All 2D commands and 3D viewing
Running full CAD on a mobile device is not new for Graebert GmhH. Company owner Wilfried Graebert in 2000 asked his son, “Can’t CAD run on Windows CE?”
“Of course,” said his son, and wrote it for his Master’s thesis. Not even Autodesk ever did this. And so Graebert had the first DWG-based mobile CAD that is known as SiteMaster and is popular with surveyors. It turned into a service business for Graebert under another company name.
The most recent version is SiteMaster BIM, which exports drawings in IFC format. This year, Graebert ports ARES to Android 4.0 and up, so that CAD can run on lightweight tablets with long battery life. The touch version has a different interface so that touch works better. But the command structure is the same, so there is little in the way of a learning curve. It works on phones, but Graebert recommends 7” or larger.
In addition, Touch has LISP and C++ API (Tx), making it easy to migrate code from desktop to the Android OS.
There are barriers:
- Will users want to do full CAD on a tablet?
- Does the small screen work with my (big) fingers?
We are now being demoed it on an 8.4” Galaxy Tab S, with an HDMI adapter to display on the room’s projector.
ARES Touch starts in file explorer, includes some 2D and 3D demo files, but also uses Dropbox for file transfer.
Once a drawing is open, the top has common tools. A popout displays all commands, and a command-line interface. Toolbar on the side has groups of commands. The toolbar changes as you change modes to display the most likely commands – just like the old sidebar menus from AutoCAD v1! For example, choose text and text editing options show up in the sidebar.
Sidebar menu changes dynamically, according to the context: called "Design for Flow"
Along the bottom are options for the current command; along the top is the user input area. When touching the screen, an offset bird’s-eye view enlarges the area under the finger.
Dialog boxes appear as slideout palettes
Dialog boxes are displayed as side-out layouts. OLE is not supported, just like Mac and Linux don't have it. The test drawing Budwiser.dwg works correctly, except for OLE and one text color is wrong. Even clipped viewports work. Tap and hold to create selection windows.
All 2D, but only views 3D (and renders them). Intitally ships with 150 commands; will add more Google Drive file cloud integration, email, and USB to come. Loads and runs LISP (and AutoLISP) files. "No artificial limitation" to DWG file size; it depends on the memory present in the tablet, which tends to be between 1GB and 3GB.
Install size 40MB -- which includes most of ARES and Teigha in a compact file; reads and writes native DWG 2013/4/5, unlike some other mobile CAD apps, which sometimes use proprietary formats. Ships beta in November with ARES Commander.
Graebert says that SiteMaster shows that there is a huge market for portable CAD, and so
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