NOVEDGE blog

Interview with Josh Mings and Adam O'Hern: "Your brain is full of ideas, most of them very bad"

Here at Novedge, we are big fans of Engineer Vs. Designer, Josh Mings and Adam O'Hern's joint podcast on product design. While they are taking a break from their series (and working on new projects), I asked Adam and Josh to share a bit about themselves, the software they use and the innovations of the future. 

True to their style, they sent me this awesome recording. So here it is, enjoy!

 

EngineerVsDesigner: Novedge Interview from EvD Media on Vimeo.

 

Catch up on Engineer Vs. Designer on its website and on Twitter.

Adam O'Hern is the founder of Cadjunkie, join the community and find him on Twitter.

Josh Mings is the man behind SolidSmack and you can read his latest tweets here.

From our CEO Cristiano Sacchi: New Year, Same Wish

We asked Cristiano Sacchi, our co founder and CEO, to share some thoughts for the end of the year. Cristiano loves to look ahead and decided to write about a wish he has had for many many years...

"Another year has gone by and for the design community it was a very interesting one indeed. The fast spreading of desktop 3D printing alone makes 2012 a year to remember.

As we look forward to an even more interesting 2013 I have my usual, still unfulfilled, wish for the software development wizards out there: Will we finally see a good initial stage design concept tool? As a matter of fact, the back of any envelope, or a napkin, still beats any software for very early stage concept design. Can we finally do better than pen and paper to help creativity at every stage?

Over the years we have seen great progress in the conceptual design software space. Products like bonzai3d, Moment of Inspiration (MoI), and SketchUp offer good early stage creativity tools to industrial designers, architects and engineers, but they have not replaced the napkin yet.

The ultimate early-stage design tool would be something that you grab for an impromptu brainstorming session instead of pen and paper when pen and paper is readily available on your desk. If such a tool were available, the benefits would be incredible: the resulting draft model could be used downstream to create many things, such as accurate designs and 3D printouts. Early analysis tools (like like rendering and stress) and remote communication would also be very easy (e.g., you could Skype in a colleague from a remote location to have a quick opinion). And that would be just the start.

I have had this same wish for the past quarter of a century and one thing that gives me hope is that tablet computers have now gone mainstream. Will this new device finally inspire somebody to find a way to replace pen and paper for conceptual design? Maybe the lack of a proper device was the problem – as long as computers only sit on your desk and can only be operated with a keyboard and a mouse they might be intrinsically less appealing than pen and paper – and certainly you cannot bring them with you at breakfast or lunch when suddenly you start brainstorming about a new design idea. Will the tablet be the game changer?

So, will this be the year when I get my wish? Can I get my wish at all? Are napkins inherently better than today’s computers and software? What do you think?"

 

Web Browsers Flirt with 3D

Is the web ready to adopt plugin-less 3D and advanced 2D?

Are web browsers ready for a new wave of 3D and vector-based 2D content (plugin-less)? Is the web ready to adopt 3D and advanced 2D with the same enthusiasm it recently adopted videos? Those were the questions discussed yesterday evening in Cupertino at the Apple headquarters by a group of tech enthusiasts attending a presentation organized by the Silicon Valley chapter of the ACM SIGGRAPH. The official topic of the event was "Browser Standards from 2D to 3D."

there is not a fully recognized 3D standard for the web

Vladimir Vukicevic (blog), a Firefox technical lead, went through the recent evolution of web browsers and described all the important improvements and enhancements generated by a more competitive environment where FireFox, Internet Explorer, Safari, Opera, and Google Chrome are competing for market share. In the long list of new capabilities of the current generation 3D was clearly absent, as we all know. Vladimir explained that there is not a fully recognized 3D standard for the web. Browser developers within the Khronos Group are getting close to a final decision on how to approach 3D features. The struggle is between providing a complete set of 3D APIs (at a level comparable to OpenGL), and keeping everything as simple as possible in order to attract the largest number of web developers. Currently the optimal solution seems for the browser to expose a complete 3D API while allowing advanced developers to build on top of it a layer of software (or library) providing higher level access to less technical web developers (more info here).

who do we expect will be the first to jump on the new 3D opportunities?

In a year from now we may be witnessing the diffusion of 3D capable web browsers (starting from Firefox 3.5) and hopefully the appearance of the first 3D web applications not requiring a plug-in. Who do we expect will be the first to jump on the new 3D opportunities? New CAD systems running from the cloud on the browser? Simple 3D widgets integrated into traditional webpages? New applications able to exploit the 3D capabilities of the browser? Server based CAD viewers? New 3D searching tools? Online 3D games?

What is your opinion?

Franco Folini

Future of CAD: What about the Internet?

I just finished reading Jeff Ray’s (SolidWorks CEO) article on the future of CAD and I cannot help noticing that something that should already have been in the past of CAD is not even prominently featured in its immediate future: the Internet!

Here is a question: how different would CAD systems be today if the Internet never happened?

My own answer: not very different.

How can that be? Everything in our life is different now that the Internet and the Web are mainstream but CAD is substantially the same as it would have been anyway.

What do you think?

Cristiano Sacchi