CAD on the iPad

IT revolutions are few and far between, but then came the new breed of tablet PCs. Martyn Day looks at how the Apple iPad is already starting to make waves.

Before presenting this review, and in the spirit of journalistic integrity, I have to confess that I was one of the geeks standing in a queue at 7am in San Francisco on the morning that the Apple iPad was launched. It was a fun experience, chatting with fellow addicts until the shop doors were opened, and there was much whooping and ‘high-fiving’ all around.

With supplies being short, launch day units had to be reserved a month in advance and to be honest nobody really knew quite what to expect. It felt to us at least, as if a revolution really was taking place, even if it only came from Apple’s unrivalled ability to create hype around its own products.

3DVia from Dassault Systèmes: Even big buildings with lots of bitmaps can quickly be spun around and navigated.

Launched in April, Apple’s iPad has sold three million units and the company is having trouble keeping up production to deal with the ongoing demand. Apple has twice ramped up manufacturing and now aims to assemble two million units a month, as the Apple tablet computer finds uses at home and in business. Despite restrictive financial times, there is always a place for new technology.

With a ten hour battery life, word processing, email, spreadsheets, photos, music and videos, the iPad does about 80% of what I need from a laptop, but more elegantly and in a super-thin package. The iPad is indeed a beautiful thing, useful and actually cheap for a low-power portable computer.

While there has been more than a bit of hype surrounding the iPad, the machine goes way beyond my expectations. For computer graphics and web browsing it is quite simply the fastest machine I own, yet it only has a 1GHz processor. It is a demonstration of what can be done with custom silicon optimised for a lightweight operating system and the engineering of this thing is exemplary. All of this power is literally at your fingertips and there is enough juice in the machine to last a transatlantic flight with two hours to spare.

It is a device you want to use and is instantly responsive. It also attracts people like a small fluffy puppy, so if your ideal speed date is with a geek, buy an iPad. There are limitations, of course. It cannot multitask, it does not have a document filing system and there is no support for Flash. The most annoying thing, however, is the speed at which the screen looks like it has been smeared with goose fat. I now always carry a screen cleaner with me.

The next operating system update, due November will fix multitasking and the file issue, but Flash is not going to be installed any time soon and you will need to develop borderline obsessive compulsive disorder when it comes to hand cleanliness to keep the screen clean.

For those of you who have always surfed the technology wave, I am sure you would remember the first attempt at the tablet market. These Windows-based machines ran a barely altered operating system on low power processors and totally failed to gain any serious traction in the mobile market.

I remember running Vectorworks on one machine and the battery was dead within the hour. Simply put, the hardware guys had developed the wrong solution for the right idea. Windows was not designed to be used with a stylus, the processors ate battery power and the whole combination crashed and burned never to realise the dreams of the hardware developers.

If you have a spare set of 3D glasses, the Rhino viewer will display the two colour views giving some sense of 3D. It is not Avatar but it is a start!

We had to wait a decade before the industry could get it right. Apple has been first to market but it wasn’t supposed to be the only company to be hitting this market. At the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in January Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft demonstrated the HP Slate ahead of the iPad launch. The HP machine was rumoured to have a battery life of five hours and run a variant of Windows with all the familiar Windows applications, which the iPad can’t.

Unfortunately after the iPad was announced, more specifically the pricing, the Slate was put on hold and HP acquired Palm to aid its development. The product still has yet to launch.

Microsoft also had tablet hardware in development but cancelled this project soon after the iPad launch. This doesn’t mean that Apple is the only game in town with many Asian computer firms developing Google Android-based tablets as well as Windows tablets.

With three million iPads sold and the company not able to meet demand, the market has been proven. When the other Tablet PC manufacturers hit the market I am sure they will find similar demand and I am sure it will revolutionise both how we work with computers and where we use them.

Design tablets

So will tablets impact the design space? Most certainly. The first design-related application was Sketchbook Pro from Autodesk, which enhanced its iPhone conceptual design application for the iPad. It doesn’t take too great a leap to see how these devices will work well for view and markup of engineering drawings, or as an interface for project browsing. There are times when a laptop is too cumbersome or just not necessary. Here a graphics tablet with touch capability will be a better-suited technology solution. Apple has the benefit that both Dassault Systèmes and Autodesk have already developed applications for the iPhone, for sketching and viewing 3D models. A port to the iPad is straightforward.

On SiteP.A.D all the basic geometry is there to be used to create siteplans, sections and elevations. The ability to share drawings and soon display DWG, DXF and PDF will make the system even more useful.

However, when it comes to drawing, using fingers has its limitations, especially when accuracy is required. To help enhance the accuracy of drawing there are already styli available for the iPhone and iPad - my fat ‘porky pies’ on an iPad are most certainly no mouse replacements for CAD.

What happens next will be interesting. Carl Bass, chief executive officer of Autodesk, told me that the iPad opens all sorts of possibilities for development, for instance an application that can view DWF or DWG files, or further enhancements to its conceptual design tools.

Another intriguing opportunity comes with SaaS, or Cloud-based CAD. If the CAD software is being run in the cloud, all you need is an Internet browser and a broadband connection and suddenly your tablet is running high-end 3D CAD over the Web. This is a very real opportunity, with the main downside being the size of the screen. The Apple iPad’s 9.1-inch screen is ideal for viewing content but it is too small for everyday CAD work. Ideally I would like a 19-inch iPad. I admit it would lose some of its portability but it would be a worthwhile trade off.

If the CAD software is being run in the cloud, all you need is an Internet browser and a broadband connection and suddenly your tablet is running high-end 3D CAD over the Web. My colleague Greg Corke has seen a beta web-based real-time rendering solution being run from an iPad.

Before I get too carried away and delude myself that all I will ever need is a little touch sensitive tablet, the reality is that there are only a handful of specific design related applications available on iTunes but there are many in the works.

Conclusion

After the first attempt to introduce tablet PCs faltered, it looks like the tablet is finally going to deliver the goods. The various machines that will follow the initial iPad will drive this new market segment to dominate personal computing and will certainly impact construction.

It is early days but the applications are now starting to become available. Software developers are excited about the new potential they are currently evaluating how they can port their existing engineering tools or come up with new ones.

Over the next year we will see some very serious, cheap and usable applications for mobile devices. I predict that within the next two years tablet PCs will be commonplace in building and construction firms and used for a diverse range of applications, from conference calls and fieldwork to conceptual design. Get your fingers ready.