Archives
Next Generation Product Development Tools, Part 12
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 [...]
Next Generation Product Development Tools, Part 11
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 [...]
Next Generation Product Development Tools, Part 10
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 [...]
Next Generation Product Development Tools, Part 9
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 [...]