Speculation

Yesterday I mentioned that Shaan Hurley of Autodesk disclosed details of AutoCAD 2009. Shaan left this comment:

"It is unfortunate that some feel I cannot speak about anything that might or might not be future of UI and CAD in the context of the article about the past of Autodesk and AutoCAD. Should I leave speculation only to others, nah."

According to the Oxford dictionary, "speculate" is a verb which means "to form a theory or conjecture without firm evidence". So you cannot speculate on something you already know. At SYCODE, we are using an AutoCAD 2009 Beta. I guess Shaan is using the same at Autodesk. Shaan and I can do a lot of things, but speculation is certainly not one of them.

Unless Autodesk is using another dictionary.

AutoCAD 2009 - Shaan Spills The Beans

I sometimes wonder why companies make such a big hue and cry about their Non Disclosure Agreements. Maybe because they think that keeping something secret and then leaking it out makes it more interesting than making it public to begin with.

SYCODE is a member of the Autodesk Developer Network and we are given early access to products in development, which is a good thing. We are also bound by an NDA that keeps us from opening our traps. And then I read Shaan Hurley's interview in AUGIWorld Magazine wherein he (very tactfully) gives a "sneek peek" at the next version of AutoCAD.

"An interesting idea might be a future UI enhancement to take advantage of new operating systems and offer more productivity. Perhaps users would like an expansion of the Microstation DGN format to include V7 versions...[snip]... What would you say to a kind of macro that would eliminate the need to write customization for small repetitive tasks? Imagine programming without any code! You would be recording and then playing back, but not that simple. It would allow you to insert pause for input, not merely brainless macro recorder."

More DRX Noise

Another IntelliCAD built using the new DRX SDK has surfaced. The DRX SDK is the OpenDesign Alliance's clone of Autodesk's ObjectARX SDK. This time it is ZWCAD from China with the new version of their AutoCAD clone known as ZWCAD 2008.

And they even included the DRX SDK along with the software. So if you want to write DRX plug-ins you do not need to join the OpenDesign Alliance to get the DRX SDK.

Got Conned? Report it and Earn $500

The Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA) is offerring $500 to anyone who unwittingly purchased pirated software from sites like eBay and who report it to them.

According to the SIIA, they are doing this because "these sites are unwilling to take the actions necessary to reduce the high-volume software piracy taking place on their sites", something which I have said here on more than one occassion.

Thanks to a whistleblower, the SIIA has already filed a lawsuit against Fox Rothschild, a prestigious law firm which is alledged to have used pirated software from Adobe, Corel, Sonic Solutions and Symantec.

Details here.

Finnish Company Fined

A Russian court has fined a Finnish company, Onninen, for using pirated software in their Russian location. The software includes AutoCAD 2004, Windows 2000 Professional and Microsoft Office Professional 2003.

Incidently, Onninen had a net sales of 1.45 billion Euros in 2006 and one of their values reads, "We work together with customers, take responsibility and keep our promises".

Details here.

T-FLEX - First Fiddle

I had mentioned T-FLEX Parametric CAD earlier and a reader wanted to know when I would review the software. I write software, not reviews, for a living. So as I fiddle around with T-FLEX I shall post stuff about the software that interests me.

On a recent business trip to Mumbai ("Mumbai Nightmares") I met the Indian distributor of T-FLEX. He gave me the not-yet-released version 11 of T-FLEX. We didn't have the time for a full fledged demo, which was a good thing, because I am the kind of person who likes to learn software on my own. I know its the hard way out, but I usually get a better feeling of how intuitive a product is and how easily I can get access to help when required.

T-FLEX is pretty much like any other parametric solid modeler but does a few things differently. I get the feeling that the T-FLEX user interface has been designed keeping AutoCAD users in mind. For example, to create a revolve feature, create the profile as you would in a 2D environment. Then before drawing the axis set the line type to "Center" and hit "Revolve". Bang! You have your revolve feature. This thing actually has an AutoCAD style toolbar with layers, line types, colors, etc. in the part environment itself. The figure below shows a closed profile and the center line. The dashed construction can be easily and quickly created before you start the sketch, thanks to a very intuitive set of tools to create them.

T-FLEX is built over the Parasolid 19 modeling kernel, the latest version. So the actual solid modeling should be the best there is. I picked this image from their help file which shows that the Y-blend function supports the blend creation although a small face is in the way.

I am sure there are a lot of nice things in T-FLEX, but I doubt anything beats this next feature. They call it "Parametrization". If you thought that parametrics makes a model intelligent, then parametrization is going to make it a genius. As in normal parametric modeling, as you peform operations on your model they are recorded in the history tree. These parameters have values. A fillet will have a radius, a hole will have a diameter, etc. In T-FLEX you can store these parameters as variables, say "R" for a fillet radius and "D" for a hole diameter. What's more, these variables can be driven by mathematical expressions and can even be dependent on other parameters and variables. For example, fillet radius "R" can be set to twice hole diameter "D". Finally, you can invoke something known as a Variable Editor (basically a dialog box which lists all the variables in the model), change their values and the model will be updated.

So using parametrization, you can create a variable driven model which can be used as a base for other variants of the model. You can even use this technique to automatically optimize your model. I haven't reached there yet. So I will leave that for "T-FLEX - Second Fiddle".

So can all this whiz bang stuff handle large assemblies? That's precisely what I asked the distributor. He replied that a Russian aircract engine manufacturer had purchased 98 licenses of T-FLEX and was using it to design their aircraft engines.

Looks like I will be fiddling around with this piece of work for a while.

Still Stuck in the Past

CADopia's webmaster must be hibernating. Today they released version 8 of their software and their product page still shows the features and box shots of version 6.

Somebody please wake him up!

Paper Rapid Prototyping

I have the habit of keeping an ear on the happennings in the Rapid Prototyping industry because SYCODE offers quite a few products for that industry. Today my attention was drawn to a company called Mcor Technologies which offers a 3D printer that creates models from office paper. Yes, normal A4/Letter sized paper. They call it Paper Rapid Prototyping wherein sheets of paper are glued together and then weeded to result in a 3D part. Literrally 3D printing on good old 2D paper!

The product is called Mcor Matrix and is priced at 18,900 EUR ($27,760) with an annual maintenance of 1,500 EUR ($2,200).

I guess people buying one of these will have no need for a paper shredder.

T-FLEX Parametric CAD

Apparently, there a Russian company called Top Systems which develops and sells a full blown 3D Parametric CAD and 2D Drafting system, including CAM, motion simulation, FEA and an SQL based PDM system. And I never heard about them till yesterday. I don't believe I have been living under a stone these past few years, but things like these give me a feeling that I have.

They call their product "T-FLEX Parametric CAD" and it has been around for quite a while. They are going to release version 11 soon. A Google search for "T-FLEX" didn't yield much. TenLinks has just three press releases from them, the last one being more than six months old. A search for "T-FLEX" in Ralph Grabowski's blog shows just one entry, and that too as a comment made by Evan Yares two years ago. And to top it off, the address listed at their web site is a PO Box address. I know some companies want to keep a low profile. But these guys seem to be taking it to the extreme.

According to their web site, "Current and potential customers most generally compare the features of T-FLEX against the features of SolidWorks, Inventor, Solid Edge, UGS NX, Catia, Pro/ENGINEER." T-FLEX is built using the Parasolid kernel licensed from UGS (now Siemens). So their software should be a pretty powerful modeler at a minimum.

I was enlightened about their existence by their Indian distributor who wanted to know whether I was interested in reselling T-FLEX in my area. I already have a tough time selling my own software. I'm not sure I want to try selling someone else's, especially when it costs about $4500 a license and when I haven't noticed it in all these years.

Attack of the Clones - Postponed

I am getting indications from IntelliCAD Technology Consortium (ITC) members that the attack of the clones, which I predicted to start by beginning 2008, will be postponed to the end of 2008 or early 2009. The main application framework has been implemented and is currently being tested. However, the ITC members will need more time to port their existing customizations and extensions and then test them before finally releasing their new IntelliCADs.

Looks like we will have to wait for a while for the fireworks to begin.

SolidWorks 2008 Woes

I like it when Matt Lombard is pissed. Because when he is pissed, he takes it out on his keyboard which results in a long and interesting post on his blog. His post describes the reasons why a majority of SolidWorks users are not upgrading to SolidWorks 2008.

It's not only users who are unhappy with the revamping that has happenned in SolidWorks 2008. Developers like us have our own set of complaints as well. Up untill SolidWorks 2007, add-ins developed for earlier versions of SolidWorks (2001, when we first started writing add-ins) could be loaded and used without a problem. Every year, when a new version of SolidWorks was released, we had to do minor tweaks to our code to make it work with previous and the latest version, test it and release the add-in.

But with SolidWorks 2008, all hell broke loose. They used a new development environment from Microsoft, most probably to arrive at the whiz bang GUI among other things, and our good old add-ins started crashing. An announcement from SolidWorks read as follows:

"SolidWorks 2008 will block the loading of 3rd party SolidWorks add-ins created using the old style MFC 4.2 extension DLL architecture. Testing of SolidWorks 2008 has revealed severe instability with add-ins created using this architecture ...... This will affect any Solution Partner or internally developed add-in products using MFC 4.2 extension DLL architecture when used in conjunction with SolidWorks 2008. This does not affect SolidWorks 2007 and earlier releases."

Little wonder that SolidWorks users are still clinging on to 2007. Developers are not too keen on spending their resources to rewrite their SolidWorks add-ins from ground up to suit the 2008 architecture and users are not pestering them to do so because not many are using 2008 in the first place.

I submitted a Service Request to SolidWorks that would make it easier for developers to port their code to the new architecture, instead of rewriting everything. This was three months ago. The last time I checked, the status of my SR was "Under review (Future Release)", inspite of them setting the "Customer Impact" to "High". I am now beginning to get a sinking feeling that what I asked in my SR is technically impossible, thanks to Microsoft and their ways of forcing everyone to use their latest stuff.

At the moment the 3D Parametric CAD market is poised very delicately. Now would be the worst time to piss off customers.

Ironically, today SYCODE released four new AutoCAD 3D interoperability add-ins for SolidWorks and none of them work with SolidWorks 2008.

PDF To Wear The ISO Hat

Adobe's PDF is well on its way to officially becoming an ISO standard. The ISO ballot for PDF 1.7 was passed by a vote of 13 to 1. France was the lone country that voted against it.

Adobe is supposed to have converted the PDF 1.7 Reference into an ISO Draft by removing all Adobe and Acrobat specific information. Once PDF becomes an ISO standard, Adobe will be just one of many implementors of that standard. Adobe expects to participate on the ISO committees determining changes that should be included in a revised standard.

I know of some companies that use the word "standard" a lot and could learn a thing or two from this.

SpaceClaim Changing Direction - Finally

If you look closely, you can sometimes get a sense of a company's direction by reading their press releases, especially the last part where they speak about themselves - who they are and what they do. Incidently, that's the part which gets ignored most of the time. Of late, my attention has been drawn to the "About SpaceClaim" section of the SpaceClaim press releases, where I have made some interesting observations.

Their November 15th press release, like the ones before, described SpaceClaim as "a breakthrough CAD-neutral modification solution that enhances engineers’ productivity by empowering them to contribute to, consume, and share mechanical designs in a 3D digital form." This is in line with their original marketing strategy of portraying their software as a "modification" tool.

In their November 27th press release they replaced the word "modification" with "design". And in yesterday's press release they added the word "create". So now it reads, "SpaceClaim provides a breakthrough 3D design solution that enhances engineers’ productivity by empowering them to create, contribute to, and share mechanical designs in a 3D digital form".

In one of my first articles about them ("SpaceClaim - Real or Marketing Strategy?"), I wondered whether this "modification" yarn was more of a back-door entry strategy. Something which has worked wonders for McNeel. McNeel has used the "companion" word very well to convince people to use Rhinoceros along with their main CAD system. They could do that because they priced Rhino like a companion product. With SpaceClaim priced as much as SolidWorks ("Is SpaceClaim Overpriced?"), one cannot expect to get the same results.

SpaceClaim has been trying to woo the 4 million non-CAD users by offering them a full featured CAD system for a price of a full featured CAD system when they do not need a full featured CAD system. And then they start by not offerring a trial but rather by giving online demos to all 4 million of them. And finally they allow customers to only rent the software, not purchase it. I cannot think of anything more that could be done wrong.

We are now witnessing SpaceClaim trying to scramble out of the hole they got themselves into. They recently started offering a trial download. They are now allowing people to buy the software, not only rent it. And they have cut their prices in half in the name of a promotion. And most importantly, they are finally telling people that their software can also "create" designs, not only "modify" them.

In a conversation the other day, someone asked me, "You keep criticizing SpaceClaim's business plan. What would you do if you were in their place?". Well, if Mike Payne allowed me to use his office for a day I would fire the person who utterred the word "modification" in my presence. I would have Development come up with a stripped down version of the software and have Marketing sell it to the 4 million non-CAD users at under $1000. I would then get Marketing brainwashed and have them start maketing SpaceClaim Professional as the "First Open 3D Solid Modeling System" and price it in direct competition with SolidWorks, Solid Edge and Inventor. The fact that SpaceClaim does not bind it's users with proprietary file formats is an excellent selling point and is something which has not been given enough attention. And finally I would get a Presidential Decree to ensure that my instructions are not revoked by Mike Payne the following morning and then leave the building.

After getting kicked out of Autodesk University, SpaceClaim should have learnt that they cannot play the "we love everyone and everyone loves us" game anymore. If they want to succeed, they should sharpen their swords, put on their armor and step into the arena. Stop playing politics while trying to sneek in from the back door. It doesn't work that way.

There are many AutoCAD 2D users wanting to make the switch to 3D. SolidWorks is doing a good job in offering free seats of IntelliCAD along with their software to help these people across. Siemens is giving their Solid Edge 2D for free. That's where the real money is and SpaceClaim does not appear to be interested in these people at all. They have been busy trying to sell sledgehammers to carpenters who just want to drive nails into wood, while telling construction workers that their sledgehammers are pretty good at driving nails into wood. Basically, they are selling the right product to the wrong people.

It's good to know that SpaceClaim is changing direction. A direction that should take it's product to the level of a mid-range CAD system, a place it rightfully deserves.