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Architosh Seybold Report: Mac products for CAD/AEC - Part 3
Architosh picks up where it left off with Seybold. Here in Part 2 we center on efforts on bringing you information related to hardware, particularly Hewlett-Packard. In Part 3, we cover web software items and hardware from the heterogeneous network hero SGI and its new Linux solutions.
Macromedia Web Publishing Solutions and Technologies Without a doubt, Macromedia reigns supreme when it comes to having the best Web publishing technologies and applications for your web publishing and marketing needs. Who what of thought that Adobe could play second to anyone else in any segment of the graphics world. At Seybold Boston, Macromedia has some amazing things to introduce and show. Graphics and AEC One of the most related items AEC pros deal with in the graphics world is the creation of brochures, pamphlets and reports (often laden with CAD drawings and color 3D renderings). Macromedia's new Freehand 9 is one of the most useful applications in this endeavor. Freehand 9 was a new product at Seybold Boston and features a number of features of particular interest to CAD, 3D and AEC pros. One key feature new to version 9 is something called Perspective Grids. You can set true perspective grids to any vanishing point you want and snap your artwork to them -- as in images of drawings, building photographs, etc. You can also use the grids to snap your text to the grid as well to obtain text in correct perspective -- which could be utilized really creatively for marketing brochures of photos or renderings of buildings in perspective. Another useful feature for those that use Adobe Illustrator or Freehand to work over scanned photos -- such as aerial views used in master planning, civil engineering or urban planning -- is the new Autotrace tool which gives you a magic wand that automatically snaps to the edges elements in the drawing. You can trace bitmaps to paths or vector areas to create unions or new shapes. Freehand 9 also supports native Flash SWF export, so that your vector-based CAD graphics (especially those from PostScript applications) can make an easy transition to Flash from Freehand 9. Freehand 9 also includes new Flash supported built-in animation effects so that your CAD files can become animated. Imagine animating your VectorWorks, PowerCADD or ArchiCAD drawings and bringing them to the Web via Freehand and Flash. On the Mac import formats include EPS, Illustrator, CorelDraw, Acrobat PDF 4.o, DXF, PICT, RTF, GIF, JPEG, PNG and others. Flash 4 is the most popular web plugin according to numerous web statistics. The popular animation software isn't just useful for funny cartoons. Flash can be an integral part of a CAD to Web publishing solution. As a vector-format and, according to one Macromedia rep, an open-source file standard, Flash can play a valuable role in bringing both 2D and 3D CAD files to life on the Web. Of particular note to Mac users, Flash 4 supports the full integration of native QuickTime in its product, including the ability to place QuickTime movies in your flash documents and add interactivity. As such, Flash can serve as an interface builder for navigating QuickTime-based Web animations of renderings such as flybys for your website. And Flash 4 can also export to Apple's QuickTime 4 format. Apple has licensed the Macromedia Flash 4 Player technology for incorporation in the QuickTime architecture, providing Web developers with the unique ability to create compact, high-quality streaming video overlaid with Flash interfaces. To see a demo of this click here. RealTime Image and RealTime Proof were two new products from a company most users would not be familiar with. RealTime claims to have breakthrough technology for the graphic design and medical community. RealTimeProof (TM) is an online proofing service that offers unsurpassed imaging quality for Web-based soft and remote hard proofing. Designed to enable graphics arts professionals to do real-time markup over the Web, the product seemed of interest to us, at least technologically, for similar type Web-based market for CAD or rendering files between AEC professionals working together or their clients, all remotely over the Web. RealTime Proof features the ability to view high pixel count photographic images over the Web without image graduation while zooming in and out of the image. The product features red-line markup features and annotation system. The demonstration seemed convincing, though the price of using such systems for AEC may be too expensive. Other issues for using this technology in the AEC space is the current file support. DXF, DWG are not supported. CAD files could be converted however to EPS, TIFF, or Adobe's PDF format. RealTime is based in San Bruno, California, with R&D in Israel. (Editor's note: last checked their company URL www.RealTimeImage.com failed) For more information, call 1-650-616-4670. SGI (Silicon Graphics Incorporated) and MacLAN Also at Seybold Boston this year was SGI. The company's presence at a publishing show is usually about NT servers but this year they were really interested in featuring their new Linux products. SGI seems to be in a definite transitional phase toward Linux and away from their unique IRIX Unix operating systems. It may also appear that SGI is getting more interested in Linux than NT as in their server products. The company had extensive Linux products on the show floor and were really talking up Linux as a server OS for mixed networks (Windows, Macintosh and IRIX workstation clients). A SGI rep told us, in no small amount of words, that Linux is SGI's future! Though IRIX and the MIPS RISC processors will remain in focus for years to come, Linux -- not Windows NT -- is where the company is directing their long-term efforts. For those unaware of the Microsoft versus SGI controversy on OpenGL support in the Linux market, Microsoft has grown unhappy with SGI's moves toward Linux after the company has been working hard over the last few years at developing unique, high-performance NT solutions. Yet, for SGI, moving its proprietary UNIX-legacacy technologies to Linux just makes more sense than NT for a company with unique hardware solutions and lots of vertical market customers. Servers for Mixed AEC Network Environments SGI's servers fall into Low-end (Intel -based systems) and Midrange and High-end (MIPS/IRIX -based systems). Their Intel-based servers come in NT or Linux product groups with essentially the same hardware for both (1200, 1200L, 1400, 1400L - L systems being Linux). The 1200L server, for example, is a high-performance, scalable, rack-optimized server supporting up to (2) PIII processors. The 1200L is also designed for server farm deployment and configuration. SGI's Linux servers run the SGI ProPack 1.2 for Linux with Red Hat 6.1 on top of the standard distribution. SGI says in their product literature that they are a multiplatform company striving to provide solutions for heterogeneous environments. They provide a number of solutions such as Samba to provide heterogeneous file sharing. The popular graphics card maker nVidia, is working with SGI and VA Linux to bring a high performance graphics standard to the desktop Linux market. (In similar news, nVidia is also bringing their cards to the Mac market by year end) SGI's Linux servers provide alternative (to NT) server solutions for heterogeneous networks requiring high-performance and reliability. Such servers may be excellent candidates for mixed Macintosh, Windows and UNIX environments that have previously been served by Windows NT. If you are contemplating Windows 2000 for your mixed platform environment, you owe it to yourself to check into SGI's Linux solutions -- as the company is serious about being a strong player in the Linux market. Advanced Rendering Machines SGI is also making serious NT workstations these days, systems that utilize Intel Pentium III Xeon processors up to 600 MHz in up to (4) processor configurations for superfast multiprocessing machines. SGI's proprietary hardware engineering technology accelerates NT performance for high-end graphics and multimedia work. This technology is called the Integrated Visual Computing (IVC) architecture and features SGI's Cobalt chipset. If there is an app (3D perhaps?) you can't get for the Mac and really need, perhaps SGI's NT offerings are the solution. Ultra Advanced Rendering Machines Even more powerful (and expensive) are their MIPS RISC R12000 (270-300MHz) -based Octane UNIX workstations capable for 1,344 MFLOPS. These systems are used in MCAD,MCAE, 3D animation (like as in Toy Story 2), video editing & compositing, medical imaging, defense, visual simulation and seismic interpretation. Very high end stuff, but having at least one of these babies around in your firm could open the door to many new possibilities if you have staff with the 3D rendering knowledge! And the good news is, SGI is working hard at solving the heterogeneous networking issues. Other Architosh News Reports and Related Articles Seybold Boston Expo - Architosh Floor Report (Pictures - 1) - [10 feb] - Hot! iDeveloper: Mac programming guru, Dan Parks Sydow, responds! - [11] The iDeveloper and CocoaCard Contents Summary - [11] Art-Lantis Render 3.5: Unlimited flexibility with ArchiCAD models - [7] Autodesk MapGuide Viewer for Java on Macintosh - [2 feb]
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