Patrick Aragon of Adobe Discusses Acrobat 3D with Architosh

In our briefing session on Adobe Acrobat 3D, Patrick Aragon of Adobe told Architosh that the lack of Macintosh support of the new Acrobat 3D is simply a reflection of how the product got off the ground. "It is Windows only at the moment because it was driven by the product manufacturing sector customers -- not AEC," said Patrick Aragon, who is Adobe's Acrobat product manager. "Adobe has even limited the languages of this product for this first release."

In our Breeze-driven meeting Patrick said that Adobe would like to take this product wherever their is market demand for it -- and that includes AEC and the Mac OS X platform. "Customer input and partners will all factor into the decision for [further] platform support and development," said Patrick. At the moment the localization is limited as well to just five languages (English, International English, French, German and Japanese).

"AEC is an important market to Adobe," said Patrick, "but Acrobat 3D is initially targeted at the manufacturing industry and that is reflected in our partners and that is partly driving platform support." Adobe's industry partners in getting Acrobat 3D off the ground include: Bentley Systems, UGS, PTC (Parametric Technology Corporation) and SolidWorks -- all primary competitors of Autodesk, a company that is gunning to challenge Adobe in the engineering document collaboration space with its more closed and proprietary .DWF file format.

OpenGL Keeps it Open

Thanks to OpenGL, Acrobat 3D has a chance in the industry to establish itself as a legitimate and strong platform-neutral document collaboration player. OpenGL is an open industry standard that works across operating system platforms and thus is widely used as a 3D technology for most CAD and 3D applications.

Apple and OpenGL

Apple has had one of the finest OpenGL implementations according to developers who support both Windows and Macintosh applications in the CAD/3D market space. And OpenGL has in turn allowed many excellent developers who started on Windows to come to the Mac OS X space and support Mac professionals. One such developer is @Last Software who claims to have found great joy -- and revenues -- in supporting the OS X platform with its popular SketchUp modeling application.

Closing Comments

Patrick said that this is just the beginning of a very important product for Adobe and the Acrobat product line. Mac users shouldn't feel too left out because sometimes it goes the other way -- as in Adobe's decision to develop its new professional photography application (Lightroom) for Mac OS X first. That decision was based on Vista development schedule issues.

In this case, Acrobat 3D is not yet on Mac OS X for a host of reasons, but as noted, it will largely depend on customer requests and developer partners. As Adobe approaches the AEC market more vigorously with Acrobat 3D, and as Apple's developer tools mature more for its Intel transition, we expect both Mac CAD and 3D ISVs and Mac pros to put in their demand for this application.

Although Adobe has made no statement regarding timing, we'd expect to see Acrobat 3D for Mac OS X on Intel and PowerPC no later than the summer time frame...this due partly to what we expect to be heated demand for it from customers.

Postscript

One more thing to mention is that Acrobat 3D supports .obj file format, a very popular 3d file format used by professional 3d applications used in entertainment and industrial design. The Hollywood studios who use these tools for digital content creation (DCC) could certainly benefit from a rich PDF-based review pipeline just as much as any other technical industry.

If you would like to purchase Adobe Acrobat 3D for the Mac then we would suggest calling Adobe's sales telephone number and stating your request with a customer service representative. You can call toll-free at: 888-724-4508.

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