Architosh’s press meeting with Autodesk at Macworld Expo this month generated a series of interesting insights into the company and how it views itself, the companies and products it acquires, and Apple and the Mac professional user base. We share some special discussion from that meeting in this report here, titled: Autodesk Talks to Architosh about Mac.
But one interesting detail we brought up in the meeting has to do with MotionBuilder, a product that in its latest release was only made available for Windows. MotionBuilder, of course, was made into a Mac darling during a SIGGRAPH show back in 2003, where Richard Kerris, then Apple Sr. Director of Worldwide Developer Relations, expressed enthusiasm for Kaydara’s decision to concentrate all UNIX develop just on Mac OS X. With so much put into MotionBuilder on the Mac we were wondering why Autodesk didn’t release a version for the Mac this last update cycle.
MotionBuilder Important to Mac Base
Rob Hoffmann, Autodesk’s Sr. Product Marketing Manager for its Media & Entertainment division explained that Autodesk still makes MotionBuilder 2008 available for Mac users and that the current 2009 release — while only available for Windows at the moment — is not a sign of the company’s lack of commitment to the Mac platform.
“On the contrary,” said Rob Hoffmann, “Autodesk is deeply committed to its Mac-based customers and the products they rely on.” Asked for an explanation, Rob said that the lack of a native Mac version for 2009 came down to development resources. “At the time we didn’t have the developer support internally do meet all our goals and get the Mac parts working too,” said Rob. “But we are working on it.”
In the meantime, Mac users looking for MotionBuilder can acquire the 2008 version. To learn more visit: www.autodesk.com
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