Mechanical Desktop being phased out?

It seems that the old Autodesk mechanical modeller based on AutoCAD – Mechanical Desktop – is being slowly phased out.

The just released new Inventor version – Inventor 2009 – no longer contains the Mechanical Desktop installer (like the previous versions). If you own Inventor 2009 and you want to install Mechanical Desktop 2009, you have to download it separately via www.autodesk.com/mdt

The end of Mechanical Desktop development was predicted since Inventor R5 but MDT still lives and it is being updated for new AutoCAD releases. But not including it on Inventor media may indicate a starting fall…

Inventor LT 2009 – free for all?

The “light” version of Autodesk Inventor – Inventor LT – will be still free in the new version 2009. The main limit is still the lack of assembly functions but almost all other Inventor features are there, including the conversion of many 3D file formats.

I only hope that this time the Inventor LT 2009 will be available even for us in Italy.

Three-quarter million of Inventor users

The WorldCAD Access site has published the numbers of the installed base of Autodesk products. The most sold CAD software is clearly AutoCAD LT, with 3.680.000 licenses. But the number of us, Inventor users, is also impressive – our community has grown to 775.000 users. Every 5 minutes there is a new Inventor user somewhere in the world.

It would be interesting to know how many of these users are using Inventor Professional. And when Autodesk starts to sell Inventor LT this year, the numbers may grow steeper.