CADintosh - 5.2

While it is great that CADintosh is a Mac native application, IMO, it is simply too strange an application to learn, to understand and to get to grips with in a short period of time (trust me, I have a BSc in CAD!). Ribbonsoft's QCad, while being written in the Trolltech framework, is not a 'real' Mac application, it runs very well on both Intel and PPC versions of OS X as well as Windows and Linux. QCad is also slightly cheaper (although admittedly it does work on the 'one licence per year' system), but it works- very well in fact, and fortunately, is a lot easier to use. QCad also translates very well into Google SketchUp, making the pair an excellent bargain-price architectural visualisation system.

The biggest downfall with CADintosh was that it seems so sluggish even with an Intel processor. It's display and layout is more like Mac OS9. Okay nothing wrong with that apart from OS X is now 8 years old, but more to the point, I couldn't share any drawings with other people who choose to use different platforms, ie Windows and Linux. Because QCad is multiplatform, this makes sharing with other designers possible, and best of all it makes it possible for others to see that the Macintosh is a viable platform for engineering as well as architecture, and in this "we're all hungry for AutoCAD, but we don't really know why" world, us, as Mac users need software like QCad more than ever if we are to show that Mac isn't just for music and pretty pictures.

Of course, when we've achieved worldwide OS X domination, then we can write every application under the sun in beautiful Cocoa, but until that time arrives...........