Graebert Unveils World’s First DWG-based Full CAD Solution for Android

Graebert™ GmbH – the pioneer indeveloping high-performance CAD solutions across desktop and mobile devices—today announced ARES™ Touch 2015, the world’s first true CAD solution for Google® Android.

ARES Touch

ARES Touch is a significant moment in CAD history with it being the first full-featured native DWG-file compatible tablet solution for Google’s Android platform and joins ARES Commander’s support of Mac OS X, Linux and Windows platforms.

ARES Touch is not a simple DWG file viewer. ARES Touch 2015 is a full professional CAD solution on mobile tablet computer using the same acclaimed engine powering ARES Commander on desktop platforms. In 2015, Gartner® predicts a total of 320 million tablet sales, versus just 316 million PC sales (desktops and laptops) with Google’s Android making up 62 percent of worldwide aggregate tablet sales. While Architosh have written many times about the dominance of Apple’s iOS platform for tablets, particularly in the AEC space in the United States, worldwide Android has a different kind of traction and Graebert is taking the first step with mobile in the Android direction.

01 – ARES Touch for Android is first full-featured DWG CAD authoring tool on Android platform.

Graebert ensured no compromises were made in the features or performance, with capabilities in ARES Touch 2015 that include:

• Native DWG support — create and modify drawings in the same format without import or export
• Unrestricted size of projects (supports massive files)
• Dropbox and Google Drive — supports the cloud via Dropbox and soon Google Drive. You are not locked into a CAD vendor’s cloud solution and it will support other popular cloud storage options in the future.
• Complete Tool Set — it comes with a complete and robust set of CAD tools to not only review and modify but also to create DWG drawings on the go
• 7- inch Android Tablets — it is designed for 7 inch and larger Android tablets but can run on smaller devices down to a phone, just not practical for drawing goals
• Intuitive UI — built with an easy to use user-interface with a loop feature that enables accurate cursor-based drawing, selection, editing and more

API for Desktop to Mobile Third-Party Support

ARES Touch is the first CAD application to include an open API for developers to easily and quickly migrate their applications from desktop to mobile. Previously, developers of vertical applications had to redevelop apps from scratch when moving to mobile.

With ARES Touch, any add-on initially created for ARES Commander or AutoCAD® can now be painlessly migrated to mobile (because ARES Touch supports the same API set as ARES Commander,including LISP and C++ Tx (Graebert’s equivalent to ARX)). As a result, developers can maintain the same core stream of code for desktop and mobile platforms and only need to focus their development on Touch UI adaptation.

“Graebert was the first company to release a mobile CAD solution back in 2000 for Windows CE® devices and we also have 15 years of mobile experience with our SiteMaster™ product line. While we believe users will keep using their PC for heavy CAD tasks, we see a growing demand for agility to work from multiple devices including tablets and smartphones and are very excited to introduce ARES Touch 2015 to meet that pent-up need,” said Wilfried Graebert, CEO and founder of Graebert GmbH.

Interested customers can visit www.graebert.com/arestouch and follow @graebertcad on Twitter or arescommander on Facebook. Users of ARES Commander 2015 will have the priviledge toreceive ARES Touch 2015 Beta for free in November this year, a few months before it becomesavailable on the Google Play™ store.

Pricing and Availability

ARES Touch 2015 is expected to be available on the Google Play store in 2015. Users of ARES Commander will receive ARES Touch for free and vice-versa, for the duration of their Graebert subscription. This means that for the initial price of 250 euro per year, Graebert customers will receive a license for their computer (Mac, Linux or Windows) and also for their Android tablets. One ARES Touch licenses allows for use on all Android devices you own.

Architosh Analysis

Several CAD journalist are in attendance at the Graebert Annual Meeting event in Berlin today, including senior associate editor for Architosh, Pete Evans AIA. While Pete is not tweeting at the event, fellow CAD journalist colleague Randall Newton has tweeted….”First impression of ARES Touch Android CAD…wicked fast.”

We wil be looking forward to hearing from Pete Evans’ report of Touch as well but an initial comment made to me by another CAD developer working on an iOS solution stated that one of the things that many of the bigger CAD developers have possibly overlooked is that tablet platforms are inviting new types of first-time CAD users into the CAD market. As such, this particular developer felt that mobile solutions should focus on radical ease-of-use and not just power.

Judging from the images of ARES Touch 2015, this looks like a well-designed mobile CAD authoring solution and—while we can maybe understand the Android orientation coming from a CAD company in Europe—it would be nice to see this product on Apple’s iOS platform as well. Especially since there is a dearth of credible CAD authoring solutions for iPad.