The CAD Insider

A Foreword to a Memoir? Not Yet.

I awake to an internal conflict. It’s 3:45 am. Last night’s tater tots are noisily discussing an exit strategy, whether it be a retreat to the North or the South. I go to the bathroom prepared for either, wastebasket in hand. 

Hours later, I am still posed like Rodin’s statue, lost in thought. How did I get here? By the time the birds start singing, I’ve retraced all the roads back to the very first fork, the one that led me astray.

Was it the Spring of 1995, almost 30 years ago, that I veered from engineering into publishing? My first article was about FEA, which was starting to enter mainstream engineering after being forever in the clutches of specialists with PhDs. I was eager to tell engineers how they could use it safely and supply a few guardrails, so planes wouldn’t start falling out of the sky or bridges come crashing down.

It was a practical article, not a scholarly one. Wondering if anyone would be interested I sent it to Cadence, one of two magazines covering AutoCAD, but one that was looking to branch out and cover additional design software. I was stunned to see my article on the cover of the May issue, not because I had gotten the cover with my first article, but because the headline said *Discover FEA for AutoCAD.” AutoCAD did not do FEA. The text below the headline said “ “7 proven ways to create designs today.” I don’t know where “seven” came from. I had listed more than seven ways.

I was to learn that odd numbers in headlines are attractive and editors value creativity more than accuracy. I should have backed down that road then and there. Accuracy was what engineering was all about.

But I stayed in. Mostly because, instead of teaching design to a few dozen students at a time, I had the opportunity to teach a hundred thousand (the number of subscribers Cadence had). 

Looking back, a thousand articles later, I wonder what effect I have had. A more accomplished person might consider writing a memoir. But what would my memoirs possibly be called? 

• A Road Not Taken? Too soul searchy. Besides, i think that’s taken some poet took that one. 
• 30 Years a Slave, for the enslavement of publishers by advertisers? Wouldn’t that be insulting to every descendant of real slaves?
• Burning Bridges, for what a book sprung from my current frame of mind would do. It would be an unfair comparison to Burn Book, by Kara Swisher, a real journalist who dared tell all. 

The sun is rising and melting away my melancholy. There is much still to cover. I am by no means done. The advent of AI in CAD is all by itself a reason to continue, for hope… The time for memoirs is not just yet.

Or have I just written the foreword?

Trimble CEO Rob Painter Conducts a Master Class in Relating to Customers

It doesn’t take TV personality to enthrall an audience – but it helps. This may be what’s working for Rob Painter, CEO of Trimble. I squint and see Anderson Cooper. But there’s more to Painter and it all adds up to keeping the audience riveted at the Trimble Dimensions 2023 being held in Las Vegas.

Most CEOs look like they’re heading for the golf course. But here is Painter in an open neck light blue button down shirt – but with jeans. He may be taking pains to fit in with his audience. There’s a lot of burly men here, all looking like they’d be comfortable outdoors, behind an earth mover, on a construction site, in a safety vest and under a hard hat. There's more  facial hair than any other conference -- and not the groomed stubble that has become fashionable. That's on the men, by the way. The few women in attendance are well coiffed. They tend to cluster at the lunch tables.

Painter speaks with feeling. He knows his products cold and understands what the guys in surveying, building and construction are up against. If he has a teleprompter, I can’t tell that he is using it. He appears to be addressing each of us personally. This is no executive slumming, taking an obligatory quick excursion from mahogany row to get in touch with the masses.

Best of all, he acknowledges the work Trimble users do. The respect is palpable. There is no hint of superiority, of putting on airs. I half expect Painter to drives a pickup to work, if not an earth mover.

If anyone wants to know how to relate to their customers, let Rob Painter be a lesson.

Psst! SketchUp Is Not Free

How do you tell the largest CAD user base in the world that they they are going to cut off? You don't.

CHICAGO (AIA Conference 2014) - SketchUp, known and loved by millions (30 million users, they tell me), was revised late last year. There was the usual list of improvements, a name change, but most significantly, Trimble, owner of SketchUp for the last two years, makes it very clear that SketchUp is not free for commercial use.

From the FAQs issued with Trimble announcement of SketchUp Make, the new name for what was commonly referred to as "free SketchUp" is the statement:

"SketchUp Make is the new name for our basic version. It’s available today and still free to use. With this change, we’re also clarifying that SketchUp Make is not licensed for commercial work."

This would mean all architects using SketchUp may be in violation of the license agreements. 

It was easy to overlook if you only read the May 22 press release, which contained only this reference to commercial use:

"In addition to serving the commercial market with SketchUp Pro, Trimble will continue to provide a free, entry-level, 3D drawing tool—now named SketchUp Make..."

It seems free use of the current version of SketchUp is confined to students, hobbyists...makers, for which the product was named --so long as they don't actually ever sell their creation.

And the initial cost of SketchUp Pro has increased from $495 to $590, as users are required to pay the $95 annual maintenance fee for the first year in additon to the $495 license.

Biggest CAD User Base

SketchUp had grown to become, almost by accident and under all radar, the most used CAD software in the world. It is, by CAD standards, ridiculously easy to use. Being free had helped. Created initially for architectural conceptualizing in 3D, it was readily adopted by interior designers as well as product design by anyone and everyone not already mired in "professional" CAD software packages, which lo and behold, was a user base an order of magnitude larger. It was quite a feat for an upstart and showed no respect for the established order. Professionals criticized SketchUp for its imprecision and impurity (it was not "exact," not a solid model, it was not robust ("you cannot document a big project") and it wasn't a "real professional CAD application" (meaning it was not expensive, as if free was a liability) but it SketchUp filled a vital need and so grew to the be the biggest CAD user base in the world.

Trimble Needs to Make Money

Google had acquired @Last, the original creators of SketchUp, to populate Google Earth with man-made objects, like buildings and towns. Google cared little about making money from a CAD product and gave it away.  Google may have received a little money from users who paid $500 for SketchUp Pro, a drop in Google's big bucket. When they found people actually cared less about creating buildings and structures than they hoped, the company seemed to lose interest, selling it to Trimble, a company known on a lesser scale than Google (both in revenue and project size). 

But for Trimble, SketchUp is an opportunity to cash in on the now ubiquitous user base.

Let's Not Make a Big Deal of It

The removal of free commercial use from SketchUp has caused barely a ripple. Trimble itself is hardly promoting the change.  Even the "official" SketchUp forums have little protest. The few bloggers who have posted have received only a handful of comments.  See About SketchUp 2013 and the Meaning of "Free", Stefan Boeykens, CAD, BIM and 3D, June 4, 2013.

So while Trimble is not breaking down doors with BSA enforcers brandishing  EULAs, as is the way of big software, I wonder how long this will last. Trimble may be content with an honor system for now.

"They'll get quite a bit of money from firms that have to stay on the up and up," says one exhibitor at the recent AIA convention, who hopes to capitalize upon the stranded SketchUp users.

Enjoy it While You Can

Only one architect I spoke to (out of of over 20 polled for this article) say they will be upgrading to SketchUp Pro. Several others were careful to say they will use SketchUp only in early, conceptual modeling and not for customer deliverables. Is that legal? It's hard to say. One part of the license of SketchUp Make says if you are not selling, renting, leasing or lending the output of SketchUp, it's ok, but then quickly insists you have to get a SketchUp Pro license if you work for a for-profit organization of any kind.

For the other architects and mechanical users who continue to to use SketchUp for business, the future could be bleak. Trimble is letting everyone stay on a less than latest version if they have it. This appears to the path of least resistance for most SketchUp users that need to stay legal, though the worst case scenario would find themselves increasingly isolated as SketchUp moves forward with more updates. Trimble will not be fixing or enhancing anything but the most recent version. Soon sources of downloads for free-for-commercial versions will dry up -- if they haven't already. Those users may soon not be able to read files made with a current version. A future OS upgrade may render their free version totally unusable.

 

Tata Technologies Manages to Sell Competing CAD Products

DALLAS, TX (Siemens PLM Connection 2013) June 5, 2013 - Sean Slyman devotes himself to Siemens PLM side of the business at Tata Technologies, which he says is not only the biggest reseller of NX, it is the biggest reseller of CATIA and of Autodesk software.

There's nothing small about Tata Technologies. It has a small army of people at its headquarters in Novi, MI and its Innovation Center in Troy, locations no doubt chosen for their proximity to the automotive industry. Yet, Tata Technologies is but a small part of the Tata Group, the huge India conglomerate with annual sales of $100 billion -- that's about 25 times the size of the biggest CAD companies. Tata can buy auto companies (as it did with Great Britain's iconic Jaguar and Land Rover brands) like you and I would buy milk.

But I have to wonder out loud how can one company sell 3 competing product lines. Craig Radomski, VP, explains to me that selling Autodesk, Siemens and Dassault  products actually gives Tata Technologies great flexibility, even the luxury of being able to offer the customer the best of breed choice. "If we go into an automotive manufacturer, Teamcenter may be the best choice. Another customer may appreciate the total cloud solution Autodesk PLM 360 may provide."

Tata Technologies website

I GET IT 

You may know I GET IT for its conputer based instruction for Autodesk products. But there's quite a bit more to it, say Craig Radomski, VP of PLM Solutions, Americas. "We're more about the process of engineering and design than CAD instruction," he says. I GET IT is more likely to have a tutorial in how to design an airplane wing. Sure, application of a CAD program is covered, but that is only part of it. We're more interested in providing instruction in a manufacturing process. To that end, we will put in a module for the CAD part of it, be it Inventor, NX or CATIA."

For more information, see http://www.myigetit.com/

Has SpaceClaim Found the Future Interface?

Not long after I got my Blackberry Tour, I handed it to my wife so she would be properly impressed. She instinctively touched the screen to access an application. "No, no, it's not a touch screen, " I say. I grabbed it back and showed her how to use the little trackball to coax the cursor over the icon, then click on it. But the moment was lost. I realized my new toy was already yesterday's technology. Thanks a lot, Apple!

In the blink of an eye, a UI transformation is complete. Apple was a genius 20 years ago when it came out with a little white one button mouse and it's a genius again for throwing the mouse away. To use a touchscreen just once is enough to forever alter your expectation of an interface.

SpaceClaim has a touchscreen interface shown here as two fingers used to rotate model.

In our industry, SpaceClaim is right there. They're the first to use touchscreen technology as a CAD interface. Blake Courter, SpaceClaim's cofounder, is giving me a demo. He is using GoToMeeting, so I have to imagine his fingers using the touchscreen... a little wierd. I play the old skeptic. "But are many CAD users using touchscreens?" I ask, forcing Blake to admit that, no, they are not. SpaceClaim is ahead of demand for this technology. But I should be commending SpaceClaim for having the guts go boldly where no man has gone before -- in CAD, anyway. Build it and they will come. Isn't that what Apple did? Companies can keep making safe little incremental changes -- or take big steps, go for paradigm shifts, singularities... whatever the business bestsellers are calling it these days.

There may have been many missteps and wrong paths in innovation, or even good ideas badly implemented. But the future belongs to companies who are not afraid to try and keep trying. 

 

Minority Report - totally cool UI but most CAD operators cannot wave their hands in front of them for 8 hrs a day.

In all honesty, I can't see designers and engineers all using tablet laptops with touchscreens. For one thing, they are too expensive. For another, they don't have  the workstation-type horsepower MCAD needs. Even if there is a desktop monitor with a touchscreen (Blake says he has one), I think I'd get really tired of holding my arms out in front of me trying to touch it. 

But how about a big touch screen in front of me, slightly tilted, like small desk, or the way old drafting tables were? Moving models around on that, mating parts, zooming panning... it would be a breeze. I could rest my arms. Can you picture that? Any one like Apple in the audience?

Publishing Catalogs and User Manuals the New Way

Having tech illustrators manually drawing isometric views for user manuals and other documentation is so yesterday. If you company still does this, you could score big points by introducing products like Anark's. Anark Core takes CAD data -- as well as ERP, MES, even SQL database and creates a PDF file which can be distributed electronically or printed. No artist required. Not only are links to the data maintained so if something changes in the design (I know that doesn't happen in your company), the PDF is updated automatically. And what is really cool is that in the 3D PDF you can move the image around and zoom  in and out. Try to do that on paper!

Though CAD has certainly displaced manual drafting -- at least in this country -- I get the feeling that catalog publishing, creation of user manuals and other documentation is still slogging along manually. There is a raft of tools available to rectify the situation (see TenLinks list 3D and Web Publishing for CAD). And what does Anark bring of unique value compared to its competition, I ask.

"We work with data further upstream," says Scott Collins, Senior Vice President of Product Development at Anark, who is giving me a web demo. "Plus, we are recipe based." Recipes are what Anark calls the recording of a procedure. I imagine these are like macros: the software remembers what you have done so it can be repeated. Recipes are saved as XML files.

Anark can read just about all major CAD format, staying current to within months of CAD file format changes. You can mark up and annotate. The result is saved as a "pure" PDF, requiring no downloads or plug-ins when using Acrobat's universally accepted readers -- unlike the competitors, says Scott. Anark is is an Adobe Solution Provider. A copy of Acrobat Pro Extended is included with Anark products. Anark 3.0 was first mentioned in an Adobe webinar back in August.

Anark Core 3.0 products are to be released as early as next week. Anark Core Workstation sells for $4,400 to $10K, the server edition sells for $5,400 to $10k per user.

Find out more about Anark at http://www.anark.com/.

AEC is Child's Play

Brian Farrimond  has created an AEC program program so easy to use that nine year olds are using it. This program is fully 3D and is parametric. Furthermore, it will sell for under $50*. Unlike, many bulky CAD programs of today, it will be a 4MB download and can run off the CD (without installation).

I watched Brian demo the program at the recent CAD '07 conference. In 5 minutes he had most of a building created as well as many of the details. Walls, roofs and other features were adjusted easily with slider bars.

There is one catch. This AEC program is rather specialized. It can only make churches. For now. Plans are underway to make a version that can design castles though it might push the minimum age up to 11 year olds.

What if you don't design castles or churches? How about ships? The program would be a bit more complicated but it could be done. I get the impression that the team in Liverpool could produce the same fantastically easy to use program to make post offices, malls, furniture, what have you. "It would only take resources," says Brian.

Brian, along with Janette Bonar Law, both from Liverpool Hope University in the UK, created Church Builder after they sensed a need for a low cost, easy to use and install design program that would fit into the UK National Curriculum. "Kids are already 3D native," says Brian. However, many teachers know little of current technology and UK schools often don't have adequate computer resources. "We have schools still using Windows 98," says Brian. The current crop of BIM programs such as MicroStation, ArchiCAD or Revit would be out of reach.

"Why churches?" I ask. Every community has one, says Brian. Also, they are usually the oldest building around, and it part of the history lessons for 7-11 year olds. The easy access and familiarly to the church also gives the student a sense of accomplishment, being able to create something that all who view would recognize.

For more information, you can contact Brian Farrimond at [email protected].

-------------

*Software has not been released and price not determined but should be in the $30-$50 range.

CAD '07 Conference

WAIKIKI BEACH, Hawaii (CAD '07), June 28, 2007 - The CAD '07 Conference is in it's 3rd day and in full swing. It is attended by 130 attendees, most of them from academia. In previous years, as many as 200 have attended.

The conference lasts 5 full days. Subjects are split into 3 concurrent tracks and cover not only CAD but also CAM and CAE, including geometric design, machining, rapid prototyping, product modeling, shape modeling, features, virtual reality, kinematics, nanotechnology, tolerance analysis, bio-CAD, and more. Presenters are almost without exception university professors and students and almost all presentations are the result of research done at their respective institutions.

Examples of presentations I've attended so far are:

• A Semantic Blend Definition
  (filleting and blending, inlcuded a method for complex variable filleting that simulates a thumb pressing modeling clay)
• A CAD Modeling System for Heterogeneous Objects
• Part Search Based on Web Based Environment
• State of the Art CAD Visualization by Outsourcing
  (which was actually about modeling engineering data using visualization programs)
• Reconstructing a 3D Model by Extrusion Features from a Single View Sketch
  (Converting a hand drawn isometric sketch into a solid model. Sounds like magic but several methods to do this have existed for years.)
• Computer Aided Tolerance Analysis
  (exposed shortcomings in presently available tolerance analysis programs)
• Programmable Graphics Processors in CAD

The full list of presentation is given here (click on each day for presentations)

Mexico Wants In

Mexico design conference raises the possibility of outsourcing  much closer to home

PUERTO VALLARTA, Mexico, June 1, 2007 - Mexico may not be the first country that jumps to mind when one thinks of outsourcing industrial design and styling. But if the government and schools of Mexico have their wish, their design students (hundreds of them flocked to the first ever DIMe v1.0, Diseno Industrial Mexico conference), should soon be able to take on outsourcing powerhouses of India and China.

Over 400 design students gather for DIMe in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico

Mexico had received considerable US investment after NAFTA. Most Americans are aware of US companies with factories clustered just over the border that churn out cheap goods. It's meant a lot of manufacturing jobs for Mexicans. Now, it seems that Mexico is setting its sights on exporting its intellectual assets, too.

To tell the story, Robert McNeel & Associates, a major sponsor of the event, invited four of us from the CAD press: Ralph Grabowski (see his blog postings about the event), Randall Newton, Al Dean and me.

The state of Jalisco, in which Puerto Vallarta is located, claims a large share of Mexico's foreign investment. It is proudest of Intel's Design Center in Guadalajara. Guadalajara is Jalisco's biggest city, and second biggest in Mexico (only Mexico City is bigger).

So why would a US company consider Mexico for outsourcing? Well, Puerto Vallarta is a world class resort. My hotel had a swim-up bar....  But forget that for a moment. Mexico neighbors the US, for God's sake! Your overseas office, design center, sweat shop -- call it what you will -- is just a short flight away. Puerta Vallarta was a 3.5 hour direct flight from San Francisco. A multi-stop flight to India will take two days on each end (actual flight time can be over 20 hours). A quick check shows Guadalajara to have one of Mexico's largest universities -- hence it's probably a good source of designers, engineers and other technical professionals.

Lost in Translation

The chief impediment to Mexico entering the international information/IT/outsourcing market is language. I am lucky to have some of the conference proceedings being translated but my lack of Spanish puts me at considerable disadvantage here and almost everywhere else. Even in Puerto Vallarta, a favorite vacation and retirement destination of many Americans, English is rare. Though spoken by many of the hotel's front line staff, it was only Spanish with taxi-drivers, waiters, shop keepers, etc.

Where's the Wi-Fi?

Though I stayed at a 5-star hotel, our rooms had no broadband Internet connection, a service that can now be considered standard in business hotels. Even after a company was contracted to set up wireless connection for us, my colleagues found themselves scrambling to connect. I suspect that if a 5-star hotel has this much trouble connecting its guests, coverage across the country may be spotty at best.

Also somewhat of a problem is "Mexico time," often offered as an explanation for being late. The conference itself was scheduled for 9am but started at 10:30. Or maybe the problem was the final schedule wasn't available till the morning of the conference. None in the milling crowd of attendees seemed to be surprised or bothered by this, but a lack of punctuality and planning would be maddening for American managers.

Still, many US companies could benefit from tapping into a labor force that is cheap, close and sounds eager to get started. By contrast, parts of the world currently associated with outsourcing are already feeling negative effects as superheated economies have caused rapidly escalating wages and rents, employee churn, inflation, etc.

Maybe it's finally time to take the Spanish course you had been thinking about.

Do People Pirate Software Because It Is Expensive?

Why do people pirate software? You might think it would be because they can't afford it. To test this theory, I did a little research and found that cost of software did have a lot to do with it -- but that was not the whole story.

In a study done of several countries*, the relative cost of software is compared to the piracy rate in that country. Relative cost is defined as the cost relative to monthly earnings (gross domestic product per capita, to be more exact). In Vietnam (which has the highest piracy rate of any country at 94%), that's the same as spending 16 months of gross domestic product/capita -- in other words, it would be like an American spending over $48,000 for Office and Windows XP!

Piracy rate is based on data by the Business Software Alliance (BSA).

Curious to see if there was a relationship beyond that example, I plotted the data from the report:

(click to see graph)

While in general the lower the relative cost, the less the incidence of piracy, this is not always the case. It's true that in the well-off US, where software costs little compared to what people earn, piracy rates stand low at 25%. In poor Nigeria, the same software purchase feels like over $60,000 and the piracy rate shoots up to 71%. But drawing a straight line between the two ignores significant exceptions that suggest other factors at play. For example, in oil-rich Bahrain and Kuwait, the same software feels like a mere (!)  $1,621 and $1,231 respectively but the piracy rates are still among the highest (over 75%). Could it be that in some countries piracy laws, if they even they exist, are not enforced? This could lead to a culture of piracy where the norm is pirated software and someone who pays full price is seen as a sucker.

------------------------

*Ghosh, Rishab Aiyer, License Fees and GDP per Capita: the Case for Open Source in Developing Countries, First Monday, November 2003