What the Future Holds for CAD?

What the Future Holds for CAD?

Next time you have some spare time sit down and think about CAD in general. Where do you think it’s going? What will be the next big thing? How many ‘new’ ways to we need to draw lines, circles & arcs?

I think that feature sets will continue to get larger and larger because this is what sells. This is what drives companies to switch from one program to another. But I wonder sometimes how much more stuff we need.

Being of a sheet metal mind set; I would like to see more emphasis place on this feature set. Square to round, cones and other transition wizards that resulted in ‘real’ flat patterns would really be nice. Also more latitude in what can be unfolded would be great. Just yesterday a customer sent me a ProE file that SolidWorks couldn’t unfold but ProE could. The part had fillets that were partially in the ‘bend areas’. We see this situation often and can’t understand why one CAD program can unfold it but SolidWorks can’t. But in fairness, I’m sure that the reverse is true also.

When I think about the user interface I realize that we have a hint of what’s to come by just looking at SW 2008. We will see more and more of this ‘heads up’ type interface in the coming years. Speaking of that, why isn’t the measure tool on the left click pop-up menu? That just seems natural to me.

Picture if you can the current interface evolving even more over the next few releases…now combine that with the voice command interface and maybe even the mouse gestures I mentioned in the last blog. Now we’re getting somewhere! Now imagine, if you can, a pair of glasses that you put on when you sit down to your computer that had eye tracking like the military uses. Instead of scroll bars you would just move your eyes from side to side and up and down. Need to rotate the part? Verbally say rotate and move your eyes in the direction of rotation. Far fetched? Not really the technology is already available.

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Thanks go out to Matt for adding this blog to his Blogroll. If you want some really useful SolidWorks info and commentary instead of my drivel check it out at

http://dezignstuff.com/blog/

What’s next for CAD?

What’s next for CAD?

As I consider this question I can’t help but think back to some of the neat features I’ve seen and used in other CAD programs. So before I address the future features that CAD programs might have I will digress to my past CAD history another day and try to remember some of the favorite things in programs I’ve used.

1. In the Applicon Bravo3 software we had mouse gestures. Hold down a mouse button and draw a ‘Z’ on the screen and you zoomed to that location. Draw a ‘C’ to center the view at the point where you drew the ‘C’. Draw an ‘F’ to fit the screen. There were many more and you could even create your own gestures.
2. Also in the Bravo3 software there was an interface programming tool called ‘Flexible Interface Tool’ or FIT. It must have been very easy to use as I remember writing several programs. I wrote programs to generate the flat layout of sheet metal cones and square to round transitions. I even wrote a game that ran inside of the CAD program. I tried to duplicate these programming feats in Autolisp and DCL and most recently VBA but either I’ve gotten too old to learn or I just can’t grasp the new programming languages.
3. In AutoCAD, I really liked typing the commands using their alias. I was faster at this than my co-workers trying to find the correct icon. I know this really old school and the closest thing we have now is the keyboard shortcuts which are okay but I really do miss the command line.
4. In SolidEdge from the start we could save a dxf of the flat pattern from the sheet metal environment. You didn’t have to place the flat on a drawing view and then do a save-as. I am glad to see that SolidWorks finally has this ability.
5. When we switched to SolidWorks we also acquired the 3Dconnexion spaceballs. They have revolutionized the way I do CAD.

These are just a few of the things I can thing of on the fly…Share your thoughts. I’ve always wished that somehow we could put together all the best things from the different programs and make a new CAD program. We could call it:

Bravo! Auto Solid Works with an Edge

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