago
This is so sad. Everything gets transformed into gigabytes of steaming JavaScript. Soon our computers won't have a CPU because it's being remotely emulated in JS.
- sirjaz 8y ago
  JavaScript is taking over because that is all they teach now a days at these code bootcamps. Once webassembly gets off the ground javascript will die, but we need to get back to native client software. The web was never meant to handle this.
  - camwest 8y ago
    Hi! I’m the tech lead on AutoCAD web. The engine is C++ which is compiled to Web Assembly, our core team doesn’t actually work in JavaScript day to day. The browsers are doing a really good job making this a possibility today.
    - sirjaz 8y ago
      The problem is the reliance on the browser. If we look at the mobile market for one, you could do the same thing, but people still want native apps since they are more responsive, lower memory and cpu usage etc …. With web assembly all you are doing is adding more complexity. Keeping things native is preferred.
      - microcolonel 8y ago
        Note that the native AutoCAD doesn't seem to be going anywhere.
        bitL 8y ago
        For now. I guess management is not doing it for fun but to explore profitability and sustainability of this approach. If it works for them, web version might be the only one that gets distributed. We already saw in Adobe how "cloud" is pushed everywhere even if it makes zero sense from the product point of view (uploading a single RAW file from a top-end camera to cloud takes ages and benefit is nearly zero), but makes super sense from economical standpoint.
bhouston 8y ago
Dupe of: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17031364 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17031364
morrbo 8y ago
CAD stuff is such a nightmare. Attempting to navigate the mixture of poorly/undocumented file formats (AutoCAD, as a perfect example) is a massive pain. Attempting to get any form of generic viewer in the browser, or convert the files from one format to a common format is nearly non existent. This is just for 2D, don't even get me started on the clusterfuck which is 3D. AutoCAD have a "solution" which is just to use their cloud platform...because that's what everyone wants, right? To upload their most sensitive drawings to a US based company's servers, somewhere. We've ended up using several hacks around link removed' C# implementation, which seems to be one of the few tools in this space which you can programatically interact with. If i have the opportunity to say one thing directly to the AutoCAD/AutoDesk guys, please, God, allow some form of offline SDK, and clarify your incredibly confusing, hard to navigate website, and expensive and lackluster offerings. All I want is a web based DWG/DXF viewer, which i can load files into from a (java or C#) stream, no cloud/SaaS nonsense, and works well. Apologies for the rant.
- mockindignant 8y ago
  This may be of interest to you, I saw it on here a week or two ago: https://products.aspose.com/cad https://products.aspose.com/cad Disclaimer: I have never used this, and I am not sure it does what you want but I thought it might be relevant to your interests. I have used some of Aspose‘s other tools and they worked quite well, FWIW.
  - morrbo 8y ago
    Thanks for the suggestion, but i can say with a firm authority, that the Apose suite of everything is absolutely horrible. Their Word/Office offerings, and their CAD stuff just don't work. Their marketing team, however, are absolutely brilliant (i'm not accusing you of being a marketer, just that their products are usually the number one result whenever you search for anything, their site design is great, as are their Q&A/forums). Their products are super slow (in part due to the huge amounts of obfuscation and licensing) and have some pretty horrible bugs and disparate features. I'll continue having a pipe dream of some true viewer. If i wasn't so busy with work at the moment i'd love to make an open source dwg/dxf viewer similar to what the great guys at openjscad (https://openjscad.org https://openjscad.org) are doing.
andyjohnson0 8y ago
i have almost zero knowledge of CAD, so can anyone comment on whether being able to run an industrial-strength CAD application inside a web browser is something that people want? What use cases are driving this massive effort?
- paulryanrogers 8y ago
  Dabbled in CAD in school and shadowed a mechanical engineer in the late 90s. From what I saw some CAD users only need basic drawings with a few hundred or thousand lines. Even for modeling in 3D the games I was playing and modeling for looked more complex. Maybe it's different today or in certain industries.
- bhouston 8y ago
  Industrial CAD for cars and planes is CATIA, and that isn't AutoCAD. It uses too much memory to fit in a browser except as a remote desktop type application. AutoCAD, which is architectural CAD, has been in flash (AutoCAD WS) for more than 6 years so if flash can handle it, WebAssembly can handle it. OnShape is mechanical CAD has been pretty successful in pure JavaScript in the browser: https://onshape.com https://onshape.com SolidWorks is coming to the browser soon I understand as well.
  - LeifCarrotson 8y ago
    AutoCAD is not just the Autocad Architectural product. That may be the most dominant niche, but they produce most of the other CAD tools as well. AutoCAD Electrical is huge for industrial controls work - it's hard to say, IMO, whether architectural or electrical AutoCAD is more dominant in its field. Other products are used for PCB design, but for any discrete wires in machines, buildings, etc. it's almost universally AutoCAD. Solidworks doesn't even have a product. And Autocad Electrical is ideal for low-powered browser work, because it's just 2D line drawings with an occasional component wireframe. They also produce Autocad Inventor (and Fusion 360), which are mechanical CAD packages. Inventor is definitely a contender with Solidworks, CATIA, Pro-E, and other mechanical CAD. A car's sheet metal may have 80% probability to be designed in CATIA, but the press that forms it has (pulling numbers out of a hat) a 20% chance to be modeled in AutoCAD Inventor, a 90% chance to be wired to an AutoCAD Electrical schematic, and a 95% chance to be located in a building blueprinted with AutoCAD Architectural.
baybal2 8y ago
>There are still significant gaps between the browser-based version of AutoCAD and its desktop-based sibling – 3D being a prime example – but these gaps will reduce, over time. It will also be much easier for the AutoCAD team to build new features that work across the range of AutoCAD’s platforms. They are heading into the abyss. They will never ever reach a feature and experience parity as JS and Web platform was and is perpetually flawed. And those flaws are barely of technical nature. The root cause are the people who define the "Web platform" and who they are. Apple's former CEO was smart enough to see that through and do a hard U-turn while the company was still able to do so.
- thanatropism 8y ago
  We never reached feature parity with Lisp machines either. Worse is better.
  - pjmlp 8y ago
    I look at ChromeOS as the lost opportunity to have created something similar to a Smalltalk-like environment, using Dartium.
imgabe 8y ago
Wow, hopefully if it becomes a webapp they can charge less than $5k - $10k per seat. Haha, probably not.
Alyosha_ 8y ago
Great, one more app that we can rent forever.

IMO that sounds like one of the worst management decisions Ive ever heard. You know what AutoCAD needs? It needs to work on Apple. I have never seen an Apple computer at any company Ive worked at. Have a team spend multiple years working on cross compatibility instead of automation in 2018? This sounds like someone in management saw that 10% of computers are apple and wants that market share. Whoever made this decision was not a designer.

unrealchild 8y ago
AutoCAD has a MacOS build, last I checked.
rurban 8y ago
AutoCAD works fine on my Macbook Air, native. Even in a trial version for free. Since about r2013
- 2_listerine_pls 8y ago
  Still a worse version.
  - rurban 8y ago
    Nope, everything is fine. Same version as on Windows. I prefer FreeCAD though. More functionality, better BIM and better parametric constraints.
bryanlarsen 8y ago
According to the article it was the port to Mac that made the web port possible. Once they had nice portable code paid for by the Apple porting effort they then used it for web assembly too. I really doubt that creating the portable code just for web assembly would ever have been justified.
- mkirklions 8y ago
  This seems like its going to be more limiting than anything. For basic apps, cross platform is needed. For AutoCAD you dont casually buy it. You probably knew weeks or months in advanced you would need AutoCAD. You have the infrastructure or are planning to buy it. What designers need is features and automation, not web/apple access. I only imagine that having a web app and cross platform capabilities is going to mean updates/new features take more manpower, more time, and are limited by conflicts.
  - bryanlarsen 8y ago
    They appear to be using the new code in Windows too. I suspect that it's now a lot faster to do updates and new features because they've rewritten using modern techniques rather than a mish-mash of code accumulated over the last 35! years.
    - mkirklions 8y ago
      fair point :)
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]

tempodox 8y ago

This is so sad. Everything gets transformed into gigabytes of steaming JavaScript. Soon our computers won't have a CPU because it's being remotely emulated in JS.

sirjaz 8y ago
JavaScript is taking over because that is all they teach now a days at these code bootcamps. Once webassembly gets off the ground javascript will die, but we need to get back to native client software. The web was never meant to handle this.
- camwest 8y ago
  Hi! I’m the tech lead on AutoCAD web. The engine is C++ which is compiled to Web Assembly, our core team doesn’t actually work in JavaScript day to day. The browsers are doing a really good job making this a possibility today.
  - sirjaz 8y ago
    The problem is the reliance on the browser. If we look at the mobile market for one, you could do the same thing, but people still want native apps since they are more responsive, lower memory and cpu usage etc …. With web assembly all you are doing is adding more complexity. Keeping things native is preferred.
    - microcolonel 8y ago
      Note that the native AutoCAD doesn't seem to be going anywhere.
      - bitL 8y ago
        For now. I guess management is not doing it for fun but to explore profitability and sustainability of this approach. If it works for them, web version might be the only one that gets distributed. We already saw in Adobe how "cloud" is pushed everywhere even if it makes zero sense from the product point of view (uploading a single RAW file from a top-end camera to cloud takes ages and benefit is nearly zero), but makes super sense from economical standpoint.

bhouston 8y ago

Dupe of: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17031364 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17031364

morrbo 8y ago

CAD stuff is such a nightmare. Attempting to navigate the mixture of poorly/undocumented file formats (AutoCAD, as a perfect example) is a massive pain. Attempting to get any form of generic viewer in the browser, or convert the files from one format to a common format is nearly non existent. This is just for 2D, don't even get me started on the clusterfuck which is 3D. AutoCAD have a "solution" which is just to use their cloud platform...because that's what everyone wants, right? To upload their most sensitive drawings to a US based company's servers, somewhere. We've ended up using several hacks around link removed' C# implementation, which seems to be one of the few tools in this space which you can programatically interact with. If i have the opportunity to say one thing directly to the AutoCAD/AutoDesk guys, please, God, allow some form of offline SDK, and clarify your incredibly confusing, hard to navigate website, and expensive and lackluster offerings. All I want is a web based DWG/DXF viewer, which i can load files into from a (java or C#) stream, no cloud/SaaS nonsense, and works well. Apologies for the rant.

mockindignant 8y ago
This may be of interest to you, I saw it on here a week or two ago: https://products.aspose.com/cad https://products.aspose.com/cad Disclaimer: I have never used this, and I am not sure it does what you want but I thought it might be relevant to your interests. I have used some of Aspose‘s other tools and they worked quite well, FWIW.
- morrbo 8y ago
  Thanks for the suggestion, but i can say with a firm authority, that the Apose suite of everything is absolutely horrible. Their Word/Office offerings, and their CAD stuff just don't work. Their marketing team, however, are absolutely brilliant (i'm not accusing you of being a marketer, just that their products are usually the number one result whenever you search for anything, their site design is great, as are their Q&A/forums). Their products are super slow (in part due to the huge amounts of obfuscation and licensing) and have some pretty horrible bugs and disparate features. I'll continue having a pipe dream of some true viewer. If i wasn't so busy with work at the moment i'd love to make an open source dwg/dxf viewer similar to what the great guys at openjscad (https://openjscad.org https://openjscad.org) are doing.

andyjohnson0 8y ago

i have almost zero knowledge of CAD, so can anyone comment on whether being able to run an industrial-strength CAD application inside a web browser is something that people want? What use cases are driving this massive effort?

paulryanrogers 8y ago
Dabbled in CAD in school and shadowed a mechanical engineer in the late 90s. From what I saw some CAD users only need basic drawings with a few hundred or thousand lines. Even for modeling in 3D the games I was playing and modeling for looked more complex. Maybe it's different today or in certain industries.
bhouston 8y ago
Industrial CAD for cars and planes is CATIA, and that isn't AutoCAD. It uses too much memory to fit in a browser except as a remote desktop type application. AutoCAD, which is architectural CAD, has been in flash (AutoCAD WS) for more than 6 years so if flash can handle it, WebAssembly can handle it. OnShape is mechanical CAD has been pretty successful in pure JavaScript in the browser: https://onshape.com https://onshape.com SolidWorks is coming to the browser soon I understand as well.
- LeifCarrotson 8y ago
  AutoCAD is not just the Autocad Architectural product. That may be the most dominant niche, but they produce most of the other CAD tools as well. AutoCAD Electrical is huge for industrial controls work - it's hard to say, IMO, whether architectural or electrical AutoCAD is more dominant in its field. Other products are used for PCB design, but for any discrete wires in machines, buildings, etc. it's almost universally AutoCAD. Solidworks doesn't even have a product. And Autocad Electrical is ideal for low-powered browser work, because it's just 2D line drawings with an occasional component wireframe. They also produce Autocad Inventor (and Fusion 360), which are mechanical CAD packages. Inventor is definitely a contender with Solidworks, CATIA, Pro-E, and other mechanical CAD. A car's sheet metal may have 80% probability to be designed in CATIA, but the press that forms it has (pulling numbers out of a hat) a 20% chance to be modeled in AutoCAD Inventor, a 90% chance to be wired to an AutoCAD Electrical schematic, and a 95% chance to be located in a building blueprinted with AutoCAD Architectural.

baybal2 8y ago

>There are still significant gaps between the browser-based version of AutoCAD and its desktop-based sibling – 3D being a prime example – but these gaps will reduce, over time. It will also be much easier for the AutoCAD team to build new features that work across the range of AutoCAD’s platforms. They are heading into the abyss. They will never ever reach a feature and experience parity as JS and Web platform was and is perpetually flawed. And those flaws are barely of technical nature. The root cause are the people who define the "Web platform" and who they are. Apple's former CEO was smart enough to see that through and do a hard U-turn while the company was still able to do so.

thanatropism 8y ago
We never reached feature parity with Lisp machines either. Worse is better.
- pjmlp 8y ago
  I look at ChromeOS as the lost opportunity to have created something similar to a Smalltalk-like environment, using Dartium.

imgabe 8y ago

Wow, hopefully if it becomes a webapp they can charge less than $5k - $10k per seat. Haha, probably not.

Alyosha_ 8y ago

Great, one more app that we can rent forever.