Blog

Drawings Now on the iPhone

Tuesday, October 30 2007

With the recent launch of Apple's iPhone and iPod Touch, the difference between a PC on your desk and a PC in your pocket has been reduced drastically. Both the iPhone and the iPod Touch are equipped with a powerful browser, Safari. Because of the sheer size of it, the iPhone cannot compete with the powerful Desktop PC, but it opens up many possibilities.

This gives us the perfect opportunity to bring out something on this platform, which is useful, elegant and going to help us explore the future

We are pleased to announce the iPhone version of our Drawings Now product. Keeping the screen space availability and the iPhone capabilities in mind, we have come up with an interface which is smaller and simpler, but the right features you will need on this kind of device.

How do you get to this site? Go to Drawings Now as you have always done.

1. Go to http://labs.solidworks.com

2. Select Drawings Now product.

3. Select the Run button.

Now we will detect if you are coming from an iPhone (or an iPod Touch) and give you an interface which is custom designed for this platform.

Things you can do on this platform are,

1. Once you have uploaded a drawing to Drawings Now site, you can access that drawing anywhere in the world via the iPhone or the iPod Touch (needs a WIFI connection).

2. You will be able to login to your account and browse all the files you have uploaded there.

3. You will be able to view all the sheets for the drawings.

4. You will be able to pan/zoom the drawing you are viewing, like you have been doing on the Drawings Now page.

For panning, you place your finger on the iPhone screen, and move your finger as if you are moving your drawing.

For zooming in or out, you need two finger slide. You need to place both your fingers together, and slide them up or down on the screen.

Comments

James wrote on Friday, August 28 2009

Gary,
Ive been a CAD designer for 10 years and in todays field of engineering and all the CAD driven processes used, most products just simply cant be designed without the use of CAD software. The benifits of CAD modelling are tremendous which is why most products designed today use it at some point in the development process. Benifits from, modelling a design that can then be sent to a STL machine to have a real life, functional part in your hand within a matter of hours, to using FEA for stress and vibration testing, to checking part interfaces, to running complex motion simulations, to programming a CNC machine to machine a part or tool...all this cannot be done with a pencil and paper...try designing a car or a space shuttle with a pen and paper these days...its impossible to even draw a free form surface such as an automotive headlight or fascia with a pen and paper for a start! Even the simplest of inventions I use CAD to design...especially for rapid prototyping where I can have the design in my hand a day after Ive modelled it.
And I to be honest, CAD software is getting more and more powerful and easier to use I believe. Its come a long way in just the decade that Ive been using it for. You should give it a go.

Scott wrote on Thursday, July 23 2009

Gary-

It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools.

J wrote on Wednesday, June 17 2009

Gary, Just because you don't understand how to use CAD software does not make it useless. If you were actually a practicing engineer you would see the use of CAD software. It is real easy when you have a simple design to just draw it on paper, however, if you have a complex design with thousands of parts that have to fit together with high precision, there is no substitute for CAD software. Also if you want to make design changes and in one part and make sure that it will not affect other parts of your assembly, there is again no substitute for CAD software. Yet another reason to use CAD software is that you can work in a team better. One person can design one aspect and another can design another aspect and then you can make sure everything fits together.

Also everything is not consumer products. A lot of machinery is designed in CAD software (for the reasons outlined above). This machinery may then intern be used to build the consumer products you speak of.

Yes if you are designing simple parts or assemblies you may not need this software (and good for you), but don't discount it just because YOU don't need it. It is actually a really great product.

Gary wrote on Tuesday, May 5 2009

About 14 month ago I invented a radical concept for a Home appliace and the major issue is that the Proto-Typing company kept htiing walls for the design because the Software uses obsolete parts that I managed to engineer-out of the product to build it faster and cheaper.
No matter what Designing software or Adobe Picture editing programs that i use they are far too complicated and still don't have the ability to create the shapes or 2D images.

35 years ago I was trained to do drafting with a pencil plus template tools for shapes and angles, BUT........after several hours of trying to adapt to the CAD/Design software I have yet to even come close to creating a simple circle or sphere.

It makes no sense for me to spend 4-6 months in a course to learn this Software when it keeps being upgraded to force the existing Experts to learn the new features.

I have stuck to my Grid-paper and a pencil because it only takes me about 30 minutes to draw what I want rather than the CAD system where after 5 hours I am no closer to having my idea on paper with the right Scale .

God bless the OCD victims that enter the Design Industry with CAD software that consumes their time to keep them busy, for me I like to simplify products as I have done with My invention and I made it a Tool-Free assembly for the End-User.
With a aging Population and shrinking youth employment pool I can only guess how big the crisis will be in about 8 years when products are too complicated for the average consumer while the older Designer retire and leave a hole from the youth that have no time to learn the Software , nor have the foresight to create the future for the Disabled oe aged populations.

kandre wrote on Monday, March 9 2009

i think that its really cool and alsome

Andrea wrote on Thursday, January 22 2009

very good program.
How can I delete upload file?

Silei Andrea wrote on Wednesday, January 21 2009

Ottimo

Emin GUL wrote on Wednesday, November 26 2008

How can i get Drawings Now program
is it free?
is anybody has a download link or web address.Thx.

Kevan wrote on Thursday, September 4 2008

RE: Kevin: With DrawingsNow you can only zoom and pan around a drawing.

RE: Steven: The iPhone doesn't have the CPU or graphics power to run an application like SolidWorks.

Steven Pagdin wrote on Tuesday, September 2 2008

Could it run Solidworks?
What about powering it with lava?

Kevin Quigley wrote on Tuesday, May 6 2008

Just found this. Can you rotate the model as well or is it restricted to zoom/pan?

Kevan wrote on Wednesday, March 5 2008

Sorry about that. Our comment spam filter was being a bit over zealous. It has been fixed.