Major Delay for IntelliCAD 7?

Deelip Menezes is reporting that IntelliCAD 7 might be delayed a year in shipping to end users. The original shipping date was "first half of 2007." Then, last October, upFront.eZine reported v7 would ship in a year's time -- ie, now.

V7 was supposed to be a significant update to IntelliCAD, one that erased all vestiges of code of its roots in former owners Softdesk, Boomerang, Visio, and Microsoft -- leaving it free and clear.

This release was also supposed to be a new day for the members of the IntelliCAD Technical Consortium -- an IntelliCAD that directly read and wrote DWG (instead of doing on-the-fly translation) and transitioned to the modern ARX API (well, not so modern, seeing how ARX was introduced by Autodesk nearly 15 (FIFTEEN!) years ago.

Along with the delays, it faces now also competition from the free CAD packages that the major (and minor) vendors have released. Ironic, given that the original business plan was to give IntelliCAD away free.

Comments

[Henrik Vallgren]

As I remember it, ARX was introduced with AutoCAD R13C4 (or was it C3?). I'd say early 1996. There was a simpler system, ADS, which I think was introduced with R12. I think that ADS was supported by both AutoCAD and IntelliCAD.

ARX is powerful in both performance and capabilities. It's "as good as it gets" - almost perfect. That's why IntelliCAD once lost the battle and if ITC wants to catch up, it's essential for ITC to support ARX.

I can't understand why ITC is having such problems as the Open Design Alliance have done most of the work. They have to rewrite their commands and implement some details such as offset but having old code that should be a simple refactoring excersize.

[Darcy Detlor]

The ITC has been very careful about making statements about release dates, because rebuilding a complex CAD engine is obviously a big job. I think that the ITC members are satisfied with the development team.

My own opinion is that everything is on-track at the ITC. With almost 80% of all revenue going towards R&D, it is a unique organization that can easily build a spectacular new CAD system. As version 7 gets closer to release you will see more and more companies joining so they can use an ARX/DWG compatible CAD that is completely royalty free for less than the cost of a single programmer.

Darcy Detlor,
President,
MicroSurvey Software Inc.