I appreciate that its effectively an AutoCAD clone, but more and more people are using ARES Commander as a better value equivalent of AutoCAD. I recently read in the press that the 5 biggest Japanese contractors have all switched to Commander from AutoCAD too, so arguably its not a marginal community movement. Are there any plans on this front?
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Congratulations on being the first herald for the ARES cause.
Workflow toolkit enablement is a big part of our prioritisation of new connectors - we haven’t heard from any users that they are building workflows incorporating ARES.
But, as you’ll have seen, the Speckle team 
is not the only path to integration. I see Graebert supports plugin development, so Graebert themselves could connect ARES with Speckle or their developer community if needed.
CTO @Robert_Graebert joined Speckle Community in 2021, perhaps we could encourage him back 
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Hmmh, like with Bricscad.
(Which is pretty similar to Ares in most areas)
They could but maybe they won’t.
Or Vectorworks, not interested.
And if the community driven Connector approach
(AFAIK delayed by unexpected difficulties)
will succeed ?
Doesn’t mean that I think Speckle team would be responsible for
supporting any niche software outside.
There are numerous software solutions out there, and while we would love to support them all, we have to prioritize based on demand and workflow necessity. Indeed, some software vendors may not be as interested in interoperability, possibly due to their unique strategies or goals or looking to sell you your own data via a proprietary cloud. However, we are strongly motivated by the needs and requests of our user base.
Whether software is mainstream or niche doesn’t limit our interest. We’re eager to provide support or facilitate the necessary assistance if there’s a significant demand or a recurring pain point with a specific tool.
We take great pride in our capacity to facilitate connectivity through approximately 30 different connectors into Speckle. In many cases, we are the sole avenue for open-access data, which is a testament to our commitment to fostering a more integrated and efficient digital environment.
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I will try to join the dots on that front.
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HI Robert, hi Jonathan,
thanks for reaching out. We actually looked at porting the existing ACAD connector to ARES some time ago (we have very similar APIs) but we never completed it. We could take another look if that makes sense. We would be happy to donate a working connector if the Speckle team would be up for maintaining it?
Robert
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I am extremely interested in talking about this with you.
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This is great to hear Robert. I have many things that could be facilitated by an ARES connector. For example this morning I’ve got trees that at in the process of being re-surveys in a GIS database that I want to pull into both Revit and ARES.
I am traveling the next two weeks, but we can connect week of June 12. I will also be at nxt bld and nxt dev if you happen to be attending to following week.
Hi Robert. I asked the team to take a look. I think we should be able to do this based on the existing AutoCAD connector. I will let you know when had a chance to check out the existing connector.
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I’ll see if I can arrange and sync at NXT
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Hi Jonathan, I got a first prototype build. Happy to show you a video. Are you going to be at NXT? You can reach me on LinkedIn or email and we can connect then. Robert
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