E-drawings for the i-pad was released on May 1st.  It’s great to have it here but honestly I think it’s about 2 years late.  Why did it take so long?  e-drawings hasn’t changed really over the last 10 years and I’ve been running the e-drawings app on the i-pad 1 so from a technical standpoint there appears to be no reason we couldn’t have had this at least a year ago.  Maybe the user demand wasn’t high enough to release the app sooner?  Maybe it was low on the 3DS priority list?  Whatever the reason, it’s water under the bridge.  e-drawings for i-pad is here now and we’re all happy 😉

e-drawings for the i-pad is basically what you would expect if you’ve used e-drawings on your computer.  The interface is laid out well and drop dead simple.  The screen real estate is given to model viewing as it should be.   There is a small drop down tool bar for “home”, “zoom all”, “play”, “explode” and “e-mail”.  There is also a flyout for viewing the model tree, available configurations or drawing sheets.   As expected you can open e-drawings files, SolidWorks native part, assembly and drawing files and DWG/DXF files.  DWG/DXF files means AutoCAD, Draftsight and any other application that can write DWG/DXF files will be view able with the app.  Files can be accessed from e-mail, i-tunes and other online file sharing services.  Once loaded navigating the file is slick and easy.  Rotation, zooming, panning is all done through touch and really nice and intuitive to use. 

e-drawings for i-pad is great for viewing models/drawings but it is lacking some features the computer version has.  There is no support for markup, sectioning,  or measuring .  It also has limitations on the size of files it can view.  This is probably more due to the i-pad hardware than the app.  On my i-pad 1 all the sample files included with the app through a low memory warning.  I’m still able to view them I just need to repeatedly close the warning.  One other addition I’d like to see (for both the i-pad and computer versions) is different viewing styles.  Shaded, Shaded with edges, HLR, wireframe, basically the same viewing styles we have in SolidWorks.

Check out the video here

Overall e-drawings for i-pad is a great viewing tool.  Hopefully an updated version will add the missing functionality found in the computer version.  e-drawings for i-pad can be found in the app store for a cost of $1.99