This Saturday, the end of people droning on about awesome iPhone apps ends and the start of people droning on about awesome iPad apps… begins. Yes, the iPad is here. Getting one? If you are, and your also into sketchin’ awesomeness with your nubbins, you’re gonna love this.

Earlier today, I got a heads up from Nick Harvey that acclaimed British actor Stephen Fry posted a couple iPad images that revealed something very revealing about what Autodesk may be revealing… in the next couple weeks.

Sketchbook Pro for the iPad. Sha.zaam. What does it look like? Take a gander… and while you do, ponder this… could it put the hurt on the face of Wacom and Adobe?

For all of you students who are drooling to create 3D prints of your SolidWorks parts at school… tough luck. You can’t. The SolidWorks Student Design Kit (SDK) doesn’t allow you to export .STL files and if you complain to the teacher about he will start crying again.

So, besides downloading a free trial of a program like Rhino to import SolidWorks parts and then export, there’s another way that Shapeways user Mathijs van Beers has discovered. It’s simple and uses all the programs that come with SolidWorks SDK.

While I was growing up, I’d occasionally run towards a wall, jam my fingers up into my arms, pass out and wake up to dogs dragging me off into the woods. Fortunately, the dogs were my pets and my fingers healed into agile implements of multi-touch destruction.

And thankfully so. At SolidWorks World 2010 I sat down with Blake Courter to try the new multi-touch features released with SpaceClaim 2009+ late last year. He snickered at my deformed knuckles, but observed in awe my reaction to what I’m positive will be tech that shapes the future of 3D modeling.

Here’s why.

I’m gonna bet a box of matches and some dry cedar that many of you work for companies who enjoy shoveling a fine mush of paper stacks and file cabinet dividers toward smiling documentation specialists. Who blames them… PAPER IS GLORIOUS!

Especially, those first sweet sounds of the day sipping vodka coffee to the whirring of copy machine and paper shredders. Glorious, I tell you… but NOT if you’re a company that has vowed to do away with paper through the entire engineering and manufacturing process.

How could one even fathomed that, you ask?

It was a noise we hadn’t heard before. A dull whirring with giggly snaps. Then it stopped, we pealed the membrane off and all we saw were these links. Hodings – Hodong La’s has the best idea for a floating castle yet, plus more CG to become completely absorbed in. 13 Words not found in…