Veteran CAD journalist Ralph Grabowski has written an interesting series titled, “MobileCAD is Reaching Maturity.” The article series is several parts long now and offers some interesting discussion on the topic.
And Grabowski, starts his series in part one with these metaphorical words:
I’ve seen CAD vendors bravely plunge into the churning waters of mobile apps, only to find them icy cold.
Perhaps his age, or perhaps his temperament and personality, but if Grabowski isn’t well known for detailed and concise instructional CAD books on a variety of his favorite known CAD systems, he is most certainly known for pulling no punches or mincing words about what he loves and hates in all things tech. He succinctly nails the challenges (nay, “headaches”) he sees in developing for mobile CAD, by listing each platform’s—iOS, Android, Windows, Web—key weaknesses.
01 – ARES Touch for Android is first full-featured DWG CAD authoring tool on Android platform.
Then he touches on the profit, or lack thereof, issues facing developers of mobile apps that have, often, small audiences, and sell for too little. As a result, many a promising mobile CAD app has gone the way of the dodo bird.
But not all of them!
Grabowski’s Top Mobile CAD Choices
Grabowski chooses wisely is listing Autodesk AutoCAD 360, Graebert’s ARES Touch and IMSI/Design’s TurboSite as mobile CAD apps that impress him.
Grabowski mobileCAD series is really an extended series on Graebert’s ARES technology in the mobile space. His article series breaks down into discussing why Graebert is chasing mobile and not cloud (Part 2), rethinking how mobile CAD should work (part 3) and question and answer session with Graebert staff. (part 4).
You can read his series starting with part 1 here. And continue on with the links above.
Grabowski asks interesting and good questions of Graebert. In his pursuit for some answers he asked Graebert’s CAD software engineer Andre Neumann, and head of sales and marketing Cedric Desbordes, to point out mobile CAD challenges and their possible, most effective solutions.
Their main challenges include file storage limitations that mobile devices have as well as moving these files smoothly, not to mention how to keep these files synchronized at all times to enable continuous access to the latest version.
Again, click on the links above for the whole series to learn more.
ARES Touch
To take a look at ARES Touch, which is for Android only at the moment, view this video below.
