Apple Develops Own Products with Alias and Unigraphics Tools

UGS's big news this week of Mac OS X support for its NX product suite and Teamcenter applications and services can't be under-estimated or undervalued by the loyal Mac constituency. This may have been an effort spanning a half a decade or more. Not in terms of how long it took UGS to developer these tools for OS X, but for how long Apple may have wanted them.

According to Paul Kunkel's tale of the famous but secretive Apple IDg (Industrial Design Group) -- always a group located off-campus in a nondescript and forgotten building, not too far from Jobs' office but not too close to the main campus -- Apple began using 3D CAD for their industrial design in the 90's. This included the use of Unigraphics.

As the tale goes, it all started with the "Blackbird" project, later to become the PowerBook 500 series. This was in 1994. Apple had just made the jump to PowerPC chips but the Blackbird laptops were based on older Motorola 68xx processors.

It turns out that designer Ken Provost, a self-taught engineering type began using 3D CAD as a way to work out the complex curves on the Blackbird project. He did his 3D drawings on a Silicon Graphics Indigo II workstation running Unigraphics and Alias software. Unigraphics was used for the solid modeling while Ken used Alias software for the B-spline curvature-based geometry.

Paul Kunkel's book and tale are very interesting. Apple IDg apparently kept using many of these tools over the years, adding to them tools such as Ashlar-Vellum and VectorWorks.

PLM for Apple

These days Apple would need to develop its products -- or at least desire to -- using a complete PLM (product lifecycle management) suite of applications. If Unigraphics has been continuously used at Apple IDg since the early 90's, it makes perfect sense that Apple may have been one of its primary customers asking for the tools to be supported on OS X. And it also makes sense that they may have had a private PowerPC version of NX for a few years now.

There is solid evidence that Apple still uses Unigraphics as part of its development pipeline. CAD drawings of its iPod line of digital music players indicate they were created with Unigraphics. A "UG Generated" mark is prominently displayed near the title-block of numerous PDF CAD documents available to iPod accessory developers and viewable on Apple's developer website. A reader has pointed this out and claims it means Unigraphics.

It was two years ago that UGS announced Parasolid modeling kernel API support for Mac OS X at the COFES 2004 event in Scottsdale, Arizona. UGS was a title sponsor. It was that year that Apple hosted a tech suite at the event for the first time. Apple is superbly talented at keeping secrets and at that time would only tell us that a major customer of the modeling kernel needed native OS X support. Apple itself was thrilled about this news but we were beginning to wonder what ever became of it until the news broke this week of UGS' plans for Mac OS X support.

The PowerPC - Intel Twist

One would think UGS would just wait until the Intel transition was over to announce support for OS X. It is unusual timing to announce the availability for such highend PowerPC software. Unless of course they have been developing this version for a long time. Say, since COFES 2004!

This suggest UGS may actually have had several parts of the NX product suite fully PowerPC (Mac OS X) ready for some time. And that Apple may have been using it privately. Just another interesting set of facts and circumstances related to this exciting announcement.

Comments? Please send to: anthony{at}architosh{dot}com

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