Last year, the ITC made IntelliCAD v7 available as a beta to its members. Today, the ITC announced the software is available as a kind-of public beta, and it expects retail versions to ship in 2011. The massive rewrite of IntelliCAD was reported first by upFront.eZine in October, 2005.
I say "kind-of," because the beta is not available directly to us: "Users of products based on IntelliCAD who are interested in participating in the IntelliCAD 7 Beta program should contact ITC member companies to coordinate details."
As to the 5.5-year delay, the ITC writes,
There has been much industry speculation as to the current status of the ITC and IntelliCAD 7 in particular since IntelliCAD 7 was first announced. Although the ITC and this project have been negatively impacted by unforeseen factors, ITC membership remains strong and stands exceptionally committed to its mission of perpetuating IntelliCAD as the CAD platform that offers the best combination of performance, security, and value to both member companies and their customers.
Its good for everyone to keep in mind the unique nature of the ITC - a consortium of independent software manufactures developing a toolkit which can be used to develop clone-like features of a direct competitor. I loose 50% of listeners at the word "consortium" and another 45% at the word "clone-like". Ironically these two words also tend to be simultaneously the ITC's greatest strength and also first point of failure. But from what I have seen (yes, seen) the wait is really almost over :)
Posted by: CADDIT | Mar 27, 2011 at 06:14 PM