Macworld Expo in Boston last week brought a flood of new products for the Apple Computer Inc Macintosh market, making it clear that when it comes to graphical personal computer applications, developers think first of the Mac. Among such new offerings at the show was Ashlar Vellum, described as a professional-level computer-aided design and drafting software package for the Macintosh SE/30 and II with 4Mb memory. Coming from newcomer Ashlar Inc of Sunnyvale, California, the product is claimed to pioneer a new class of drawing interfaces which it believes hopefully will revolutionise computer-aided design CAD software on the Macintosh. The core of the product is what the company calls a Geometric Inference Engine, which enables mechanical engineers, designers, drafters, graphics artists, illustrators and other technical professionals to create precise, accurate engineering drawings more quickly than ever before by leaving much of the painstaking work to the computer. Vellum’s Drafting Assistant is claimed to be the first advanced implementation of the Geometric Inference Engine and automates the accurate alignment of geometry. Interestingly, it seems that the term artificial intelligence is so discredited that Ashlar eschews any mention of it, even though inference engines are at the heart of much knowledge engineering applications, the implication of the product announcement being that the computer decides what the designer probably meant when he drew a squiggly line. The thing automatically aligns intersection points in a drawing based on inference from previously specified points, so that if the user is drawing a symmetrical object, the program picks up midpoints, perpendicular and tangent intersection points and aligns them based on the geometry already entered. Vellum will be out in the fourth quarter at $1,000. The initial version is two-dimensional, but a three-dimensional add-on is planned.
