To emphasize its role in viewing drawings from AutoCAD, SolidWorks is changing the name of eDrawings -- an accurate but unexciting name -- to DWGviewer. Uh huh. The name change is to be announced soon.
Name sound familiar? Autodesk has its DWF Viewer, but it displays only .dwf files and not AutoCAD's own .dwg files.
Also, DWGviewer will run on Macs, in addition to PCs. Tech Soft America says that its HOOPS 3D Application Framework for Mac OS X has helped SolidWorks bring its eDrawings design communication solution to Apple’s MAC OS X platform.
DWGgateway (translates .dwg files between releases of AutoCAD) will soon have the ability to generate PDF files from inside AutoCAD. Ouch. That's going to hurt a lot of people.
In the Spreading the News department, purchasers of SolidWorks get a 3-to-1 license for DWGeditor. Use one copy of SolidWorks mechanical CAD, spread around three copies of the IntelliCAD-based DWGeditor.
While Autodesk builds a fence around its customer (bundling AutoCAD, MDT, and Inventor into one pkg), SolidWorks is drilling the knothole bigger.
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