Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

AutoCAD Coming to Mac, First Beta Screenshots

Vectorworks is good also

I have been using MiniCad/Vectorworks and it is a good program. Pricy also.
 
So, in the video, the guy is demonstrating that AutoCAD supports the standard features of a mouse? I'm glad to hear that. Because scrolling, clicking, and right clicking have been a feature of almost every mouse made in the past 20 years.
 
ValSalva said:
They're developing for the wrong platform. Where is their iPad app? No one is going to be using Macs by the time this comes out of beta.
Click to expand...
Actually, there will be more people using Macs by the time this comes out of beta -- at a rate of about 1 million more per month.

To put it in really simple terms: Macs are a rapidly growing market and the rate of growth is increasing. Software vendors like to sell their products to large and rapidly growing markets, thus this announcement.
 
RT2020 said:
The latest Macbook Pro upgrade was extremely underwhelming, and very overdue.
Click to expand...
It wasn't that overdue, though. Arrandale chips were slow to ship in volume. Apple usually doesn't like to announce stuff until it can be shipped in volume. The main complaint I have heard, anyway, is not about that, or performance, but, prices.

A lot of the tech media took note of Apple sitting on their hands then. OSX development has been stagnating.
Click to expand...

Snowleopard has been a big success. I think the apps need more work, especially parallelizing/multithreading/Cocoa/64-bits, to take advantage of new CPUs, and enhancing app security, especially Safari. At this point, Apple needs to think mainly about enhancing Snowleopard security (e.g. enhanced ASLR), library security enhancements.

OSX will not even be mentioned at WWDC. Usually there should be at least an early preview of what they are working on. Nope... they're going to try to make the last service pack (10.6 - buggy as hell) last that much longer.
Click to expand...
How can you be so sure of what Apple will say at WWDC?

Mac Pro is an abandoned product. Plain and simple. We're not talking three months. The damn thing hasn't been updated for over a year.
Click to expand...
Again, you sound so sure. Apple seems to be on its usual schedule to me. One thing I notice from the forums is that many people like the idea of a mini-tower, although, for myself, I think the iMac and Mac Pro cover things pretty well.

Apple is too focused on building idevices for the lowest common denominator...not pros or even prosumers. It's working very well for Apple now... but I'm really concerned that Google will pound Apple out of the mobile space (they're faster and have amazing engineers)...and Microsoft is going to start take its share of the computer space back (Windows 7 doesn't suck).
Click to expand...
Apple seems to be on a pretty steady path with the Macs, despite the new idevices. I guess a lot of people want Apple to come out with new Macs faster, but, I'm not sure Intel's schedule really justifies that. The Intel 6-core chips are just now shipping in volume, for example, and they would be the logical choice for an updated Mac Pro. Also, Intel has some very high-end chips out now, but, if you're looking for a $2K system, a $1K CPU is kind of a problem-- Apple has historically not used the very high-end chips. Bottom line -- I haven't seen much of a change in Apple's Mac strategy, so, I'm not sure why a lot of people are worried that the sky is falling.
 
YES oh yes!!!!!! :D i will finaly be able to ditch bootcamp! :D
i cant tell how happy i am because of this
 
G4-power said:
As the positive/negative ratio suggests, this is big news for the platform. AutoCAD might not be the best, but as has been noted, it's a big player in the market.

As a mechanical engineering student, I have more experience in CATIA, not so much in AutoCAD. Our university teaches mostly CATIA for us, because it's CAD/CAM possibilities and generative design. AutoCAD is a decent package anyway.

Concerning computer specs, yes, we've been waiting for a Mac Pro refresh for ages, and we're in the market for one as soon as there's a refresh, but on a slower system you can always turn the fancy stuff off. Of course with more complex modeling, and for presentations you need to have all the materials show correctly and that can take a lot of power.

At school we use 3.0 GHz P4 machines, with 1GB of RAM and a 128MB mid-range ATI graphics card. This is sometimes a pain, when viewing complex systems with shading and material on, but it's still doable. And those machines are like 5 years old...at least.
Click to expand...

As a mechanical engineer I was weaned on Ansys and we also had CATIA, but I'll take Ansys. Then again Pro/E is one of the big players as well as Ansys and CATIA and of course so is Algor.

However, CAD has always been standardized on AutoCAD via its dxf format.

DWG and DXF are everywhere in the United States.

I won't speak for other countries.

This is big news and actually having this skill as a mechanical engineer makes you more able to get hired.

Programming in C/C++ with Numerical Analysis, OpenCL/OpenGL are also invaluable.
 
TheWatchfulOne said:
How do you define "fully" 3D? I've used AutoCAD for nearly 15 years now and I've always considered it very useful for 3D modeling. Unless you are are referring to AutoCAD Lite which does not include 3D modeling.
Click to expand...

There seems to be some confusion between 3d cad and parametric modeling. CAD, be it 2D or 3D, is electronic drafting or drawing. Parametric modeling (BIM, i.e. Revit and Inventor) is for creating a 3D model of interrelated, intelligent components. In the AEC industry, I assure that BIM is the future (not to say there will not be a need for CAD for quite some time into the future). As a principle of an small architectural firm, I would definitely consider going back to Mac. Had it been available on Mac when I migrated to Revit, in 2008, I would have done it then. I think that this is great news, and join those who hope that they also develop Mac Revit.
 
Solidworks

kapps said:
I agree with Psykx. AutoCAD is nice but completely outdated for anything but simple 2D drawing and architectural design. Now if something like Solidworks, Catia, or Pro/E were ported to Mac (preferably Solidworks), that'd be something I'd be ecstatic about.
Click to expand...

Hmmm. You may be smiling soon. There's something going on, whether it's a native port or a cloud version.

I don't see how a cloud version could be responsive enough.
 
kapps said:
I agree with Psykx. AutoCAD is nice but completely outdated for anything but simple 2D drawing and architectural design. Now if something like Solidworks, Catia, or Pro/E were ported to Mac (preferably Solidworks), that'd be something I'd be ecstatic about.
Click to expand...

I own/run a architectural design studio as well as work & contract with numerous design professionals around the country and we all use the same software, AutoCAD and Revit. I don’t really see the building department and planning and zoning going back to napkin sketches and "oh just build whatever and wherever you want" mentality. Revit is making its way in the marketplace but still has a lot of kinks to be worked out to become completely mainstream, but would make good use of the MAC hardware.

Currently industry standard is plotted hard copy drawings to give to the city and to the contractor to build the building and for permitting, these are 2D drawings, I have put together drawing sets from a 1 page renovation on a house to 200 pages (36"x48") and 4 volumes of drawings to a historic renovation, which are not just simple 2D sketches.

Just an FYI.
 
I hope the Mac version is written better than the 2011LT I had installed last week. Support from Autodesk has been slow and not very impressive.
 
Carbon64 exists!

JeffDM said:
There is no 64-bit carbon.
Click to expand...
Try this
Code: 
lipo -info /System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/CarbonCore.framework/Versions/A/CarbonCore
or this
Code: 
lipo -info /System/Library/Frameworks/Carbon.framework/Versions/A/Carbon
in the Terminal of SL 10.6.3!

Btw, every serious developer knows, that Cocoa does not speedup apps and requires more memory than Carbon. A good example is PS CS5. PS CS5 is not faster, because Adobe used the Cocoa-APIs. PS CS5 is faster, because it runs now on the x86_64 architecture, which means the code requires less memory read/write operations, because the x86_64 architecture has more registers than the i386 architecture. Apple has also published a guide which describes how you can make your applications "faster" (at least they appear to be faster), and Adobe followed the guide. The first known Adobe application on the Mac which did run much faster than the previous versions was Acrobat Pro v7.x.x.

Here is the Apple guide which i mean:
http://developer.apple.com/mac/library/documentation/Performance/Conceptual/CodeSpeed/CodeSpeed.html
 
mdriftmeyer said:
As a mechanical engineer I was weaned on Ansys and we also had CATIA, but I'll take Ansys. Then again Pro/E is one of the big players as well as Ansys and CATIA and of course so is Algor.

However, CAD has always been standardized on AutoCAD via its dxf format.

DWG and DXF are everywhere in the United States.

I won't speak for other countries.

This is big news and actually having this skill as a mechanical engineer makes you more able to get hired.

Programming in C/C++ with Numerical Analysis, OpenCL/OpenGL are also invaluable.
Click to expand...

You're probably right. I don't have much knowledge of the other programs you mentioned, but I've liked CATIA so far. Despite it's few quirky ways of doing things.

I haven't looked into the file formats, but AFAIK, AutoCAD is quite big in at least Finland, probably in other Nordic countries as well. So I'd reckon DXF is quite common here as well.

Well, I still have a way to go, as I don't know C/C++ yet, I can program in Python only. I've been more of a hardware/mechanics guy, but of course with integrated electornics in everything today, it's probably good to be able to program as well.
 
Really great news. I'm not in that industry at all, but I realize this is very desired among professional architects and engineers etc.

Thanks AutoCAD! :D
 
ltcol266845 said:
...I watched the video demonstrating the 'gesture' input and couldn't help but laugh. One-finger click has always selected an object. Two finger clicks that register as a right-click always bring up a contextual menu. Scrolling has always zoomed (or panned, depends what you like). Shift+scrolling has always done the 3D rotating (which SUCKS sometimes on a large set of 2D drawings...
Click to expand...

Yeah, these are not "Gestures."

Why have only me and ltcol266845 noticed that what they are showing is just right clicking and scrolling behaving normally.
 
Hey, is anyone aware of any updated news on AutoCAD for OS X?

Any torrents with the beta? or dates on public betas etc?
Starting 2nd year architecture in october and don't want to have to be going back to windows again, Don't know why but had a lot of freezing issues with my bootcamp...

Cheers! Luke.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back