AutoCAD 2014 for Mac

Oct 23, 2013

Yesterday the first AutoCAD 2014 for Mac customers pealed the virtual shrinkwrap off their shiny digital copies. Here's some info on this release from my friend Micah, the AutoCAD for Mac Product Manager:

There's been quite a lot of press on the 2014 release already, both from Autodesk and beyond (here are but a few examples of the coverage to date).

The release schedule for our Mac version has now been synced with Apple's annual announcements, allowing us to take advantage of the latest & greatest OS X capabilities but also to be part of the launch event (however briefly: watch for AutoCAD and AutoCAD 360 around the 73.5 minute mark in the video). It's interesting to note the Mac Pro announcement: AutoCAD must literally scream when running on that hardware.

I'm not using AutoCAD for Mac much, myself: its programming environments are still AutoLISP and ObjectARX – neither of which I do much with, these days – but I have hopes that we'll get to see JavaScript running there at some point. Lee Ambrosius tells me this release has meant an update to the LISP Developer Documentation (as part of the AutoCAD for Mac online help), which is relevant to LISP developers working on Windows, too. More details over on Lee's blog.

4 responses to “AutoCAD 2014 for Mac”

James Maeding

October 24, 2013 at 10:37 pm

but no .net API? I'm asking, I do not know.
I have not played with the .net ports on mac, curious how that works.
I think the nearest competition will be Bricscad, which runs on linux also. Wonder how they will do things.

This is a good time to ask this question: Who does Autodesk see as its main customer base? Is it more the users, or more towards cad manager types that manage multiple users?
Most industry cad managers I know say its the former. These things impact marketing and choice of what features to implement. Guess which crowd is making the purchasing recommendations though? Curious what your impression is.

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Kean Walmsley

October 24, 2013 at 10:49 pm

No, no .NET on OS X. There are indeed ways to partially get there (Mono being the main one), but that's not the direction we're heading.

I'd really hate to answer the "who's the customer?" question on behalf of Autodesk, as I honestly couldn't say. Firstly it's not my place (or area of expertise), but also because of the diversity (and continuing evolution) of our business.

But yes, the people that are engaging with our customers in order to gather their feature requests must have a better idea of who they're targeting said features at (and I'd say that both constituents you've mentioned must rank highly, of course).

Kean

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James Maeding

October 26, 2013 at 12:11 am

wow, no .net? Did you forget to vote for that on the AUGI wishlist? 🙂
Sorry, could not resist.
Thx for your replies!

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Micah Dickerson

October 26, 2013 at 1:54 am

Thanks for the plug, Kean! We're definitely making progress, and we promise that the dev community is in our sights in the near term. If any of your readers have feedback after trying out AutoCAD 2014 for Mac, I've created a (very!) short survey where they can let me know: surveymonkey.com/s/K7Q7YW6 - thanks again!

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AutoCAD 2014 for Mac

4 responses to “AutoCAD 2014 for Mac”

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