CompuServe Thread

I thought that I would call the following to everyone's attention: (This is not a commercial announcement, as I am not affiliated with any of the parties mentioned below in any way.) Through the end of April, you can purchase X-CAD Designer (presently the most powerful general-purpose CAD program for the Amiga), for only $199.75 plus $3.95 shipping, PLUS a trade-in of "any commercial CAD package". The deal is offered through InterComputing, Inc. of Grand Prairie, Texas. The retail price of X-CAD is about $600, and the best discount prices are usually in the $350 range. You need to send the order soon (offer expires April 30). It must be prepaid and include the original disk and manual of the traded-in package. I took advantage of this offer (sent in my original Aegis Draw package with a cashier's check and received X-CAD in about 10 days). I am generally very pleased with the program. X-CAD is far and away more powerful than Aegis Draw 2000 or Intro-Cad. It has features like: spline drawing, automatic fillet generation, lines of "real" width, customizable fill patterns, raster plot generation of virtually any density, very powerful polygon entities which allow interior regions to be cut out, automatically generate a polygon around the borders of a series of objects, selectable high-resolution text fonts, many kinds of automatic dimension indicators. It also has a wide variety of "construction aids" such as snap to the endpoint, midpoint or nearest point of an entity, draw lines tangential to circles, circles tangential to other objects, draw perpendicular to, parallel to, snap to intersection – far too much to list here. I haven't seen any bugs in it so far – everything worked as advertised with no crashing or mysterious lockup problems. Also, it is _much_ faster than any other program I have seen – screen redraws are usually instantaneous. An array of 484 circles, rendered in medium curve resolution, takes about six seconds to redraw. Aegis Draw 2000 takes 205 seconds in CustomScreen mode or 143 seconds in Workbench mode. (Aegis takes much longer yet during certain editing operations). Just so I don't get anyone angry with me, here are some things that are disadvantages, or may appear to some users to be disadvantages of the present X-CAD release: No "undo" command, doesn't work with standard Amiga drop-down menus (uses its own style of "automenus" plus optional user-definable "toolbox" type menus), doesn't have file requesters, no way to save color palette etc. separate from the drawng, no way to custom-define plot drivers (supports HPGL, HI, Roland plotters and Laser/Deskjet, Xerox 4020, Epson and Mitsubishi printers), no published info on the file formats, no electronic capabilities like netlisting or PCB layout features. The U.S. distributor says many of these deficiencies will be addressed and new capabilities added, but the support is in a state of flux because the developer (CADVision in England) has been bought by someone else. Although I'm getting quite used to the interface, I would still say that it is a bit much for the occasional user – this program is not as easy or self-explanatory as Aegis Draw. Those who do a lot of CAD work, or who have been frustrated by difficulty of achieving desired results with one of the other Amiga CAD programs, will be most likely to appreciate X-CAD. There is yet another high-end CAD program coming out soon, called Ultra Design (I think it is written by the MCAD/IntroCAD author). I know nothing about this program other than the contents of short blurb on page 84 of the August AmigaWorld. I'd be interested to hear from anyone who takes advantage of this offer, or any other X-CAD users.