MacDraft Professional

Love this product...have been using for about 10 years. Run it on my iMac and MacBook Air. Current 6.2 version is the best to date. I was trained on AutoCad back in school and before opening my own business, used AutoCad at the various firms I worked for. When I started my own business I needed a drawing program, but one that could easily work with an iMac. I was happy to find MacDraft. The transition between AutoCad and MacDraft was pretty seamless, there are differences between the two programs, but if you understand the basics of cad drawing, there should be no issues. I use MacDraft for everything design related...furniture plans, cabinetry elevations in bathrooms and kitchens, designing custom furniture, tile detail. Highly recommend this program. And customer service is great...always able to connect with someone who wants to help.

Vorteile

Price point, Easy to get started. Easy to use. Drawing line weights always look professional.

Nachteile

I miss some of the features that are on AutoCad. Dimensioning things can sometimes be a real task. Lining things up, copying small images...I do lots of tile design for bathrooms and kitchens, and getting real detailed and lining things up and be a challenge with this program. I've also found that if I've worked on a document over and over again, which some of my projects take months to create, the document seems to have weird layout issues. Shapes refuse to line up and when I copy and paste, things are completely out of whack. I've learned many things by trial and error on how to manipulate the program, but after all this time using this product, still catch myself trying to do auto cad shortcuts.

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Be patient with the learning curve. I would love to take a MacDraft class...any chance MacDraft might come to San Francisco for a tutorial? Or, better yet, offer online training? I would pay a class fee if I could have an instructor get on to my computer and walk me through my questions. I've tried the "help" menu many times, but my questions don't always appear. Anyway...overall, I'm very happy with product. :)

I've been using MacDraft since v. 1 in 1985. Back then it was as easy to use as Apple's MacDraw but could accurately maintain scaling when moving an image from one drawing to another with each drawing in a different scale. Now, with many more features and capabilities, Mac Draft 6.2 is still extremely easy to use.

This new 6.2 release has a variety of GREAT new features but without a doubt, my favorite is the "page centering" feature. In the past when you opened a drawing and dragged out the size of the window you were using, it was almost always a two-step process: you placed the size of the window you wanted on your screen and then you'd move the image where you wanted it in that window which invariably was in the middle of the window. Now, from the first placement of the window to subsequent adjustments, your image is always in the center of the window regardless of whether you are resizing from the right or left side.

This centering of your document also provides an extra benefit: the Dead Zone. Not as macabre as it sounds, the Dead Zone is simply a place off to the side of your document where you can place objects that you do not need in your image at the moment but do not wish to delete. So, whether it be furniture, straight lines, or sizing rectangles, simply move them off the document you are working on onto the gray "dead zone," and they will simply just "sit there" waiting to be used or not. And anything off the document will not print. So, such objects are "off" but not forgotten--just there when you need them.

Other great new features are custom guides (dragged from the ruler) as well as Smart Snapping of objects where the top, center, and bottom of an object can snap to another object at the same points.

The Welcome screen provides a variety of help features but if that's not enough, there is also a new Helper Palette that will provide basic instruction on any of the tools. Besides the Help provided in the Welcome window, there is also a "New" tab with both blank documents and many templates to help you get started in a variety of directions. And yes, there are all of your recent documents for you to continue to work with.

Despite all of the many new features (I've only pointed out a few). The overall MacDraft application is still the same MacDraft that longtime users have enjoyed for years. Easy to use with powerful performance.

Vorteile

Ease of use and powerful capabilities

Nachteile

Occasional bugs that need to be addressed. (Not as if I've ever seen any software to be bug-free.)

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I've been using this software for over 25 years and it's constantly helped me do my job.