SpaceClaim Professional - SketchUp on Steroids

I just got off a GoToMeeting with SpaceClaim. They gave me a short and sweet presentation and then a demo of the product. And now I cannot wait to get my hands on that piece of software.

If you are reading this I guess you have already used SketchUp. To put it simply, SpaceClaim is SketchUp on steroids - very powerful steroids. Powerful because in SketchUp you pushed and pulled planar surfaces (basically polygons) to create your objects. Here you push and pull actual NURBS surfaces to get solid B-rep models, all in real time. It's truly amazing.

In an earlier article, I had wondered whether SpaceClaim's strategy of targeting the "extended development team" was actually a back door entry plan to get to the "product designers". I am now totally convinced that this is the case. There is little chance that a designer will want to go back to his strictly parametric solid modeler after he has tried SpaceClaim Professional.

Once in a while comes along a product that changes the way people do things. SpaceClaim Professional is one such product. I just wished they had a trial that I could download.

Thoughts on Subscription

In todays upFront.eZine newsletter, Ralph Grabowski mentions a reader who wrote this to him regarding AutoCAD 2008:

"Amazingly my company is going to go to 2008. They have been on subscription, but only running 2005. No one bothered to install 2006 or 2007 even though they paid all of that money for subscription."

This company is either too rich or too stupid or both. Or this may be a perfect example of how Autodesk's carefully crafted subscription policy works for them.

There are people like us who go out of our way to ensure that our customers spend wisely. And then there are people like these who make me wonder whether it is worth taking all that trouble.