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When Alibre recently announced a permanent reduction of Alibre Design Standard to $97, they also sweetened the deal by including Alibre Translate, a data exchange add-on that uses technology provided by French company Datakit. The add-on lets Alibre Design import CATIA V5, Pro/ENGINEER, Inventor, Parasolid and Solid Edge files and export SolidWorks files. Now that is a lot of high-end data exchange technology.

At SYCODE, we have been using Datakit’s technologies in our products for a while now and I can tell you from personal experience that their stuff is (1) very good, and (2) very expensive. Just to give you an idea, at NOVEDGE no Datakit product that reads CATIA V5 files is priced below $2,500. That’s 25 times the cost of Alibre Design Standard as it is priced today. So I was surprised to learn that Alibre Translate, which reads CATIA V5 files besides other formats I listed above, was being given with the $97 Alibre Design Standard.

Not any more. Yesterday Alibre CEO Paul Grayson announced on the Alibre blog that Alibre Translate would no longer be shipped with the $97 Alibre Design Standard. As Paul put it, “due to some new requirements by a partner, which are beyond our control“. However, Alibre Translate will continue to be shipped with the Professional and Expert versions of Alibre Design. It will also be shipped for a couple of more weeks in Standard. So if you want some high-end data exchange functionality for $97 you need to act soon.

Dassault Systemes’s definition of 3D XML states that it is “a universal lightweight XML-based format for quick and easy sharing of 3D data“. If you have dabbled a little in HTML and XML you might think that all XML-based files can be opened in a text editor, have HTML like tags and look something like this:

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=’UTF-8′?>
<painting>
<img src=”madonna.jpg” alt=’Foligno Madonna, by Raphael’/>
<caption>This is Raphael’s “Foligno” Madonna, painted in
<date>1511</date>-<date>1512</date>.
</caption>
</painting>

I took this example from Wikipedia’s XML page. The 3D XML file format is a bit different. A 3D XML file is actually a ZIP file containing other files. To see this for yourself, simply rename a .3dxml file to .zip, open it in WinZip or similar and extract the contents into a folder. You may be surprised to find one or more files with a .3dxml extension. These are actual text XML files (like the one I listed above) and the reason why Dassault Systemes can call 3D XML a “XML-based” format.

You will also find one or more .3DRep files, one for each object in the 3D model. These 3DRep files are quite interesting because they can either be text XML files containing the tessellation of the objects in the model or proprietary CATIA V5 files, possibly a CATIA Graphics (CGR) file or some variant. However, I don’t believe 3D XML file can contain the NURBS model which is the actual intellectual property. That’s why Dassault Systemes describes it as a lightweight format. If anyone can shed some light on this please leave a comment.

Here is a news alert. Ashlar-Vellum’s March Madness Sale is ending tomorrow. They are offering a 20% discount on new licenses and upgrades to v8 of Cobalt, Xenon, Argon or Graphite.

If you have 12 minutes to spare I suggest you take a look at this video. Ashlar rounded up seven designers from around the world who use Cobalt and SolidWorks and asked them to speak about modeling techniques in both programs. One of the designers is Kevin Quigley from Quigley Design, a frequent commenter on this blog.

By Matt Clark

But first a note from the Editor. Yeah, that’s me – Deelip. Matt Clark is an avid reader of this blog and finds it “informative and interesting”. Last year he left a job as a SolidWorks Support Technician at the VAR level for over six years. He has used the first generation iPhone and is currently using the iPhone 3G with the OS version 3.1.3. He has never used any other smartphones. He also uses a MacBook Pro with Mac OS X 10.6.2 and a Dell Precision M90 with XP Pro SP3.0. Matt is also a part-time computer science student.

Matt read my post “Is the iPhone an Idiot Phone?” and wanted to offer a counter view. I must say it is pretty interesting. Read on.

I recently read your blog post, “Is the iPhone an Idiot Phone?”  Most of your concerns were related to functionality. I made a list below of the points and concerns you made along with my comments.

1) Speed Dial – The iPhone has a speed dial.  It is the Contacts “Favorites”.  After adding some phone numbers to this list, you can access it by ensuring you are logged into the phone, quickly double-click the “Home” button, touch the contact you wish to call, and the call is placed. It is really quick. I ensured this was also an option on the first generation iPhone.

2) Attaching Multiple Pictures to an Email – This is possible. While viewing a photo album, select the button at the bottom of the screen, select the photos you wish to send, select the “Share” option, and you are able to attach them to an email or MMS. I ensured this was also an option on the first generation iPhone (except there is no MMS option).

3) Multitasking – It is not really fair to say the iPhone does no multitasking. If by multitasking you mean the ability to keep multiple windows open at one time, then the iPhone will not do this. However, if you mean the ability to run more than one application at a time, the iPhone will do this with some apps. You can run the Phone app or the iTunes app while working in another app. Also, your email will continue to be pushed to your phone and you will receive notifications while working in other apps. It has also been my experience that if one app needs to access info from another app, it will automatically do this behind the scenes without having to have both app windows open at the same time. Therefore, I think we can say the iPhone is at least a semi-multitasker. However, because you can easily copy info from one app and paste it into another, and because it is very quick to close one app and open another, this has never limited my ability to efficiently multitask. I can’t think of too many reasons to have multiple windows open at once on an iPhone, unless you need to view two windows side-by-side (which would not be fun considering the small size of the iPhone and other smartphones). In addition, keeping multiple windows and apps open at one time would be more taxing on your resources and ultimately deplete your battery faster.

4) Data Files On the iPhone – You have a number of concerns regarding data files on the iPhone that I have combined here. Because of the limited real estate of the iPhone, I have never had any real desire to do anything but views data files. I agree that the iPhone (out of the box) is really lacking in functionality in the data file arena, but because it is primarily marketed for its multi-media capabilities and not its business capabilities, I am not surprised.  After doing some research, I found two apps on the app store to address data files. I decided to download the $9.99 (US) Quickoffice Connect Mobile Suite. With this app, you can create and edit Word, Excel and text files (and soon Power Point files), store/manage multiple data file types, attach multiple data file types to email, edit data file email attachments, access files on the cloud, download files from the cloud so you have a local copy, transfer files between your iPhone and desktop/laptop computer via a web browser (using Wi-Fi), or attach your iPhone as an external drive and transfer files between your iPhone and desktop/laptop computer via Mac OS X Finder/Windows Explorer (using Wi-Fi).  Some of the functionality was cumbersome, but most of it was easy to use. Regardless, I still would not want to do much file editing on any smartphone because they are too small. That is the purpose of a laptop (or perhaps an iPad).

5) iPhone is Only Good for Simple Tasks – You stated, “I highly doubt that anyone uses an iPhone for anything serious apart from calling people, texting and replying to email.”, and you also alluded to the fact that a power user would not use an iPhone because it is too simple. As a power user, I must disagree with you here.

The iPhone has a simple interface, but it can do more than simple tasks. Not only are various businesses beginning to ditch their old smartphones for the iPhone, but I also have read about more than one IT Administrator who uses his or her iPhone to manage his or her servers and provide technical support. Also a number of Universities and Colleges have developed their own apps to socially and administratively connect the entire campus and distribute and manage educational content (like iTunes U). These Colleges and Universities issue an iPhone to all of their students, staff, and administrators free of charge.

I keep hearing that other smartphones are more capable than the iPhone. Although I am sure the iPhone is not capable of doing everything, I have found an app or a way to make my iPhone do almost everything I want it to do. Not having used any other smartphone, I would be interested to hear from you (or anyone else) regarding what other smartphones will do that the iPhone (plus the Apple App Store) will not do. Also, what non-simple tasks do you expect of your smartphone?

6) Cool Factor – Sure, part of the allure of the iPhone is the cool factor. Hands down, Apple is the best aesthetic designer of mobile devices and computer hardware. However, their designs are not just about looks. Because of their various interface and functionality innovations, they are constantly forcing the industry to reconsider the way it thinks and does things.

7) Definition of the Word “Smart” – In your blog post, you state, “Personally, I believe that the iPhone is an idiot phone because I expect it to actually be a “smart” phone.” I believe we have a different definition of the word “smart”.  It sounds like you define a phone to be “smart” based solely on its out-of-the-box functionality. I believe “smart” is not only defined by the functionality a smartphone contains, but also its reliability, expandability and its overall user experience. With very few exceptions, the iPhone and its functionality work smoothly without issue, the Apple App Store makes it one of the most expandable devices around and it provides a very positive user experience (This is true of my MacBook Pro as well). This has not been my experience with many non-Apple products (especially Windows products).

My goal here is not to push Apple products.  I could care less what computer or smartphone someone uses. Use what makes you happy. However, I  believe the reason so many people are moving to the iPhone is because they have had similar negative experiences with non-Apple products. Regardless of technical background, most people don’t want to have to be a support technician every time they power up or modify their smartphone (and other electronic devices) – including me. This is where the iPhone shines. Regardless, if a person has used another smartphone or not, I believe he or she is more willing to take a chance on an iPhone because Apple products have a reputation for reliability, high quality, and a positive user experience.

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Today I received this glowing testimonial from someone who purchased my book titled “OpenCAD – A Step By Step Guide to Developing a Professional CAD Application“.

“I purchased the electronic version of your OpenCAD step-by-step guide. What a blast!!! Using VS 9.0 (2008). I had to do some trivial adjustments, but otherwise everything worked right out of the box. For sure the best 50 bucks I’ve ever spent. Now, I’m ready to move on with my actual project (meshing for CFD). Without your guide, it would have taken me ages to figure things out. Next step is to embed a python interpreter to allow scripting.”

Søren Hjort, Ph.D.
Siemens Wind Power

Once in a while it feels good to blow your own trumpet. It feels much better when someone helps you do it.

A prospective customer put this question to me today:

It has been great trying to use SYCODE software to import 3DS files from ArchiCAD to Alibre. I would love to work with both platforms more interconnected. Do you have a suggestion of how I could do that? I plan to use Alibre Design for my structural working shop floor steel fabrication details for units designed with ArchiCAD. I know Telka is great for this, but so is its price. More information will be greatly appreciated.

While we do not have an ArchiCAD to Alibre Design bridge, there is something else I would like to mention about opening mesh formats like 3DS into Alibre Design. We often receive support requests on this issue. So I decided to write my thoughts here on this blog for the benefit of others trying to do the same thing.

Here is the thing. Alibre Design is a solid modeling system. It does not have a mesh data structure. Neither does it have a mesh visualization structure like SolidWorks or Pro/ENGINEER. That’s why our Alibre Design add-ons that import mesh formats like 3D Studio (3DS), Wavefront (OBJ), SketchUp (SKP), Stereolithography (STL) and Visualization Toolkit (VTK) need to cough up solid models from the mesh objects described in these mesh files. So this task is not a simple conversion from one data structure in one format to another data structure in another format, which is what happens say in the case of importing a STEP file into Alibre Design. The task involves creating a trimmed planar NURBS surface for each triangle/quad of the mesh and then stitching them together to yield a closed solid or an open surface.

Maybe I should explain this by means of an example. Assume that we have a simple solid model of a sphere stored in a STEP file. The solid model contains just one closed spherical surface. Alibre Design’s STEP file importer simply reads the spherical surface stored in the STEP file and converts into a spherical surface in Alibre Design. However, the same sphere in a 3DS file would be stored as a mesh object consisting of maybe 200 triangular faces depending on the resolution selected when saving the 3DS file. So our 3DS importer add-on for Alibre Design needs to create 200 planar surfaces, trim them and stitch them together into a solid. This takes a lot of computing resources as well as time.

In fact, the time required increases exponentially with the number of faces to create, trim and stitch. So if you have a huge mesh containing thousands of faces, you are going to end up staring at a progress bar that appears to be stuck up. In reality the add-on is working overtime. The Task Manager will verify that.

So my advice to anyone trying to open a mesh format into Alibre Design (or for that matter, any other solid modeling system) is to try and break down the mesh into parts if possible. Unfortunately, in the case of STL, that cannot be done since a STL file holds all triangles as a single mesh object. But the other mesh formats I mentioned above can all store more than one mesh objects.

So in the case of the prospective customer I mentioned above, it would make sense to save individual objects or small groups of them in ArchiCAD to individual 3DS files and then import them one by one into Alibre Design using our add-on. I understand that the process may seem a bit tedious, especially for large models. But this method may actually end up yielding a desirable outcome as opposed to waiting endlessly for the add-on to stitch thousands of triangles and possibly run out of memory.

If you have any questions related to this issue, please do leave a comment. I will try my best to get you an answer or suggest a workaround.

Bob McNeel, CEO of Robert McNeel and Associates, the developers of Rhinoceros, had this to say about CAD on the cloud:

Any new technology direction in the CAD industry takes awhile to show user benefits. The “Cloud” is one more technology that might help designers get their work done cheaper, and faster, but it is still too early for us tell where the opportunities really are.

It will be interesting to see what comes of the current hype and how soon reality catches up. I’m sure it will be a few months if not years before users see any real benefits.

Meanwhile we’ll stick our heads in the cloud from time to time to see if there is anything there worth watching.

I managed to get Paul Grayson, Founder and CEO of Alibre, to go public on his views on CAD on the cloud. With his permission I am reproducing an email he sent to me a short while ago:

Hi Deelip,

I have been following all of the coverage that cloud computing has gotten lately on the blogs. I have especially enjoyed yours, Ralph’s, and Matt Lombard’s coverage. The comments have been very interesting as well.

As you know, I have a long history with “Cloud Computing” beginning with the founding of Alibre in 1997. My co-founder, Steve Emmons, and I filed for a US Patent in 1999 for an Internet / distributed computing based “System and Method for Solid Modeling”. We were granted US Patent #6,748,419 on June 8, 2004. The abstract of this patent follows:

“Modeling three-dimensional objects on a computer system via a high bandwidth distributed network, facilitating the computing of intensive computer-aided design (CAD) tasks to take place on a series of servers. A multi-tiered distributed processing architecture, which separates client user interface, multiple application servers and database servers is employed, resulting in the separation of server computing and data storage from the client control device. Computing for CAD tasks is directed to the client device or to an application server, as is appropriate for the complexity of tasks being performed.”

We began shipping Alibre Design in 2000 in which our invention was embodied and consisted of three components: a design application, a design server and a data server. The multi-tiered architecture separated the CAD application’s user interface from its core modeling engine, or design server, and data storage, facilitating the computing of intensive 3D CAD tasks on a series of servers.

Alibre Design contained a broad set of online functionality that relied on this and other Internet-centric technology including:

1. Contact management
2. Instant Messaging
3. Private email
4. Integrated online and local data sharing and management with check-in, check-out and version control
5. Real-time collaboration including mark-up, arrow pointers, and the ability to pass control of the session to different team members
6. Real-time team modeling, enabling design engineers, regardless of their locations, to work on the same model together

We successfully upgraded and sold Alibre Design with this technology for 8 years, but decided to begin phasing it out in 2008. Alibre Design V10 was the last version to ship with this technology. We decided to remove it because similar functionality had become pervasively available in mass market operating systems and applications. At the time only about 5% of our customer base used the online capabilities. Most customers were already using mass market chat, email, and collaboration software such as NetMeeting and GoToMeeting (both of which allow screen sharing and passing of control in applications). We decided that our customers would benefit more from a tighter focus on core features and improvements than from a continued investment in what we considered to be generic operating systems and mass-market applications technology.

SolidWorks’ recent demonstration seems to further validate this decision and confirm that even complex distributed computing capabilities will be provided via technology that applies equally to all vendors. According to Ralph Grabowski, it was OTOY technology that powered the SolidWorks-in-the-cloud demo. OTOY, along with their partner AMD, have publicly stated their desire to make this technology equally applicable to all robust graphical applications.

Dassault must have been pretty taken back by the visceral reaction that their demonstration of SolidWorks running via OTOY generated. So much has already been written that it is doubtful that I add much to it, except perhaps my observation that it was a serious strategic and tactical mistake for them to have done so. They took credit for a “Cloud Computing” breakthrough when in fact a similar demo could be given by any other CAD vendor using OTOY technology. In doing so they have frightened customers and put them on notice that Dassault is now fully in charge and what Dassault wants customers to buy is what customers will have to buy. I believe that the SolidWorks World 2010 Cloud demonstration, along with Dassault’s heavy handed control of the event, marks the end of an era of independence for SolidWorks USA and the beginning of dominance and dictation by Dassault France. This was further confirmed with your photographs showing the demonstration software to be SolidWorks V6, an apparent merger of SolidWorks and CATIA V6 code. Given Dassault’s history of releasing incompatible versions of CATIA, V5 to V6 for example, it is truly frightening to think what customers are likely to go through in attempting to migrate to a V6 based SolidWorks that also abandons the Parasolid kernel.

Based on our experience, I can tell you that mechanical design engineers are:

1. Very conservative
2. Late adapters of new technology
3. Do not like change
4. Insist on owning and controlling their software
5. Insist on owning and controlling their data
6. Do not trust CAD vendors, especially those that promise dramatic new technology

If in fact, the entire software business migrates to the Cloud, mechanical CAD customers will be the last ones to do so. By the time it happens, all of the technology infrastructure will be in place, and it will be easy for any software company to offer their products on the Cloud.

Paul

Tomorrow a press release from Bricsys will announce their second annual developer conference to be held on June 8-9 in Bruges, Belgium. I missed the first one last year. But I am making sure that I attend this one.

Bricsys’ strategy of relieving Autodesk of it’s customers has two main components: (1) The Bricscad platform, and (2) the BRX SDK. This conference is mainly about the latter. For those who are not aware, the BRX SDK is an ObjectARX source compatible SDK whose main objective is to make it easier for AutoCAD plug-in developers to port their plug-ins over to Bricscad.

At the conference Bricsys will let attendees know the current state of their DWG-related API’s and will also provide a strategic roadmap for the Bricscad platform.

You can get more information about the conference and sign up here.

Like I said in my previous post “A Cloudy Conversation with Mike Payne“, a lot has been said about CAD on the cloud by people like me who are nowhere close to actually shaping the future of the CAD software industry. In my quest to find out what other CAD vendors think about CAD on the cloud, I put the cloud question to Mark Parent, Chief Operating Office and Vice President of Finance of Kubotek USA, the developers of KeyCreator. I wanted to know how Kubotek was viewing all of this. This is what Mark had to say:

Simply put, I think most of the vendors want to offer a cloud solution to give their users and prospects another choice. At the end of the day, it appears to me that the cloud is nothing more than a new pricing model. Most vendors will still try and lock the user in to their software by file format games or other activities. I think today’s cloud is more like a lead balloon. It’s just another trick by the large greedy corporations that want to trap you inside, and will someday sink you to the ground.

Doesn’t it feel like the corporations are the real problem? I can argue that the corporations are now in the way of progress.

So, what is the future?

I think the corporate world and the software world will drastically change in the near future. Just think how fragile the software industry really is. What if Autodesk decided that they were no longer going to charge for their software and they gave it to everyone for free? Of course, they wouldn’t be the financial powerhouse that they are today, but maybe their community would be bigger and stronger.  Corporations today are all about quarterly profits and their shareholders, and that’s fine for them.  But this leads to the customer being less the focal point. In fact, it treats the customer quite poorly.

What if a strong online community was built that had access to all the software tools needed at no charge?  What if the community was the ones to maintain the software? Obviously this is being done in limited situations, but what holds people back from doing this? There could be store fronts that sold services, training and other added value items.

Longevity of the community is key.

So I guess we can count Kubotek out of the cloud party, at least for now. I will continue to try and get decision makers to go public with their views on CAD on the cloud. As you can imagine, this is by no means an easy task.

We can look into our crystal balls and come up with our own predictions for the cloud. But it is these senior executives in the CAD software companies who will ultimately decide which way the CAD software industry will head. Their views are far more important than mine.