Autodesk Design Review now free - features and pondering...

Another nice gift from Autodesk... Autodesk Design Review is now free.

This will be a nice enhancement to people who already were using DWF for viewing, but didn't want to fork out the $199 for the ability to measure and redline the DWF files.

An interesting feature
A feature of Autodesk Design Review that I noticed for the first time recently is that it can open a few file types that I hadn't concentrated on before. If you go to "File + Open" and look at the types supported, it includes not just DWF but also image formats such as TIF/GIF/PNG/JPG as well as some older engineering formats CALS and IG4 (which I think is IGES).

While you've probably got your share of ways to view the image files, it's nice when you can have a single application that can view all those file formats (plus DWF) in a single environment. What's more, Design Review can batch print them to scale... You could even markup a TIF file, I bet. Not bad. (We used to have a multi-format viewer called IntraVision way back in the day - I think it's now owned by Spatial Components - but it's nice that they're giving them away these days).

We'll probably look at adding this behavior to our Product Browser application (which views files inside of Autodesk Productstream) - using ADR as a consolidated viewing application.

Point to Ponder
Does this represent another tactic in the battle between DWF and PDF? With PDF's recent opening of the format to the ISO committee - is this Autodesk's move? to make the review/markup/create tool free? It makes some sense to me.