What's Inside? IntelliCAD 8

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Now that the IntelliCAD Technical Consortium is over the huge, multi-year hurdle of rewriting IntelliCAD 7 (so as to plug in ODA libraries  remove all Microsoft-owned code found in IntellICAD 6 and earlier), its programmers have been pushing out updates several times a year like clockwork. No longer the "what ever happened to?" IntelliCAD, it's now the "what's new in?" IntelliCAD.

IntelliCAD 8 is now in beta, and if you ask extra nicely the folks at ITC might, might, might let you in on the beta. But remember: ITC does not sell the software directly; it licenses the code to its members, who pimp up the package with their own special treatments, and then sell it to end users. Here is what to expect when the software ships later this year:

Files

• Now in 64-bit version (as well as 32-bit) for handling larger drawing files and using all available RAM
• Read and write files in native DWG 2013-2014 format (and 2015, too, I would expect)
• Better handling of Microstation DGN files as underlays
• Reads Collada DAE files
• Attaches compressed MrSID MG4 files

User Interface

• New menus and toolbars; reads CUI files
• New dialog boxes for several commands
• Adaptive-sized grids with subdivisions, and lines or dots
• Lots of little additions to layer management, such as states and filters
• IntelliCAD Explorer updated
• Quick select of entities by properties and so on
• Real-time dynamic view rotation

Other

• Raster image attachments
• Advanced rendering component
• Civil3D API
• Improved multi-threading
• Licensing of components

http://www.intellicad.org

Comments

[Dave Lorenzo]

Ralph you stated that:

Now that the IntelliCAD Technical Consortium is over the huge, multi-year hurdle of rewriting IntelliCAD 7 (so as to remove all Microsoft-owned code found in IntellICAD 6 and earlier),

This is not the case. Our goal for IntelliCAD 7 was not to remove existing Visio/Microsoft code but to refactor our usage of the ODA libraries.

Previously in IntelliCAD 6 we only used the ODA libraries for read/write of DWG files and we maintained our own internal database. This caused a lot of delays when porting to new ODA updates as it required us to make huge modifications to our core database code and did not allow us to properly handle custom objects.

We redesigned IntelliCAD 7 to utilize ODA as our internal database so now we properly support custom objects, exposed a new C++ API, and greatly simplified our ODA updates. This effort took a lot of time and resources as all internal commands were refactored and this also completely changed our entire graphics engine.

However, we still have a lot of Visio/Microsoft code in IntelliCAD as there are hundreds of man years of experience/work that would be senseless to rewrite.