2009 will see another major milestone in the history of AVA CAD/CAM with the release of version 4.0 of the software. Just why is this release so much more significant than its other feature packed predecessors?
We can get a sense of the magnitude of the changes effected in this release by looking back over the history of the software and, in particular, at previous steps which were deemed worthy of a change in the root version number (the number before the decimal point) of the AVA design software.
Version One was released way back in 1987 using all of the processing power provided by the mighty Motorola 68000 Processor on the first Apple portable computers and written in an early programming language called Forth. Dozens of feature packed releases followed (1.1, 1.24 etc) but it wasn’t until 1994 that we made the big step to version 2.0 with a complete rewrite of the software (in C++) to take advantage of the new Power PC processors in the latest Apple machines. Six years later it was time to change everything again with a Carbon rewrite and the introduction of Mac OSX (which, interestingly, AVA achieved before Adobe – despite the fact we are obviously a much smaller company proving that size is not everything!) with version 3.0 – new software for a new millennium. Other significant releases followed – version 3.3 saw the introduction of multithreading technology and in 3.6 large parts of the software were re-written so that AVA would take full advantage of the new Intel CPUs - but only now, eight years after the release of 3.0, do we come to version 4.0.
*As was the case in each of the previous ‘root version’ steps, AVA 4.0 has been rewritten within a completely new application framework. This one is called Cocoa and was developed by Apple. We tend not to dwell on ‘language issues’ since, in itself, rewriting the software in a new language (which users don’t even see) provides no benefit to our customers. We assume that what you are really interested in is improved performance and additional software features. AVA 4.0 provides plenty of both but it is worth mentioning that the hard work put in by the AVA development team in rewriting the entire application for Cocoa will bear dividends for all of our customers – not only in 4.0 but in subsequent releases – by allowing us to add many seemingly ‘huge’ features (some of which have been specifically requested by customers but which we have, as yet, not been able to achieve) relatively quickly thanks to parallel development work now being carried out by Apple. Many of the excellent new OS features are only available to applications developed within the Cocoa framework and this provided yet another reason for AVA to move now – in order keep AVA customers ahead of the game – rather than hanging on for a few more years and eventually being faced with a choice between a complete rewrite or redundant software as Apple hardware and software development continues to move on at the speed of light. Users opening AVA 4.0 for the first time will immediately notice a new cleaner, fresher, look and feel to the software which may seem familiar to those who already use Apple’s outstanding iApps (iLife, iPhoto etc).