“A report from Desktop Engineering does indeed seem to indicate that SolidWorks Corporation is working on not just cloud computing based Mac support but a native SolidWorks for Apple’s popular Mac platform,” Frausto-Robledo reports. “Desktop Engineering reports that the 5000 plus attendees cheered loudly when SolidWorks CEO, Jeff Ray announced support for the Mac. ‘Clearly he hit a nerve,’ writes Desktop Engineering’s Kenneth Wong. ‘The spontaneous applause that erupted in the audience was louder and longer than the initial one he received when he first walked in.'”
Frausto-Robledo reports, “It is not clear yet when a native SolidWorks for the Mac will be ready, but based on the feedback in applause to Jeff Ray’s news it should be readily apparent that the demand for this is out there. And now that this news is out, what will Autodesk’s response be?”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Autodesk will likely sit there and do nothing, at least when it comes to AutoCAD which is what most Mac users want out of the company. Unfortunately, AutoCAD is so Windows-centrically spaghetti-coded that it’s beyond repair. A clean, ground up rewrite of AutoCAD for Mac OS X seems to be beyond Autodesk’s desire and/or capability, no matter how many surveys they run on the matter.
Best news of the day -BY FAR
I’m not a fan of autodesk, though i use Maya intensively on mac.
But, please do note that they did port Alias Studio to the mac.
I tried it and it SUCKS like hell. So Besides all the other smaller apps they ported, who knows what they will do.
I think they might even be working on it right now.
SolidWorks is solid. It’s one of the few reasons I keep Windows installed in Bootcamp.
I’ve been professionally using AutoCAD since R12. Scholastically, I started on R10 or R11, I don’t remember. Every iteration since R12 has been a Microsoftian endeavor to pump more useless functions into a bloated code base that very few people will ever use. I saw the writing on the wall when AutoCAD aligned themselves with Windows for R13. They were going with the easy money at the time. Now they are strapped to old code and a large (very large) but dying dinosaur.
If SolidWorks goes to Mac…PRO/E will be in trouble.
just my $0.02
Autodesk just can’t seem to do it. Too hampered by the ‘old ways’.
I have long purported this is a huge untapped market for CAD makers and have a large software proposal package I’ve tried to get someone to help me get started as a project and / or company.
Nobody wants to do all that work for free while trying to get started so I’ll either have to learn Objective C myself (from a non-programmer point here) or lament while somebody else swoops in on the idea.
Great news!!!!!!! This is huge.
Revit!
Doesn’t matter. AutoCAD blows! Keep the bloated POS on Windoze!
I remember (and had the misfortune to use) AutoCAD when there actually was a Mac version. It was so bad I’d guess the sold numbers in the hundreds (maybe it was dozens, it was that bad) — not thousands — of copies. Believe it or not, it was really the late ’80s DOS version of AutoCAD written to operate within a SINGLE window on the Mac.
It was the epitome of the concept:
a. Write a truly horrific, non-native Mac version.
b. Sell dozens of copies versus hundreds of thousands of copies of the Windows version.
c. Claim, based upon poor sales of a sh*t product that there is no Mac market.
d. Kill all development of a native Mac version.
This is AWESOME news!
Shame about Autodesk being so in bed with Microsoft. Their Inventor 3D modeling software is really a pleasure to use and would be a good fit on the Mac. It could truly benefit from Grand Central, too.
I learned AutoCAD 10 back in the stone ages. PC, of course. I was a Mac guy back then and was truly astonished at the brick-wall-like learning curve. When I got through it, I felt like a scene in Aliens where the female hispanic Marine was trapped in a ventilation shaft with an alien and had opened fire its damned face with her 9mm. What an utter abortion of a program.
AutoCAD is good for giving the program away near-free to private, two-year AA schools like DeVries so they can teach losers how to become draftsman. Real engineers use SolidWorks, ProE, or something else.
AutoCAD is crap. Why any Mac users would want it so bad is beyond me. It’s bloated and difficult to use. There are alternatives. I use Nemetschek’s Vectorworks. It works fine for me. It exports files to the latest AutoCAD DWG. format. My drawings are better looking than any AutoCAD hack’s and I can trade files with my AutoCAD using engineers without any problems, usually, unless they are still using ancient versions of AutoCAD. And those are the same type of user that doesn’t know what a PDF is, or how to make one.
AutoCAD is bloated, but some of us are inextricably tied to it by our industries. .DWG is the dominant format in the commercial construction industry, and there is not a Mac alternative that handles .DWG natively. Import/Export and other conversions make workflow and file management a nightmare, especially when the same drawing is edited multiple times by multiple groups.
I wish that there were another solution. I’ve tried just about all of them.
Actually, VectorWorks is the best CAD software for the Mac, and it has always been Mac native. It’s cross-platform, too.
There is a 3D drawing program called SketchUp available. There are two versions, One is SketchUp Pro 7 (about $500) and the other is SketchUp 7 (free). The pro version as a number of subset program that are not in the free, SketchUp 7 version. Go to their URL : http://sketchup.google.com/ for free trial, of both versions as well more information on the products.