Topic: Autodesk on a Mac...anybody?

[sourdough]

Hi all, I just read they are introducing again Autodesk on a Mac. How does everyone feel about that?

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/31/technology/31autodesk.html?src=busln

Curious how the camp will vote.

MJP

[pkohut]

Hi all, I just read they are introducing again Autodesk on a Mac. How does everyone feel about that?

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/31/technology/31autodesk.html?src=busln

Curious how the camp will vote.

MJP

I Like!

[danallen]

great, now I've lost the last reason I had to explain why my office can't go mac

(not that I have anything against macs, other than the cost and the elitism, and I'm getting too old to learn new s*%^)

[Kerry]

And the available Programming API's are .. ??

 

[Jeff_M]

And the available Programming API's are .. ??

 

I think I still have some Apple Basic books here for the old 2E, I wonder if they will be of any use... 

[Kerry]

And the available Programming API's are .. ??

 

I think I still have some Apple Basic books here for the old 2E, I wonder if they will be of any use... 

I'll hold off rushing to do an Amazon search for a few days.

[It's Alive!]

My first computer was a Mac plus. I used Macs until the PowerPC 7400 before switching to the pc solely to use Acad. 
I'm not switching back to those yuppie candy looking things now.

X apple fanboy

[pkohut]

My first computer was a Mac plus. I used Macs until the PowerPC 7400 before switching to the pc solely to use Acad. 
I'm not switching back to those yuppie candy looking things now.

X apple fanboy

If I wasn't so spoiled with MSVS I'd switch completely to OS X. Other than the single menu instance for all applications (there's a couple hacks for that  ) and couple other UI annoyances, I really like the OS.

[pkohut]

http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2010/08/31/the-mac-cracks-the-engineering-market/

AutoCAD is widely used in both those markets. According to Amar Hanspal, senior vice president for platform solutions at Autodesk, requests for a Mac version were coming with increasing frequency and could no longer be ignored.

The fact that Autodesk was working on the Mac edition was hardly a secret. More than 5,000 users participated in beta testing. Screen shots and YouTube videos of the program in action started appearing on the Web several months ago.

[pkohut]

Image from article -
http://www.macworld.com/article/153761/2010/08/autodesk.html

[It's Alive!]

So what do you use to code on a mac these days? I used to have a copy of code warrior.. I think it was for system 8 or 9.
Anyway, now I have an excuse to go visit the apple store 

[It's Alive!]

I wonder if MacAcad is truly native, or built using QT or similar...  that screen shot looks nice  :kewl:

[Mark]

utoCAD for Mac also offers users easy, cross-platform collaboration with suppliers, customers, clients, and partners because of its support for the DWG file format. Files created in previous versions of AutoCAD will open seamlessly in AutoCAD for Mac, the company says.

Plain DWG's perhaps.

[Mark]

Hi all, I just read they are introducing again Autodesk on a Mac. How does everyone feel about that?

I'm sure Apple is happy about it. Personally I could care less.

[pkohut]

So what do you use to code on a mac these days? I used to have a copy of code warrior.. I think it was for system 8 or 9.
Anyway, now I have an excuse to go visit the apple store 

Mostly XCode and Qt Creator.

[JCTER]

If my techtarded boss, who's easily distracted by anything shiny, goes and buys a Mac, because of this, he's on his own.  I know jack about a Mac and have no desire to learn.

[sinc]

So what do you use to code on a mac these days? I used to have a copy of code warrior.. I think it was for system 8 or 9.
Anyway, now I have an excuse to go visit the apple store 

The Mac actually has development tools that are better than Windows stuff.  When Steve Jobs came back to Apple, he brought along all the development tools they had created at NeXT, and that stuff all got incorporated in OSX.  This stuff was doing stuff 20 years ago that is only now becoming possible on the Windows side, with the move to .NET and WPF.

The interesting part will be that the Mac is all geared around Objective-C and Java as development languages, whereas Autodesk has been pushing everyone into .NET, which is not supported on a Mac.  In fact, not even the old COM stuff is supported on MAC.  Not really sure what Autodesk's plan is.  At the moment, I think we're pretty much SOL for custom development for Auto-Mac.

I'm also curious about what's going on with Autodesk's vertical apps...

[pkohut]

So what do you use to code on a mac these days? I used to have a copy of code warrior.. I think it was for system 8 or 9.
Anyway, now I have an excuse to go visit the apple store 

The Mac actually has development tools that are better than Windows stuff.

The XCode dev tools are very good if you stay within the Objective-C/Cocoa world, for C++ work XCode is pretty raw. XCode 4 is currently in beta and looking sweet, hopefully the C++ support got a little love.

[It's Alive!]

I'm pretty sure that adesk didn't use objective-c  as macros for mac have been spotted in some of the arx headers.  I suspect the compiler is GCC or maybe the intel compiler

link http://otb.manusoft.com/2010/04/autocad-for-mac.htm

[pkohut]

I'm pretty sure that adesk didn't use objective-c  as macros for mac have been spotted in some of the arx headers.  I suspect the compiler is GCC or maybe the intel compiler

Probably gcc or LLVM, both are installed with the SDK.

http://developer.apple.com/technologies/tools/whats-new.html#llvm-compiler

[JohnK]

Awe, Paul Beat me to it...

Can they even use GCC? Im thinking that maybe pre v3 version but not anything after the switch because of licence issues. I would imagine that if they are using GCC 4.2.1 now, most likely they are looking into using CLANG or something in the near future; maybe they will make a huge donation to FreeBSD to get them to hurry it up.

[It's Alive!]

seems Intel's  compiler works with Xcode as well.  Intel's  compiler generates blasting binaries, at least it does on windows.

[pkohut]

XCode 4 is currently in beta and looking sweet, hopefully the C++ support got a little love.

Read the XCode LLVM more closely and

With Xcode 4, the compiler is more than a command-line tool. LLVM is fully integrated into the IDE itself. Syntax highlighting, code completion, and every other index-driven feature is handled by the LLVM parser. If the compiler knows about a symbol, so does the Xcode IDE. C, C++, and Objective-C are all accurately understood at editing time, exactly as they are when building.

This could be the love.

[pkohut]

I would imagine that if they are using GCC 4.2.1 now, most likely they are looking into using CLANG or something in the near future; maybe they will make a huge donation to FreeBSD to get them to hurry it up.

From Wiki Clang

On May 20, 2010, it was announced on the LLVM blog that the latest version of Clang had successfully built the Boost library, and had passed almost all tests.[18]

On June 7, 2010, Apple announced the preview of Xcode 4.0, which includes Clang C++ support as well as direct integration of Clang into the Xcode 4 IDE. This integration provides Xcode with precise code completion, indexing (cross referencing), on the fly detection of errors and warnings, as well as a new Fix It feature, which uses Clang to automatically corrects errors in the code.

On June 10, 2010, Clang/LLVM became an integral part of FreeBSD. While the default compiler being used is still GCC, it's expected that Clang will replace GCC as a default compiler in the future[19].

[JohnK]

Cool! Its an exciting time; those BSD guys dont screw around much.

[mjfarrell]

At this stage of the product BUZZ generation; who cares?

If it goes on for more than 18 months...then It might be worth looking into.

They are all just computers to me.

[JohnK]

I got news for you, by the time you hear about it its been going on for at least 18 months already; Development doesn't happen overnight.

[mjfarrell]

I got news for you, by the time you hear about it its been going on for at least 18 months already; Development doesn't happen overnight.

Let me clarify...
Until this thing is out in the wild in the hands of the general public (tecnotards) for at least 18 months...then it might be worth looking into.
Realistically ACAD on the MAC is not the death knell of all things WINTEL.

[sinc]

The big roadblock I see preventing widespread adoption of Mac for Autocad is the difference in hardware cost between Apple and PC.

That is, assuming they also manage to get things like Civil 3D and Revit out on Mac.  So far, all I've been hearing about is plain Autocad.  I couldn't image using plain Autocad in my line of work.

[JohnK]

Plain AutoCAD still holds the majority of the market so thats why the push for Plain AutoCAD.  The vertical products will not be ported in my opinion.

[Kerry]

At least it has Lisp and Scripts available ... now is that Lisp or AutoLisp I wonder ??

[It's Alive!]

My guess is they did similar to what Bricsys did for their lisp engine in the port to linux, and that's reroute all the VL calls to AutoCAD objects through internal functions rather than COM.  Probably won't be able to connect to external apps though.

[joshua.modglin]

Kean just posted a little about the code available in this version of AutoCAD for Mac:
http://through-the-interface.typepad.com/through_the_interface/2010/09/autocad-for-mac.html

He said that "For now that means a subset of ObjectARX and AutoLISP will be available to developers and customers working on AutoCAD for Mac". This was clarified in a comment that the subset is more connected to MFC UI and COM calls.

Hopefully more will be made available but this is definitely interesting.