AutoCAD on the Mac and iPad, ArchiCAD 14, and the New Revit Server

Last Tuesday, Autodesk made a product announcement that came as quite a surprise, and an exciting one at that—it is releasing a Mac version of AutoCAD, and simultaneously also releasing a version of AutoCAD that can run on Apple’s iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch, and other mobile devices. It is commendable when a dominant company in a field can still come up with something unexpected—something different from the incremental improvements and product upgrades that are typically so routine that they carry little by way of surprise, let alone excitement. In addition to announcing the new developments at a press conference last week, Autodesk also scheduled an event the same evening in its San Francisco office for select customers and media, providing additional details about the products as well as the opportunity to see and play with the Mac and iPad versions of AutoCAD first-hand. AECbytes looks at what has been shared so far about these two new “avatars” of AutoCAD and analyzes its potential impact on the AEC industry—including the possibility of the iPad becoming an exciting new medium for accessing, communicating, and even creating building information.

Next, we will explore the new version of ArchiCAD, which follows up on the ground-breaking server-based collaboration technology introduced in ArchiCAD 13 last year by offering additional improvements to its Teamwork module and several productivity and performance enhancements. The key focus of ArchiCAD 14, however, is on promoting "open collaboration" between architects and engineers to faciliate multi-disciplinary collaboration and design coordination. It achieves this by providing IFC-based translators for leading engineering applications used worldwide, as well as specific add-ins for Revit Structure and Revit MEP to further improve the accuracy of the model exchange. Thus, it has considerably reduced one of the biggest stumbling blocks to its adoption, while at the same time, highlighting the richness of the IFC platform for facilitating model-based interoperability.

In another surprise move from Autodesk this month, it released a subscription upgrade to Revit that included—finally!—a Revit Server capability to speed up collaborative design across a WAN, and new integrated conceptual energy analysis capabilities that can work with massing models. We will explore these capabilities in more detail in the article, "Revit’s New Server and Conceptual Energy Analysis Capabilities."

Also on the agenda for this month is a provocative Viewpoint article entitled "BIM from Thirty Thousand Feet" by architect Brian Lighthart, which puts forth the proposition that no one really has a global perspective of the complex set of issues involved in BIM, despite it being a global revolution in design methods. But there ought to be a group dedicated to taking an overall view, and be doing something big with that view.

As always, please continue to check out the AECbytes Blog for reader comments and the VendorHub to get a consolidated view of all the technology providers in AEC.

Thank you!

Lachmi Khemlani

Editorials > September 2010