DEVELOP3D - Technology for the product lifecycle

There’s been a lot of excitement around the iPhone since it was released, but its not until 2009 that the device started to find a home in the world of design and engineering. last year saw two key releases on the device, 3Dvia Mobile from Dassault and the mighty SketchBook Mobile from Autodesk. But alongside these, what other apps are available that can prove useful for designers and engineers - here’s a few the D3D team has found useful and others that have been pointed out from our community on twitter. Enjoy.

SketchBook Mobile: Let’s start with the mack-daddy of iPhone design apps Awesome use of the multitouch interface and the portability of the iPhone. Let’s you sketch using a wide array of brushes and colours, has layer control, symmetry functions. All that’s missing is a bigger screen and the Rule/Ellipse functions from the SketchBook Pro desktop client. Once that’s done, it’ll rock even harder than it does not. Autodesk pulled this one out of the bag and it’s shifting serious units across a wide range of industries.

3Dvia Mobile: Dassault where first to the draw with a 3D CAD app - but it won’t the last. It’s not a design tool, it’s more a client front end to the 3Dvia.com community. Also includes tools to download 3D geometry models from the web-site, snap a photo and position the model in that photo - as used to great effect by Dassault CEO, Bernard Charles at last year’s DEVCON at DS’s HQ.

MyPantone: This is something i found useful. I’ve always geeked out about three things when it comes to design: Materials. Colour and Human Factors. This app flicks my colour-geek buttons. While the app let’s you flick through all manner of Pantone swatches (which is kind of useful), I found it fascinating for grabbing a quick snap of something you’ve seen and like the look of, then use that photo to extract the colour values by selecting the area you’re interested in. If there’s a limitation, it’s that there doesn’t seem to be a direct match (from what I presume is down to the proprietary nature of Pantone’s business), but to get a quick grab, it’s excellent.

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