AmigaWorld X-CAD review
2 messages in this thread
Anybody read the Amigaworld review of X-CAD? I submitted a review of X-CAD
to Amazing Computing which is 180 degrees out of phase with AW's article.
Quite frankly, I wonder just how the author made the program crash!(he
states it does so frequently). I and several friends have been running
X-CAD for about a year and NOT ONE OF US HAVE HAD IT CRASH!!!
I've done an extensive study of the program, and I can say it is the _best_
CAD package I've seen for a PC under a coupel of thousand bucks.
The only really justified remark in the article was the crack about the
manual being insufficient. I agree, the documentation does leave something
to be desired, but EVERY CAD manual I've seen is as bad or worse.
As for the bit about how the author drew a simple project which took three
times longer on X-CAD than by hand, all I can say is that the author
probably does not know how to use CAD or X-CAD efficiently. Neither I nor
my friends have this problem.
In closing, don't go by what AmigaWorld says about X-CAD. It is definately
worth the price!!!
P.S. Look in an upcoming issue of Amazing Computing for my refiew. It
will <hopefully> be out in a couple of months, it is _much_ more
descriptive of the program and it's capabilities.
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