CAD cross Mobile

Although SolidWorks hasn’t been considered a technological backwater for some time, I fear the day is not far away when even Dassault will start calling it that. Pay close attention to how DS describes the current SolidWorks product today. Today they want you to believe what you have always believed: that SolidWorks will always exist. When SW V6 hits, their tune will change.

They need to play this one carefully. They will want to sell you the new software by making you understand that the old software is now obsolete, but of course they can’t say that the old software is obsolete. I think people will be confused by the message, because SolidWorks will likely be saying one thing, but meaning the exact opposite. Like nodding your head and saying “no” at the same time, that kind of lying takes practice.

Do you remember the days, say 1999, getting ready for the Y2K bug, and watching internet marketing explode? There were a lot of people who invented new stuff, and anything they could do to connect any product with the internet in whatever way possible was considered marketing brilliance. Of course we all know how that turned out. The bubble of “irrational exuberance” burst, and ideas that had more exuberance than substance quickly fell apart. Connecting CAD to the web made real sense only in some limited ways. We still have a Web toolbar in SolidWorks, with all the usefulness of a coccyx, as a reminder of that time.

So there is a lot of reason to be cynical about the feeding frenzy developing around marketing the cloud and mobile technology. Mobile phones have been an incredibly successful market, especially if you count tablets as big phones you can’t make calls with. They are all just mobile computers. We’re supposed to have quad core devices in the 1.5 GHz range by the end of winter. It makes me sick to think of wasting all that mobile compute power on angry birds and facebook.

Even these devices use primarily local apps, and local data.  Why? Mobile devices are putting very powerful processors right in the palm of your hand, with the local processing power far outstripping the remote data transfer rates, even at 4G speeds. Maybe more important than the power of the hardware are the monthly data quotas. Cloud is going to be limited to “stuff you want to give away”, and applications for widely distributed data, as long as the data isn’t that big. Stuff like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter – all stuff you put there because you want other people to see it. That’s the point, and that’s the strength of the cloud.

The main limiting factor for going mobile with CAD (besides the hard data limits) are the display and the power source. You need a display large enough to do real work on, which is going to require a “sit down” sized power supply (wall socket). Even if we get mobile projectors, batteries cannot keep up with the power requirements we can invent. Power consumption on mobile chips is coming way down, but again battery life is still the biggest complaint about smartphones, especially ones with fast data transfer (4G) and big screens.

What’s the intersection between CAD and mobile devices? It will probably start with viewers and markup. There have been some 2D sketchers available for some time. I think SolidWorks is missing a huge opportunity by not having a mobile version of eDrawings already, especially in light of n!Fuze being such a dud. Siemens Teamcenter already has a Mobility app to give you mobile access to product data. CAD developers need to stop ignoring Android.

I personally think that CAD and a touch interface are going to work well together, once we get tablets/touch monitors into the 20″+ range that can sit in your lap, or at the level of a desktop keyboard. Over a year ago, I linked to a video of someone running SolidWorks from an Android using a remote desktop app linked to a pc. It’s crude, and certainly not the way anyone will want to spend 8 hours a day. But it does give you crazy super powers from anywhere with bars (cell signal bars, that is). While I’m a big believer in touch interfaces, I really dislike gesture-based interfaces, its a lot of silly motion that you often have to repeat to get the device to understand. I still want to touch an interface element of some kind. The combination of touch and direct edit will be sweet indeed.