Mac OS X CAD programs

This webpage may be of some assistance in your search: http://architosh.com/
Hope this helps. Cheers.

After having used the Mac OS version many years ago I also needed to do some work on a new house and so purchased the upgrade of MacDraft for OS X. My experience has not been particularly good.

The MacDraft interface can feel clunky and inconsistent e.g. I would expect that holding the shift key down when adjusting the length of an existing line would constrain the object to it's original angular orientation - it doesn't. In fact there doesn't appear to be any way to do this. However holding the shift key down when modifying other objects does have that effect. Irritating and counter intuitive.

 The way in which the creation and management of layers has been implemented also feels clunky and weird. Opening or clicking on the Layers Setup window hides all the other Pallettes. Why? Layer names are limited in length. There is no drag and drop reorganisation of the layer level in the list of layers in Layers Setup window - I could go on.

But perhaps the most important issues center around the loss of data and the fact that MacDraft unexpectedly quits. Cutting and pasting objects between layers will sometime cause whole layers to disappear - permanently. Fine adjusting the position of objects using the arrow keys will eventually cause MacDraft to crash, freeze or worse for the current document to somehow become corrupted without you being aware of it. Reporting these issues to MacDraft support resulted in the suggestion that I regularly save my work - there is no built in automatic feature to do this BTW. In other words the implication was that it was my fault that I would loose several hours work because I hadn't saved it regularly!

These bugs feels like some sort of memory management issue, as they only develop after having used MacDraft for a while. Unfortunately if you do remember to save your work at regular intervals you can find that the file you have saved has lost various objects or even whole layers.

In all the current OS X version of MacDraft feels like the bad old days of applications on early Mac OS's with bugs and unexpected crashes and quits. No other application I have running on my machine behaves like this. To me MacDraft feels and behaves like a beta version of a Mac OS port . I am neither paid to be or wish to be a software tester. I want to concentrate on designing.

Having looked at other drafting software for the Mac, MacDraft would appear to be one of the easiest to use and apparently reasonable value for money - that's a relative statement as some are outrageously expensive. I would reluctantly be prepared to live with the idiosyncrasies of the MacDraft UI if the thing didn't loose data - unfortunately for me it does. If my experience is anything to go by I couldn't recommend the current incarnation of MacDraft for anything other than the lightest occasional use.

As a general comment, having cast around at other Mac CAD / drafting offerings the Mac seems to be poorly served. I'd be very interested to hear of others experiences in this area.

Archicad and Vectorworks are both professional grade programs available for Mac. Sketchup is a bang up modeling program, but not much (nor does it claim to be) in the drafting department. Archicad is available in an educational version for trial for $79, I think. With your requirements for a bill of materials, it sounds as though Archicad is the program you need. It is a full fledged BIM modeler and can handle all manner of that. Whether you elect to learn the program to this level is up to you.

Good luck.

Mark Lucas said:

>As a general comment, having cast around at other Mac CAD / drafting
>offerings the Mac seems to be poorly served. I'd be very interested to
>hear of others experiences in this area.


I don't have any experience with it, so I can't really tell you all that
it can do, but you may want to check out this FREE program:

Cenon
http://www.cenon.info/frame_gb.html

Screenshot:
http://www.cenon.info/gallery/images/appleScreenShot.jpg



Randy B. Singer
Co-Author of: The Macintosh Bible (4th, 5th and 6th editions)

Routine OS X Maintenance and Generic Troubleshooting
http://www.macattorney.com/ts.html

http://www.ashlar.com/

This is a great product and it is easy to use! I grew up on FreeHand, Canvas, Illustrator, MacDraw and AutoCAD. A great product for CAD !!!

D. Tillman

CADintosh <http://www.lemkesoft.com/en/cadintosh.htm> from the author
of Graphic Converter. Only $33.
--
Roger
Lovettsville, VA

I started with MacDraft in 1987, then progressed to Dreams and then back to MacDraft. I use it mainly for making cross sections of electro mechanical cables so mostly it is circle elements I am putting on paper. There are probably more advanced programs on the market but since I have an extensive library of MacDraft drawings I stay with it. Most of the negatives I have seen mentioned in this thread are not that bad and easily worked around. To me drawing with MacDraft is easy and intuitive. I designed a shed for my wood working equipment and rather quickly drew the prints. Then built the shed from these prints. For an extension on my house, I drew the plans which I presented to the contractor who used them for his work.

PowerCADD by Engineered Software <www.engsw.com> is an excellent CAD
software package. Visit their site and download a trial version.
Does not handle or edit bitmapped objects very well but heck, that's
for Adobe.

I agree that the Ashlar suite of products is outstanding. The 2D CAD
program, Graphite is very intuitive and extremely fast and powerful.
We use it in a professional setting to design civil submarines and so
the price is not an impediment for us.

Over the years we've used a number of programs dating back to Dreams
and the Mac version of AutoCad as well, plus specialized programs
like ProEngineer. The learning curve for some (e.g. AutoCad) saps
productivity. The Ashlar program suite is by far the best in terms of
productivity, ease of use, power and value.

I tried Macdraft, and found it very clunky and also tried TurboCad but finally settled on an Illustrator plug in from< www.hotdoor.com> called CADtools 4 which lets you use all the normal Illustrator tools and functions along with full drafting tools. It leaves all the other programs in the cold because if you use Illustrator it means you don’t have any learning curve.

Richard Blundell
36 Cromwell Street,
Battery Point,
Tasmania
Australia.
7004.
rblundelnetspace.net.au
Ph 61 3 6234 1022

30-11-2005

More on vectorworks .. we upgraded to verion 12, from version 11.5, because of the new GIS features, critically the import and export of shapefiles, which present a real problem on the Mac. Got the upgrade, loaded it keenly and then played with the new feature. Big let down. Vectorworks 12 does import shapefiles (.shp) but in doing so loses the georeference coordinates so the images floats in some random space. If you know some of the object coordinates then you can manually reference the vector files. This was the same problem with the vectorworks plug-in Azimuth which imported shapefiles but lost the coordinates (unless they were lat. and long.). The frustration is that we need to deal with multiple GIS datasets and it is just not possible to manually coordinate. It is like taking a CAD object and importing it without scale, size and volume units, you have the shape but nothin else.

Nick