Tidbits: Camtasia for Mac, Freeform for iPad and more!

TechSmith releases Camtasia Studio 7 and Camtasia for Mac

One of the most popular screen video capturing applications used by CAD and 3D developers, TechSmith has announced updates to Camtasia Studio and a new native Camtasia for Mac, version 1.1. Camtasia has been very popular with the CAD community for years for helping to create product demos, training and client-walk thrus. Now the Mac community has a new native version built from the ground up to take advantage of the Apple Mac platform.

Camtasia for Mac is an ideal product to help CAD and BIM managers in creative firms like architecture practices create quick help and demo videos to distribute to staff and clients.

Freeform for iPad

Want to get a sense of what a drawing, CAD or BIM application on the iPad might be like? Take a look at the image below of Freeform, a new upcoming application for the upcoming iPad. The Apple iPad will be available this coming April 3, 2010. What you will notice about applications purpose-built for the iPad is that the much larger screen (compared to an iPhone or iPod touch) enables serious screen real estate for tool buttons (top and and left in the image of Freeform).

Earlier we wrote about goBIM, a new (and first) Building Information Modeling (BIM) application for the iPhone. The developer of goBIM will be working on an iPad version as well.

Freeform for iPad - an experimental "vector drawing app" gives indication of what is possible in the user-interface of the iPad.

Freeform is a true “vector drawing” application. Polygon objects can be created and modified, filled with colors and degrees of transparency and positioned accurately. We don’t know much about Freeform but this screen shot gives us a big sense of what is possible. Take a look at the top tool bar and buttons and you get a sense of the capabilities. We are seeing Alignment tools, perhaps Back-Forward tools (or could those be Booleans?) and arrangement items. On the left tool bar we have shapes, line, square and polyline with bezier-style editing capability.

It is not clear if the developer of Freeform is going to ship this product. It says “experimental vector drawing iPad app” on this web page. Not much else is known.