In my previous post I made the assertion that besides monetary reward, everyday people would increasingly endeavor to acquire 3D modeling skills as a consequence of two non-monetary incentives: social reputation and personal empowerment. I’ll briefly touch on the first in this entry.
The Future of CAD is Social Networking Awareness
I’m not sure that in the [...]
In Parts 7 and 8, I applied a “Web 2.0″ filter to software in general, and then CAD in particular. With that filter in place, I’ve been primarily focusing on tools. At this point it’s time to pan the view and focus on people; especially the up-and-coming generations who will use and primarily benefit from [...]
In Part 10, I claimed “the future of CAD is cooperative”. This might seem obvious, but one look at current ongoing difficulties reveals the magnitude of the non-cooperative problem. It’s an inconvenient fact of life for too many of us and the reason I spent so much time examining the ongoing shift in the CAD [...]
This is probably a good time for a brief, updated review.
In Part 7, previous installments were reviewed and the impact of Web 2.0 thinking on digital tools was discussed; particularly usability and collaboration.
In Part 8, a Web 2.0 “filter” was applied to a specific set of digital tools, 3D CAD applications; with tool migration to [...]
In my last entry I said I’d post some examples of recent developments in the CAD arena. So without further delay, here’s some items which caught my attention.
Dassault CATIA V6
What’s notable about the forthcoming release of CATIA is the continued aggressive push towards a virtual interface along the lines of Microsoft Earth. From MCAD Online [...]
I previously offered (reLink) that there were three issues of particular relevance to the future evolution of “next generation” 3D CAD applications:
Limited data portability
Proprietary, closed source formats
Insufficient support for extensible semantic information
My last entry, in which I discussed the emergence of “direct modeling” 3D CAD, was still very much about data portability. While I’d previously [...]
First let me confess to not having paid sufficient attention to the “direct modeling” wave that’s flooding the CAD market. While the technique isn’t new, it’s made substantial gains in recent years… both in the release of some interesting new modeling applications (e.g. SpaceClaim) and noteworthy upgrades (e.g. Siemens NX5), as well as in significant [...]
In my previous post I touched on the data portability issues which plague CAD applications, particularly those which employ parametric, feature-based history trees (a dynamic, rearrangeable record of the creation process). However, whether it’s within a corporation’s own firewall or between businesses and their vendors online, CAD applications must become increasingly “cooperative” if their developers [...]
One reason for the current level of relative application complexity is the segmented, proprietary CAD market and the gated communities which form around a particular application. As we saw with SolidWorks some time ago, a productivity enhancing user interface combined with competitive pricing can breach insular walls and drive “volume” migration/adoption. The consequence of course [...]
In my previous entry the migration of digital tools in general was discussed; in particular, advancements in both usability and collaborative capabilities. In this and a couple of brief follow-up entries, I want to focus on CAD applications.
The Inevitable Fall of the CAD Priesthood
With any difficult to master skill there usually arises a group of [...]
