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 industry; a shift which is arguably a result of efforts to circumvent artificial barriers and market reactions arising from those efforts. However, having spent a fair portion of that time discussing two of the three roadblocks – data portability and proprietary formats – I want to briefly touch on the third: extensible semantics.
Continue reading →

This is probably a good time for a brief, updated review.

Continue reading →

In my last entry I said I’d post some examples of recent developments in the CAD arena. So without further delay, here are 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 (Link): Continue reading →