While the pc had his 30th birthday in August, an new era is already started in which we all be working on mobile devices. When I look around I see colleagues and friends who embrace this technology in a pace never seen before. The very effective and clean interfaces make it possible that even my 2 year old son can play angry birds flawless, and search for and startup his favorite music clips. This makes me curious how to use this technology in an engineering environment.

Last year, a few months after the release of the Ipad 1, I spoke to people from the R&D department of SolidWorks and shared some thoughts about these devices. Bottom-line was that these devices were a dream come true for the people on R&D who are responsible for the User Interface but a hell on earth for the programmers. WHY? do you probably think. The problem of these devices is that the internal memory (not the storage memory which is most of the times published) is very low compared with a workstation we now work on with SolidWorks. This lack of memory will throw programmers a decade back in time concerning memory effective programming. This is mainly the reason why there is for the moment not a serious 3D modeling application available. But this will change, probably faster than we expect. All of these devices are developed with working online as one of the most important features. That’s why we have to look for a solution to overcome the memory problem in cloud computing. For the device it won’t make any difference in workload when watching a movie on YouTube or you are assembling a massive assembly. This is because only the graphic is send to your mobile device and the entire bit crunching is done in a very powerful server network. During SolidWorksWorld a tech preview was showed in which the vision was very clear. Make it easier to work wherever whenever or with whoever. The video that was released for preview I find it still interesting to watch it and think about how it will be for me and all other engineers when this is our normal working gear.

SolidWorks Cloud: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWDDWu2_CQE

Despite the vision of SolidWorks and the lawsuit of Apple, Samsung etc. about who is the original owner of the overall look of a tablet, I find it very interesting to watch this movie created in 1994. In this movie they show a tablet like device which looks very much like the devices used today. Is the idea of working with a mobile devices and find your information every you are very new and refreshing? Probably not:

Tablet Newspaper (1994): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBEtPQDQNcI

Regards, Renso Kuster