About IronCAD Design Collaboration for 2016 by Ralph Grabowski
Feb 29, 2016
The article excerpted here, “About IronCAD Design Collaboration for 2016” by Ralph Grabowski, originally appeared on upfrontezine.com.
The thing about IronCAD is that they innovated a lot of technology that other CAD vendors subsequently copied, such as interactive 3D cursors (IronCAD calls theirs the “TriBall”), dragging and dropping parts into drawings (“catalog-based design”), hybrid direct and feature history designing, and more.
The product goes back to 1998 — or even 1995 if we consider the initial inception — and today the IronCAD mission is to be the leader in “innovative product design.” As a result much of the new stuff in IronCAD 2016 leads to greater design automation. Not the automation you might be thinking of, but in how parts interact; I’ll get into details later. The company’s primary users are in the fabrication and assembly markets, such as machine designers, sheet metal fabricators, and so on.