DWG editing goes Web
Published 21 May 2008
Posted by Al Dean
It seems that the battle over the DWG format is still raging - Autodesk claim it’s theirs, others protest. Autodesk tries to copyright and protect it, others protest and to be honest, it’s a battle I’m not really interested in. DWG was an abbrieviation long before the advent of CAD and the copy of BS308 (for those non-brits out there, this is a British Standard for Technical Drawing) proves it - job done.
Anyway, what is interesting is that SolidWorks Labs just launched an online hosted DWG editor called BluePrint Now and it looks pretty slick. With many talking about delivery of CAD over the web, then this is a good indicator of what the first batch of tools will look, feel and smell like. Its built using the Microsoft’s SilverLight technology and the UI is nifty, if a little clunky (as all over the web, CAD apps have been to date). But does it work? I’m going to spend some more time playing with it, but first impressions are that it has some basic tools, lines, circles, arc etc. You can output the drawings as PDF, as DWG again (useful if you’ve made an edit) from AutoCAD R14, right through to the latest rev - or you can email a link to share it with someone.
SolidWorks DWG data - works fine - as you would expect.
I did try loading some data, both from Inventor as AutoCAD DWGs and from SolidWorks. The app has a 1Mb file limit, which is going to be pretty quickly hit if you’ve got any data of any size. It loaded the SolidWorks DWGs fine, displayed them after a few hiccups but you could actually pan and zoom the drawing, add some basic detail. Same for the Inventor generated data.
Inventor DWG file, uploaded to Blueprint Now - seems to work just fine
But this isn’t the point of Labs projects. these things are put out there to show the vendor’s future thoughts - whether they actually reach fruition and become a shipping product remains to be seen. Oh and I just realised two things - Yes, I tried this using Safari and Yes, it works on OSX.
Comments:
It’s great !! Cool work, lots of stuff to be done though !<BR>But doesn’t look that good on Mozilla Firefox :( (The second most popular browser in the world, soon going to be no. 1 
, and much better than IE)<BR><BR>The blue background is not there, and we cannot save files on our local machines from this browser it seems :( <BR><BR>Hope to see a lot more in it in coming days…All the best ! <BR><BR>Piyush Soni<BR>Summer Intern,<BR>Solidworks
Posted by Pi on 01 January 1970 at 01:00 AM
(Update: The blue background is there now somehow ... but the File Saving problem is still there… )
Posted by Pi on 01 January 1970 at 01:00 AM
Watch out for special characters in the username/password when using the Firefox browser. I cannot find any way to enter the following characters :;+=_
Posted by Peter on 01 January 1970 at 01:00 AM
I had an underscore too in my username. Just enter it in notepad or somewhere else and copy paste
Posted by Pi on 01 January 1970 at 01:00 AM
its not god enough for me. the icon is too small, so i must set the screen resolution.<BR>also its take lots of time to loading a file from a server and upload file from local.<BR>The file has a limit max only 1 MB. what kind of drawing has a size below 1 MB ? a simple one maybe, if a complex drawing no you cannot use this tools.<BR>To use this you must download a microsoft silverlight. i cannot use it directly without install any pulgin. i take 23 minute to download a plugin. Its not good enough for user have a bad internet connection like in Indonesia.
Posted by indonesiacad on 01 January 1970 at 01:00 AM
The SolidWorks Data is bound to work fine as it’s created using the same library (Open Design Alliance) that the web application uses. I suspect that the ODA have lines circles and arcs covered. The interesting things to test are the more complex AutoCAD drawing features.
Posted by Martyn Day on 01 January 1970 at 01:00 AM