Wednesday, September 29, 2010

AutoCAD WS for iPhone and iPad…

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Thanks to Clark Morgan at VirCon for making me aware of the AutoCAD WS app for iPhone and iPad.

I downloaded it tonight to my brand new iPad. (Happy Birthday to me, thanks honey (p.s. don’t tell her that there is a new version to be released sometime around Christmas. Ignorance is Bliss.))

So, the APP is kind of cool, but I think the concept is awesome!

Here is an application for portable devices that lets you take AutoCAD drawings with you wherever you go.  No more rolled up plan or “lap set” to get coffee stains (please, keep you mug off my iPad, thank you very much.)

The usefulness remains to be seen.  You can zoom right in to the area that you want to review.  You can cloud and markup.  You can even measure (although I have yet to figure out how to set units. That might be set in the drawing file. Not sure.)

Here’s the kicker.  I haven’t investigated this yet, but the App’s documentation claims that I can share a drawing and work on it in tandem with another user.  Read that again.  A collaborative software that allows multiple users to work in a file and see the work being done by the other users.  You had me at “take .dwgs in the field on your tablet.”  I’m blown away by the thought of real time collaboration “in the Cloud.”

From there website:

Sharing drawings

Share drawings with others directly from your device. Use permissions controls to restrict editing and download of the drawing. If other users are also viewing the drawing you can see each other's changes and collaborate in real-time.

If this actually the way the application works, and given the blog chatter about the Revit Server Extension, I think we are in for some interesting times ahead.

Seems like Autodesk is still proving that their not afraid of the Big Bad BIM…

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