Released during the latter part of April, this productivity service from Autodesk attempts to bridge all types of computing devices to be able to utilize CAD drawings effectively… does it work? Somehow it does.
What you see above is the actual shot of the application in action, the display of lines and navigation within the drawing is certainly a breeze. There is no need for any instruction on how to pan around and zoom in or out of places within the model space. Doing accurate lines within is a little bit of a chore especially if you are not working in a tablet environment which provides some clearance for you to maneuver. Snaps to existing vertices are always present and very helpful but the accuracy still requires a little bit of work.
This application shines for checking markups and edits as you are automatically taken to the part of the drawing where the markups have been set if there are any.
In order to use the free service, you have to sign up into the Autocad WS website with an account and manage the drawings within that cloud. I’ve tried opening local files within the phone file system but it simply doesn’t work like that… Here’s how I think it functions: the cloud files, when they are downloaded, are broken down into encrypted folders with numbers as names and without so much as a recognizable extensions, kind of like how iTunes does it with audio files. There is supposedly a direct from email integration method but I’m still skeptical about how it will go down.
Regardless, this productivity service is pretty much a great leap in mobile computing. It further eliminates the tethering of the drafting work from an able computer system to practically anything with either a browser and/or an operating system. It does have recommended hardware requirements such as a 1GHz processor and 512MB of RAM but most of the upcoming devices have more than enough to handle this. Now architecture and allied services have literally no excuse for unattended drafting work… not that good at all ain’t it.
WS stands for WorkStation… fitting right? Haha.
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