CompuServe Messages

Doug, I share many of your disagreements with the AmigaWorld review. One thing that X-CAD is _not_, is "buggy". It has never crashed on me either. Also, I haven't found any commands that didn't work as they were supposed to. Perhaps there are some (the author vaguely claimed to have confirmed some problems with Haitex), but I doubt there are as many as he "found". For example, he complained about the trim command – that it doesn't always produce the expected result. I believe that he just didn't understand how to select the the "trimmer" vs. the "trimmee" entities. Having said that, I also must say that I agree with his conclusions about the steep learning curve. The program is much more difficult for an inexperienced person to operate than Aegis Draw or IntroCad. Part of the problem is the lack of Amiga-style interface, but I think that it's mostly traceable to the massive number of options available for each command. Although it's not immediately obvious to me how the interface could be made super-simple, I think that it's worth trying. And there should definitely be more requesters to modify program settings and object parameters. An expanded version of the Aegis "Stats" requester is sorely needed, in my opinion. I am usually pretty quick to become productive with new programs, but I find myself still going back to Aegis for quick jobs – X-CAD really is harder to master unless you use it continuously for a long time. I hear that there is a program called X-Shell coming out. Do you know anything about it? It's supposed to simplify the X-CAD interface. Joel