Tuesday, June 16, 2009

RE: AutoCAD Clones

You might want to take a look at DoubleCAD XT by IMSI (the makers of TurboCAD). They have a free version that works like AutoCAD LT.  If you like the way it works, the professional version is $695. You can find more information at www.doublecad.com.
Regards,
Bill Cain, SE
Berkeley CA


Date: Tue, 16 Jun 2009 13:03:33 -0400
Subject: AutoCAD Clones
From: richkip@gmail.com
To: seaint@seaint.org

While waiting for the economy to pick up, I've been doing a couple of jobs out of my house.  Not wanting to make the big investment by jumping into AutoCAD, I've been trying demo versions of the Intellicad based 'clones'.  While I'm impressed that I can produce quality drawings with these programs that cost 1/10th the price of AutoCAD, I'm still looking for one that is easier to use (ie closer to autoCad with the user interface).

So far I've tried

AxCAD (www.axcad.com) - has a very full featured interface that is basically identical to AutoCAD - down to the icons on the buttons.  It seemed really buggy and crashed a lot - (might be my slightly older computer or maybe the files I was using, but I don't think so).  Also, their website seemed to lack any 'company' information that turned me off a bit.  I finally had to give up on it and went to. .

IntelliCAD   (http://www.autodsys.com/indexh.html) the user interface is not as full featured as axCAD and lacks some of the tracking, snapping, polar functions that really boost efficiency - it gets the job done, but takes a bit longer to get there. Seems very stable though.

Is anyone using another of the cheaper CAD programs on a regular basis.  Any recommendations?

Thanks,
Rich Kipke
www.rookrook.com/rk



Insert movie times and more without leaving Hotmail®. See how.