The original note, as written at the time
In CAD and other 3D design software, an intelligent tool to handle snapping so that these platforms can be used more naturalistically — for example with a tablet, in such an efficient state that they outcompete traditional mouse precision.
Ongoing development
An intelligent snapping tool in CAD and 3D design software, so that these platforms can be used naturally on a tablet — to the point where touch outcompetes the precision of a traditional mouse.
Snapping is the whole reason CAD stayed on the desktop. The mouse is a device that reports a position, and a position is what a snap needs. A finger reports an area, roughly two centimetres across, and every existing snap system is built around the assumption that the input is a point.
So the fix is not a better snap tolerance. It is a snap that understands intent, because the finger has already told you more than its position — it has told you what it is near, what it came from, and what it is moving towards.
Drawings are made of relationships. A line is parallel to something, a corner meets something, a hole is centred on something. A machine that infers the relationship being attempted can snap to it before the finger lands, and highlight the inference so the designer can accept or reject it.
The reason this beats a mouse is not screen size. It is that a finger can indicate two things at once — the thing you are placing and the thing you mean it to relate to — while a mouse can only hover over one. That is genuinely better input, and it is why the inference has to be excellent rather than adequate.
The failure mode is snapping to something the designer did not mean, silently. Precision tools must never be confident and wrong, so every inferred constraint has to be visible, reversible and countable.
Tablets have been “almost there” for CAD for a decade. The missing part was never the hardware.