Wednesday, October 20, 2010

Behind the Scenes: Bringing AutoCAD® to the Mac®

Hello,

Here is a short video with some Autodesk people and some beta users talking about the challenges faced to develop AutoCAD for Mac.

Behind the Scenes: Bringing AutoCAD® to the Mac®

I would like to thank you all Autodesk members for the effort and support helping us (OFCDesk) to accomplish our hard job to port OFCDesk IDC to the Mac platform.

Regards.

2 comments:

  1. Hi Fernando... I've been programming to AutoCAD using .NET/C#.. I'm one of the Kean W's follower...
    Seeing the possibility of AutoCAD's MAC, considering that I'm in the start-to-middle way of my work, do you consider migrating what I've done from .NET API to ObjectARX, to future compability a smart choice for now...
    In this direction: Is there any other benefit (performance / maintence) of doing that??
    Once the UI is separeted of the program's heart, I could even keep this part in .NET/C# for later migration...
    Or maybe Mono (http://mono-project.com/) would work in a near future?

    Regards,
    Felipe
    SP-Brazil

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hi Felipe,

    There is no official support for .NET inside MacOSX. There are some third-party initiatives like Mono but I can't see any solid future. The DBX portion is totally compatible including MFC classes like CString and CMap which were ported to Mac via Helper classes. This help a lot and avoid you to rewrite code.

    In regards to UI, inside OSX your have basically two options: Cocoa or QT. Cocoa is native and QT is a UI framework from Nokia. QT can also run inside Windows so it could be a good UI solution if you plan to support both OSX and Windows. In other hand, as a cross-platform UI library it doesn't work smoothly with the look & feel of host OS so if UI quality is not mandatory in your product it could be a good solution.

    There are some Silverlight possibilities in a near future but to blur for a immediate adoption.

    I currently use Cocoa for the UI portion inside Mac OSX so I have to recreate all the Windows UI with Cocoa. It is not the ideal solution but I prefer to take advantage of Mac UI cool features than create a solid and boring UI.

    Hope to help your decision.

    Regards.

    ReplyDelete