Monday, May 17, 2010

Project Butterfly – Autodesk’s CAD in the cloud

Work is progressing with Autodesk’s Project Butterfly that I was covering in a previous blog post about Project Butterfly. At that time, the technology preview was just entering the Autodesk Labs’ sandbox.

Project Butterfly allow you to edit AutoCAD DWG files in the web browser as well as review and co-edit them with others. Could this eventually be a Autodesk Design Review killer as there definitely is some feature overlap.

Autodesk’s cloud offerings are evolving and one of the technology’s enhancement is Google Maps integration. It is very easy and intuitive to use.

For more about Project Butterfly check out the teams blog at: http://autodeskbutterfly.wordpress.com that also lists some of the missing features.

Recently added are support for complex linetypes, leader styles and improvements to Multiline Text as well as the review crop functionality. Try also the easy to use file sharing.

It will be interesting to see if HTML5 will be embraced eventually because now it rely on Adobe Flash Player plug-in to work and thus cannot be used on for example an Ipad.

I still don’t like the offset function as mentioned in the previous blog post: “Offset is limited to specify the distance in the dialog only. It would be useful to be able to specify it on the screen too just like you can with the Move command.”

One thing I could see useful for the timeline functionality is to compare drawings between different dates and have them marked up in red/yellow/green like Drawing Compare in AutoCAD Architecture or the compare function in Autodesk Design Review.

1 comment:

  1. I think Project Butterfly is great. Yes there is feature overlap, but it isn't bad.

    ReplyDelete

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