CADopia Moves From IntelliCAD to ARES
I have been writing about the trouble brewing between the ITC and its former member CADopia.
- ITC Sues CADopia
- ITC Vs CADopia
- News Alert – Autodsys Feeds Off CADopia
- ITC Takes Down CADopia Or So It Says
- CADopia Maybe In Bigger Trouble Now
- CADopia Takes Down Its Flagship Product
- A Conversation With Darcy Detlor
Yesterday a tweet from Roopinder Tara of TenLinks alerted me to a press release issued by CADopia announcing the release of CADopia 11 based on Graebert technology. That makes CADopia the second company I know that has dumped the ITC in favor or the ARES CAD engine from Graebert, the first being SolidWorks. Actually, unlike SolidWorks, CADopia didn’t dump the ITC. Rather, it was kicked out of the organization.
I went ahead and downloaded a trial of CADopia Standard from www.cadopia.com and installed it. This is the new CADopia about box.
This was what the old CADopia about box looked like.
Click image for larger view
CADopia Standard is priced at $249 and can be extended by plug-ins. The Professional comes with full solid modeling capabilities, MS VSTA and the LightWorks rendering engine and sits at $495. I find this a bit odd because ARES Commander Edition from Graebert is priced at $995. So I am beginning to wonder why anyone would buy ARES Commander Edition when they are getting essentially the same thing for half the price.
ARES works on Windows, Mac and Linux. On November 30th 2010 CADopia released a Mac version and priced it at $995. I am expecting a Linux version soon.
I tried loading one of my ARES add-ins into CADopia 11 but it did not load. It looks like Graebert has a mechanism that prevents add-ins compiled for one ARES based application being loaded into another. Most probably I will need to recompile my ARES add-ins using the CADopia version of the SDK or simply change a signature. I am trying to figure this out with Graebert and CADopia and will share my findings here (if I am allowed to). Stay tuned.