These are good tools. PowerCADD is the current product. BUT it is not cheap and it is not currently having new releases (though development is supposedly happening) so can only run on older MacOS. I would say it has been incredibly stable through multiple OS changes. I have a couple functions at present that sometime crash it.
On the other hand it has been SUPER cheap for those who bought it long ago, got many upgrades. and there’s no maintenance fee because maintenance isn’t offered!
I don’t know what you mean " they are essentially online support" . PowerCADD / Wildtools is Desktop. Support is low key. Sometimes you might call and talk to the programmer or other times…? Alfred of WildTools is present in the online forum, active, and accessible. WildTools is often updated, but it depends on PowerCADD, so that determines what OS and hardware you must use.
Great, I will check those out. I do have a brand new Mac. I want to create construction documents for a 650 SF residential addition, so not a big or complicated job.
Not at all. I was trying to get at how folks do SU, and related apps/workflow.
Sorry about typo mistake re PowerCADD. I meant to say their support is minimal as vest I can tell. I wrote to them recently and didn’t get a response. I’ll try again. I owned it at one time so hope I can dig up that license.
I wouldn’t go back to 2D because I like the 3D usuals and drawing once option, but I could see supplementing occasionally, and it would be fun just to play.
Ignore the machow.com comment about how in the old days pc’s were ahead of Macs. Not true. I remember either MiniCad (now Vectorworks) or PowerDraw (now PowerCADD) being able to run circles around anything on a PC, re-rendering multiple views at the same time, when AutoCAD on a PC couldn’t have more than one view open at a time.
Yeah, they don’ have much staff if any.
The 2d application is good for all the non-modeling. things. SO much better than LayOut for texts, notation, any markup graphics and dimensions. And easy to bring in other images and tables. You can explode pdfs, So I mostly use SketchUp for the elevations, besides rendering and other presentations.
Also you can bring topographic plans to WildTools, produce terrain sections, and create a 3d DXF for SketchUp.
PowerCADD is so similar to Adobe Illustrator that I basically stopped using Illustrator for a lot of graphic design work, and just do it in PC like this poster illustrating the use of SketchUp for Schools in my class:
There are imported photos, drawings, text on a path, and radial distribute, which you can do in SketchUp, but here there’s the option to not rotate the object being distributed along the arc. Actually, I thought about doing a video to show why PowerCADD is the program Layout wants to be when it grows up. I think once Layout users see what can be done, they’ll really be asking, “Why not.”
Yeah those days are LONG over with. At least Acad can run on current OS. It will be a miracle if powercadd ever gets updated. I’m afraid that it died with Bill.
