A friend trained as a carpenter and now does general sort of stuff -
anything from fitting kitchens to floors or new doors etc. Sometimes for a
building firm, sometimes freelance. I showed him some tech drawings I'd
done on this Acorn using ProCad, and he was most impressed. And would like
to start doing such things on his Mac - at the moment he just uses board
and square where he needs drawings. He's quite new to computers and middle
aged.

What would be a good prog to use on a Mac? Preferably not too taxing to do
simple stuff.

--
*A chicken crossing the road is poultry in motion.*

Dave Plowman London SW
To e-mail, change noise into sound.

Dave Plowman (News) wrote:
A friend trained as a carpenter and now does general sort of stuff -
anything from fitting kitchens to floors or new doors etc. Sometimes for a
building firm, sometimes freelance. I showed him some tech drawings I'd
done on this Acorn using ProCad, and he was most impressed. And would like
to start doing such things on his Mac - at the moment he just uses board
and square where he needs drawings. He's quite new to computers and middle
aged.

What would be a good prog to use on a Mac? Preferably not too taxing to do
simple stuff.

I think there is a Rhino cad 3D Beta Mac port.

if 3D is what you want..thats a great program but £900 to buy.
Mac version is free because its beta.

I use Corel Draw under a windows virtual machine for the Mac.

I think Illustrator from adobe is very close.

All the above have the ability to look good on screen - i.e. they are
sort of artistic rather than pure maths.

Macs have never been well supported for CAD,

In article ,
The Natural Philosopher wrote:
What would be a good prog to use on a Mac? Preferably not too taxing
to do simple stuff.

I think there is a Rhino cad 3D Beta Mac port.

if 3D is what you want..thats a great program but £900 to buy.
Mac version is free because its beta.

I'd say 3D might not be that important.

I use Corel Draw under a windows virtual machine for the Mac.

I did wonder about that as Coral Draw is reasonably close to Draw on the
old Acorn, which is about as easy to use as they come. But I doubt he'd be
interested in using a virtual machine, somehow.

I think Illustrator from adobe is very close.

All the above have the ability to look good on screen - i.e. they are
sort of artistic rather than pure maths.

I've a feeling he doesn't want artistic stuff. Just to do simple technical
drawing.

Macs have never been well supported for CAD,

Sadly ProCad which I love on the Acorn is only ported to Windows. But it
costs anyway. I was hoping there was something simple and free to start
off with.

--
*Can fat people go skinny-dipping?

Dave Plowman London SW
To e-mail, change noise into sound.

On Aug 17, 10:40*am, "Dave Plowman (News)"
wrote:
In article ,
* *The Natural Philosopher wrote:

What would be a good prog to use on a Mac? Preferably not too taxing
to do simple stuff.

I think there is a Rhino cad 3D Beta Mac port.
if 3D is what you want..thats a great program but £900 to buy.
Mac version is free because its beta.

I'd say 3D might not be that important.

I use Corel Draw under a windows virtual machine for the Mac.

I did wonder about that as Coral Draw is reasonably close to Draw on the
old Acorn, which is about as easy to use as they come. But I doubt he'd be
interested in using a virtual machine, somehow. *

I think Illustrator from adobe is very close.
All the above have the ability to look good on screen - i.e. they are
sort of artistic rather than pure maths.

I've a feeling he doesn't want artistic stuff. Just to do simple technical
drawing.

Macs have never been well supported for CAD,

Sadly ProCad which I love on the Acorn is only ported to Windows. But it
costs anyway. I was hoping there was something simple and free to start
off with.

--
*Can fat people go skinny-dipping?

* * Dave Plowman * * * * * * * * London SW
* * * * * * * * * To e-mail, change noise into sound.

Try DraftSight. http://www.3ds.com/products/draftsig...-cad-software/

"Dave Plowman (News)" wrote in message
...
A friend trained as a carpenter and now does general sort of stuff -
anything from fitting kitchens to floors or new doors etc. Sometimes for a
building firm, sometimes freelance. I showed him some tech drawings I'd
done on this Acorn using ProCad, and he was most impressed. And would like
to start doing such things on his Mac - at the moment he just uses board
and square where he needs drawings. He's quite new to computers and middle
aged.

What would be a good prog to use on a Mac? Preferably not too taxing to do
simple stuff.


A bit like word processing, 2d CAD went through rapid development for
several years in the 90s and since then companies have struggled to add any
meaningful new developments to new releases. So almost any CAD program
released since about 1998 will do the job. If your mate only wants to do 2d
drawing he might actually want to avoid anything with a lot of distracting
and complicated 3d capabilities. I still use a ten yr old copy of TurboCAD
when I need to do 2d work and it is totally adequate, but he would have to
run Windows on his mac to get much choice.

However.... my experience is that for drawing room layouts, interiors,
furniture, kitchens, joinery, staircases, roofs and whole houses Sketchup is
a far better general purpose tool than 2d CAD, not too hard to learn, much
more fun, much more impressive in presentation results and just way better.
Also available for Mac.

Tim W

On 17/08/2011 10:12, Dave Plowman (News) wrote:
A friend trained as a carpenter and now does general sort of stuff -
anything from fitting kitchens to floors or new doors etc. Sometimes for a
building firm, sometimes freelance. I showed him some tech drawings I'd
done on this Acorn using ProCad, and he was most impressed. And would like
to start doing such things on his Mac - at the moment he just uses board
and square where he needs drawings. He's quite new to computers and middle
aged.

What would be a good prog to use on a Mac? Preferably not too taxing to do
simple stuff.


Google Sketchup is available for the Mac. Would that do?

In article
,
82045 wrote:
Try DraftSight. http://www.3ds.com/products/draftsig...-cad-software/

Thanks - I've downloaded that for the PC and it looks promising, although
far more complicated than I hoped for (for a beginner). And the ability to
trade up to the full version useful.

--
*If Barbie is so popular, why do you have to buy her friends? *

Dave Plowman London SW
To e-mail, change noise into sound.

On Aug 17, 10:12*am, "Dave Plowman (News)"
wrote:
A friend trained as a carpenter and now does general sort of stuff -

What would be a good prog to use on a Mac?

Google Sketchup. Far more appropriate to carpentry use than most of
the other 2D-centric drawing programs. Pretty easy to learn too.

Otherwise Autocad. If you talk to your local college / job centre and
make the appropriate "small business startup" noises, there are still
quite a few CAD courses around for people in that situation, and it
gives you a legit copy of Autocad at a bargain educational price.

On Aug 17, 2:33*pm, Andy Dingley wrote:
On Aug 17, 10:12*am, "Dave Plowman (News)"
wrote:

A friend trained as a carpenter and now does general sort of stuff -
What would be a good prog to use on a Mac?
Qcad, available free for Linux or about £20 for the MacOs version.
Works with industry standard dxf files.
If you want full Autocad dwg file interchangeability you could have a
look at Progecad.

Russell.

On Wed, 17 Aug 2011 10:12:13 +0100, Dave Plowman (News) wrote:

A friend trained as a carpenter and now does general sort of stuff -
anything from fitting kitchens to floors or new doors etc. Sometimes for
a building firm, sometimes freelance. I showed him some tech drawings
I'd done on this Acorn using ProCad, and he was most impressed. And
would like to start doing such things on his Mac - at the moment he just
uses board and square where he needs drawings. He's quite new to
computers and middle aged.

What would be a good prog to use on a Mac? Preferably not too taxing to
do simple stuff.


I've just discovered a program called DraftSight. It's a 2D cad program
similar to Autocad LT. Available for Windows, Mac (beta), Ubuntu (deb
file beta) & Fedora/Suse/Mandriva (rpm file beta). Looks interesting and
is remarkably similar to LT 2010/2011.


--
Mick (Working in a M$-free zone!)
Web: http://www.nascom.info
Filtering everything posted from googlegroups to kill spam.