Anthony Frausto-Robledo (afrausto@architosh.com)

8 August 2001

Part 1 - Exclusive interview on VectorWorks for Mac OS X

Part 1 - Exclusive interview on VectorWorks for Mac OS X

Part 2 - Exclusive interview: Future Nemetschek Product Direction

Sean Flaherty, CTO of Nemetschek North America

Anthony Frausto-Robledo, Editor of Architosh.com

VectorWorks for X : When Will It Arrive?

AFR My question for you right now is, when do think the Mac OS X version of VectorWorks will be ready?

SF We're looking at the next several months. The September-October time-frame is in the heart of our target area. I am hesitant right now to put a firm date on anything because the technology is something we've been bad at predicting up until this point.

AFR That's fair.

SF We plan to go into a public beta of the OS X version in about a month. Right now we have released the OS X beta into internal testing and we are taking that first set of in-house eyes and reviewing it and then we are going to do a public beta since we have a lot of users clamoring to see the OS X version and we certainly want to get a wider set of eyes on the software.

AFR Who do you see wanting it so badly?

We think the typical OS X user right now is a classic early adopter, because there certainly is a big learning curve with OS X and you are dealing—almost across the board right now—with early release and beta software. So we think in about a month we'll go public beta and probably a couple months after that is what I think would be a reasonable release time-frame.

If anything, things are moving much faster now. We actually have Apple and Metrowerks helping us directly, instead of indirectly through the normal tech support channels. We have a direct line with them and they have really accelerated our development. We went from three weeks ago to actually having nothing working under OS X to having most of the application working and actually having it in our test department.

AFR What was the technical difficulty confronting you with this early development in OS X?

SF Well, we had a couple of things. We've actually been Carbonized for more than two months now. Being Carbonized at the very basic level means that you have taken a completely working application and switched it to the Carbon API's and are linking and running under Carbon.

What we expected was that the time between being fully Carbonized and working was going to be a lot smaller (laughter...)

AFR Right.

SF I think there's been two big areas that have been the cause of our schedule problems.

AFR What are they?

SF First there were quite a few API's that have changed significantly within the operating system. Some examples of that are: we do network licensing using standard AppleTalk networking calls, and those aren't supported at all in OS X and everything had to be rewritten to use Open Transport. The whole scrapbook manager is brand new for Carbon and the previous classic version doesn't work so we had to completely replace our scrapbook handling as well. So going in and working on those have taken up a decent chunk of our time.

The second thing is the debugging environment has been slow coming out of Metrowerks. And that is where they have really stepped up and helped us out. We finally approached them and said, "we don't have any source level debugging", and this has become such a basic tool of our product development it is really like trying to drive down the road with blind folds on and someone giving you directions. You can still do it but it is far far less efficient. We had to revert to some really old style development techniques in the absence of a source level debugger.

AFR I see.

SF And that was when one of our biggest breakthroughs came. We finally got in touch with someone at Apple who got us connected at Metrowerks and they offered to take the whole project from us and take a look at why we were having so much trouble. And this has been a real breakthrough for us.

AFR Now everything that you are doing with the OS X version is related to Carbon. Is that correct? You are not doing anything with Cocoa at this point?

SF We are not.

AFR Now let me help readers get a sense of how much work is involved. How many lines of code are involved in VectorWorks?

SF We were just talking about that before you called. We don't really do a count. We've got in our project about 8000 files, and those are pretty big meaty files; they are not single one object-per-file types of things. We are guessing on the order of ten million lines. But it is a tough measurement.

AFR Well that's a lot. I know for the Alias/Wavefront folks have been outspoken about the 25 million lines of code in Maya for OS X.

SF The scope of the application—and I think obviously we knew this going into the project—is really large. And Paul was talking to me earlier about this, the number of dialogs built-into the core of the application was 175. So if you do anything, like with Aqua going in to make buttons wider and move things around a bit...if you had to do that for every single dialog, it takes a lot of time.

Another thing which is different, like with Cinema 4D—which is also in the Nemetschek product group—they have a very innovative product development technique, and one of their big advantages is they are less specifically reliant on the Mac OS directly than we are and we have a very broad use of the Macintosh which means we are more effected by core changes to the OS.

So what you are seeing are applications that have shifted quickly and others that have not and that comes down to your internal development style.

AFR Let's talk about some of the challenges in detail. I would like to know how you have dealt with some of the Aqua interface guidelines across your dialog boxes and menu bars and stuff like that. Has that been a challenging thing?