Yes, I've been on the closed beta test for the last couple of months. You may have better luck if you try later – I believe the open beta was going to go live around midday in Massachusetts.

I'll post something about it later when I have a moment. Looks pretty good for light use. You can have 5 assemblies free and beyond that the subscription is $100/mo IIRC, which pretty much rules it out for the likes of us. However, 5 assemblies is possibly enough for most of us and of course you can import and export work.

Some features are still not implemented yet (eg drawings and some mates) but it's pretty close. There is supposed to be a CAM offering coming along later on.

Murray

Of course the cloud doesn't require you to give up all rights – they wouldn't get a single customer if they tried that! If you pay the subscription, you get 100GB of secure private storage and of course you can back it up by exporting it to your own archive if you feel the need. I don't think you quite understand cloud storage – although I'm not sure which bit you are struggling with.

"With the Onshape Free plan, you can designate up to 5 private documents as active at a time which enables the document for editing. We don't limit the number of private inactive documents or public documents that you have."

Sounds fair enough to me – if you have more than 5 documents, you either make them inactive (and still private) or public. Bear in mind that a "document" can be a complete assembly comprising many parts, not just one simple part.

Murray

If you lose the connection, you just go back in and nothing's lost. They have server farms (one in Ireland for us) that handle all the computing power, so you no longer need a powerful graphics card and Xenon workstation with licence manager etc etc to do CAD. Stuff like PDM / PLM is already part of the concept in OS whereas in SW etc you have to pay another few grand a year for it. Of course, several of the competitors already use cloud storage for that (oops).

There's also an app for iPad and iPhone(yes!). Technically you could edit or even draw stuff up on the iPhone for a bet though I suspect you'd be better off attempting that on a tablet. Handy for showing people what you are up to and possibly even for first look design reviews.

They have also implemented a collaborative working structure that allows several people to work simultaneously on the same assembly or even the same part. I know, I know, all sorts of nightmares come to mind but the alternative is that the various collaborators branch off and you have a nightmare merging again (or only one person can work on it at once), so in fact a successful solution has a great deal to recommend it. Hardly an issue for most of us here but unless you are working on a small product, one guy at a time, it's a handy feature.

Murray

Collaboration
Would this enable several model engineers who were interested to spread the load of converting an old design to metric? Problems of privacy on the essentially copyright design admitedly.
It would also be nice if people did 3D representations of some parts of designs where people have difficulty in visualising off the drawing.

Is it totally 'in the cloud' ie does it avoid even any tiddly runtime .exe that I can't load on my work computer?

got this email

"Hi ,

Thanks for requesting an invite to Onshape. We will send you one as soon as possible."

Almost instant response so at least their front end server is not the usual ZX81 on a tea break.

However it does say Internet Explorer is not supported. I assume that means they are Firefox geeks or something. Also the tablet version mentions an APP.

Edited By Bazyle on 10/03/2015 18:13:16

Hans,

I successfully applied for and received my invitation about 12 hours later.

However it looks like it is very sensitive to browsers and other packages so would try your application using Firefox (which I can confirm works fully or with Opera (which works for the application form but not the application itself it seems). I am not an IE fan so I only use it when there is no option but I suspect this is your problem.

You will only be able to use Chrome (which I didn't test), Firefox (which works perfectly for me) Opera alegedly (but which I could make work) and I think something else but not IE.

All in all, deeply impressed with my initial playing, I have a reasonable amount of 2D experience and virtually no 3D but this had me drawing the beginner's tutorial object in less than an hour and I now have a long list of boxes and 'thingys' to do as source for a newly acquired 3D printer.

Simon

Well I can get all the way through to creating a document but then it just does into a continual 'loading' mode. Same with demos.
Anyone know if it is doing something funny that needs a special plug in or firewall setting?

There appears to be a webinar tomorrow lunchtime (1pm in the UK, 9am EST)

That was a very short test with Firefox!

I got the message "It seems your browser doesn't have WebGL enabled', but when I check it it IS enabled!!!

Continuing with Opera tomorrow.

Re. the webinar: when I check what EST means, I see they have DST now. So what's it in Greenwich time???

Regards, HansR.