AutoCAD "Web" is Chrome-only:<p>"Unsupported Browser. The AutoCAD web app is currently only supported by an up-to-date version of 64-bit Google Chrome on Windows or Mac."<p><a href="https://web.autocad.com/" rel="nofollow">https://web.autocad.com/</a>
Something similar existed years ago with ME10 running on HPUX. Many similar things existed. Workflows centrally hosted, on site, with terminals or workstation clients. Literally many engineers could work on a single drawing or design and individually created or updated. And of course the updates would synchronise between clients.<p>Nix hosted, colloborative workflows. What is old is new again.<p>Personal Computer software like Solidworks or Maya might seem "cool" or cheaper; I once made money as a contractor recreating what companies lost from older solutions and refused to pay for from platforms like Catia.
These frustrating paradigms are not excuslive to CAD or DCC.<p>So many designers and architects I know still use pen and paper more than software, I am not sure if the tooling advancements in PC hosted software has outweighed what was lost in centralised, transaction backed, collaborative workflows.
SketchUp has been running in the brower for the better part of a year (or at least their free version does): <a href="https://help.sketchup.com/en/article/3000315" rel="nofollow">https://help.sketchup.com/en/article/3000315</a><p>I wasn't able to find any technical information about whether SketchUp takes the same approach of compiling their desktop code to Emscripten.
Why can't they just wrap it into Electron or Meteor and go full circle desktop-web-desktop, all in C++, just eating a few more gigabytes for V8? It's so super enjoyable to see Chrome header, buttons etc. on top of any desktop app, really!<p>Something in our industry went horribly wrong, investments going to self-serving "innovations" instead of needed areas.<p>This is probably an attempt to turn a full-blown desktop app into a SaaS-bound, remotely-delivered app without much concern for users. I guess we will have to get used to it; next is likely going to be Photoshop & co.
The future of AutoCAD is certainly not web, but BIM. Their biggest problem is that BIM standards are national, so have to be provided by third party devs. Which does not allow coming up with proper general solutions for the more technical challenges of working with large BIM projects. Web is only a toy, like the first internet connected AutoCAD versions 2000.
I hate webapps. What will happen to scripting, application automation? Just have a look, how dumbed down most webapps are when compared to their desktop parts or similare programs as desktop version.
This probably doesn't count as full-blown CAD, but there exists a cool and mature desktop 3D modelling application written in _ERLANG_! How can you resist at least trying that? It's called Wings3D:<p><a href="http://www.wings3d.com/wp-content/uploads//SS01.png" rel="nofollow">http://www.wings3d.com/wp-content/uploads//SS01.png</a><p><a href="http://www.wings3d.com/wp-content/uploads//Amx141prscr.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://www.wings3d.com/wp-content/uploads//Amx141prscr.jpg</a><p><a href="http://www.wings3d.com/?page_id=84" rel="nofollow">http://www.wings3d.com/?page_id=84</a>
You would think, if you wrote a hosted CAD program that ran on large compute instances in AWS, you'd really lock the market down. No more buying expensive CAD workstations, way less graphics drivers, just fire it up. Need more power? Just pay more each month/day/hour. Plus you could host all your giant CAD files in the cloud, no more buying storage and easier to share across remote teams.