autodesk

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AutoCAD for OS X Survey

Posted on by Chris Owens

imac-autocad-mockupA couple days ago, Mac:Design (a new site by Develop3D) posted an article speculating about AutoDesk’s potential development of AutoCAD for the Mac OS X platform. Yesterday, Yanko Design followed up with a quick link to the AutoDesk survey about moving the software to the platform. You can also take the survey to contribute your opinion.

It seems like it’s certainly in the cards, especially following AutoDesk’s development of AliasStudio to the Mac platform. The AliasStudio move is huge for many product designers. Having AutoCAD for OS X would open up the platform for a number of other creative and technical professionals. With tools like SolidEdge, iRhino3D (in development) and AliasStudio, the platform is becoming more viable as a product development environment than it has been in the recent past.

[disclaimer: the image on this post is nothing official, I just threw it together for illustrative purposes.]

Via: Mac:Design and Yanko Design

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AliasStudio Coming to Mac

Posted on by Chris Owens

Autodesk AliasStudio

Any product designers fond of the Mac OS X platform will appreciate how monumental this is. In their Manufacturing 2010 Products Webinar [you can access the full webinar here], Autodesk has announced that they will be bringing the AliasStudio line of surface modeling tools to the Mac platform. Core77 transcribes the announcement as follows:

According to product line manager Thomas Heermann, they’ve been building a Mac version for about a year and a half “when [Apple] started shipping really good hardware”, and expect to ship it along with the new Windows version in early April.

Now that Apple is running Mac hardware on the X86 architecture we’re seeing more developers port their previously unavailable software packages to the Mac platform. McNeel has been beta testing a Mac version of Rhino (my personal surface modeler of choice at the moment) for a while now, but it’s not ready for a full release yet. It will be interesting to see if the Mac version of AliasStudio really matches up to the concurrently released Windows version. There are a number of other 3D modeling packages available on the Mac platform already, and Core77 gives a decent summary of options on their site. As a product designer that prefers an OS X work flow, I’m excited to see so many industry standard software packages making their way to the platform.

Via: Core 77 + Autodesk