The screenshot depicts Dassault Systèmes’ SolidWorks running on Mac OS X.
HardMac reports, “The software SolidWorks in its version 6.0, a competitor of ArchiCAD, will soon be available on Mac OS X.”
Full article, with screenshot, here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Fred Mertz” for the heads up.]
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Good thing AutoDesk has totally neglected Maya’s developpement and has been, long enough, a non-Mac friendly arrogant busyness.
Had a follow-up call from Solidwork just this afternoon after having visited their site yesterday… I asked about the news of Mac OS X porting… Of course he hadn’t heard of it and said it’s not in their plans at the moment…
lol… For what it’s worth…
I use ArchiCad every day, and it’s not a competitor to Solidworks at all. If anything Revit is ArchiCad’s competitor. Solidworks is more for modeling engine parts or MacBooks than buildings. Catia is what Frank Gehry uses. That’s more like ArchiCad. Is IPhoto a competitor to Photoshop?
Uhhhh…. guys, SolidWorks really isn’t a competitor to ArchiCAD.
Though both are “CAD” programs and both are used to model, they are two very different products (in both data structure and function) aimed at two very different markets. (engineering and architecture)
Competitors in SolidWorks market (on the mac) would be Punch’s ViaCAD and Shark and Ashlars Cobalt Xenon and Argon.
On the PC side it would compete with AutoCAD and ProE
Are there any good reporters left in the business, or are they all hacks? ArchiCAD is a great Mac/PC program for designing buildings. SolidWorks is a great program for designing products, like toothbrushes, cell phones, and other consumer products. The fact that SolidWorks does not run on Mac is the only reason I run VMware Fusion and windows. It would be great if SolidWorks came to the Mac OS, but this “reporter” can’t even get the basics right so I sure wouldn’t hold my breath.
“SolidWorks coming to Mac OS X?”
In other news, SolidWaste-Time Management for Plumbers is now available exclusively for Windows….(be sure to wipe your hard drive after downloading)
No mention of Nemetschek VectorWorks (MiniCAD)?
I agree to call ArchiCAD a competitor SolidWorks is like saying Schwinn is a competitor of Ferrari.
just my $0.02
I’m an Aerospace Engineer, and we use quite a bit of Dassault Systèmes’s applications, like CATIA and especially SolidWorks. This is certainly a very welcoming news for me.
However, the most powerful thing that may elude many who think that SolidWorks is merely another CAD program, is that it can model and resolve CFD analyses. That’s a powerful tool in the design of Airfoils, submarines, cars you name it. But they require SMPS, hence lots and lots of cores and CPUs.
In other words, Performance Cluster (and not the fail safe ones) is mostly an oxymoron in the Windows platform. Mac, on the other hand, besides being part of the *nix family, offer GrandCentral. This is huge, even bigger than SGI and many other Big Irons.
The biggest gift from Apple to the world will probably be GrandCentral, especially now that it’s open sourced. And yet, there’s not many programmers out there still to really take advantage of it. That’s the future, make no mistake, the very tipping point to an avalanche.
Cool, so now I can design an F1 car on my Macbook.
krquet;
Aircraft design is a special case (certification of airframe design tools and work flow) where there is, sadly, little opportunity for competition.
However, for product design I would strongly recommend that designers & engineers (who have a choice) take a close look at Punch’s Shark and/or Ashlar’s products. Far better in many cases than running windows based products in VM (in that you don’t have to run windows;-)
Altivec Guru,
VectorWorks is not a CSG modeler nor does it store an extended FP database, so it is very limited in most mechanical engineering applications (it is more a competitor to ArciCAD)
We are big UG NX users (wintel). Siemens talks big about NX7 now out for 10.5. I have seen nothing that is real!
Maybe i move to SolidWorks?
Dassault demonstrated a cloud-based version of SolidWorks on a Mac:
http://www.solidsmack.com/future-of-solidworks-on-the-mac-in-the-cloud/2010-02-01/#more-8397
@ krquet
I used Solidworks for a bit of FEA (I’m Aerospace structures so I don’t do much CFD) but I thought it was a bit weak for anything other than very simple “coloured pictures”. ANSYS and NASTRAN offered much more powerful and useful solutions for me.
Solidworks is a great CAD package though.
@me
Never used NASTRAN, but I love ANSYS, and it’s for structural, solids and mechanical analyses. It is not really comparable to CAD programs. Although you can design your models in CATIA (and SolidWorks) and then very carefully transfer it to ANSYS, life’s good that way, and so in that sense ANSYS and SolidWorks are more complimentary. It’s like comparing word with Excel.
And for CFD analysis, well, they are a huge deal. Lot’s of money involved where Air tunnels are not always the immediate next option. I use Gambit, Fluent etc. But the licensing and deployment can be pricey and tricky. SolidWorks may not be as powerful as a few other commercial ones out there that do the rendering and analyses parts separately, but it’s still good enough for smallish works and that alone is worth more than most of the CAD software out there combined, IMHO.
“Although you can design your models in CATIA (and SolidWorks) and then very carefully transfer it to ANSYS”
Key words are “very carefully”
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When I used ANSYS it was the Linux version. If you could figure out some way to get that working with OSX along with Solidworks that would make the Mac a viable option for engineering design.
What does Johnny Ives use?
Will some bright developer group PLEASE create a worthy and feature comparable replacement for the troublesome Quicken for Mac?? You have a great opportunity now because the new Quicken version is severely limited and a worthless update!
http://www.revaplastics.com will be first in line to order 10 seats of SW when available on Mac.
What we showed on Monday was some new technology that’s currently running in our labs. It’s a cloud-based solution that will allow our software to run via browser on most any device, or possibly some kind of thin-client application. There’s no timeline for deployment, and there are still no plans to port the current version of SolidWorks to the Mac OS. You can see my interview with our CTO here on our blog http://blogs.solidworks.com/solidworksblog/2010/02/solidworks-world-2010-day-1-general-session.html
Matt / SolidWorks
Best news i’ve heard in the last month.
(and no, this is not a flippant remark. I’m dead serious.)