Thursday, September 24, 2009
Autodesk and Parallels Team to Support Mac Virtualization for AutoCAD, AutoCAD LT, Autodesk Inventor Professional, 3ds Max and Revit Software
Autodesk :: Investor Relations :: News Release: "Autodesk will now support use of AutoCAD software, AutoCAD LT software, Autodesk Inventor Professional software, Autodesk 3ds Max software, Autodesk 3ds Max Design software and the Autodesk Revit software platform for building information modeling (BIM) on Mac OS X via Parallels Desktop. Autodesk added official support for these products on the Mac via Boot Camp earlier this year."
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4 comments:
That's very welcome news. I've missed AutoCAD for the Mac since V14. I realize you can run it through VMWare, but having it in Parallels brings it a step closer to being native once again and should provide better integration with the native system underneath it all. Just doing a very casual survey in PTM I see 3 Mac users and 2 Windows users, all of whom work in CAD at some time or another, some quite frequently. There's a definite market for it on the Mac and now that the only difference is the system calls and library interfaces it should be much easier for them to make it work on both platforms together.
It’s good to see that more and more companies are becoming multi-platform, especially so in this case, since CAD is used in theater a fair bit, and I myself am a Mac user. Many people have used both a Windows, and a Mac operating system at some point, and while many people have a bias one way or the other, both platforms have their strengths and disadvantages. For some people, Windows is easier and more familiar, and others Mac is easier. While it is often difficult to do, companies should try to cater towards both sides in order to provide the most complete service in terms of their software because we are probably never going to have one system that completely dominates a market, and so it is more useful to the consumers to have support behind them no matter what operating system they decide to run.
This is an interesting development - I've been hearing rumors for a while about autodesk trying to win back some MAC market share, but this is an interesting way to go about it. It seems that emulators are becoming more mainstream, even in the eyes or software creators. A few years back when Google was looking at Google Earth on linux, rather than creating another version, they poured a bunch of resources into developing an existing, open-source, emulator for linux, and then ran their program through that. This is certainly a way to increase portability while also helping the outside world.
Parallels is a great product that for the most part, seamlessly integrates a windows experience into the mac environment. I think running the core components that allow this to happen as an almost sub base for CAD is a great idea. Instead of trying to make the program native, why not take the same great windows software and just add a bottom layer to make it work on mac. Because of Parallel's history of success, I have a good feeling about the mac stability of this new CAD software as well.
Or we could all just go buy vectorworks...
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