AutoCAD for Mac - a good reason to stick with VW

[Alan Boughey]

Despite the apparent demise of the standalone Machine Design product line in VW, the new release of AutoCAD for Mac does little for me. Although we have all had a few things to complain about in VW2011, it is still one of the easiest CAD packages to use, and for those old enough to have used board and paper, still matches the old drafting model.

Now we need to improve the export capabilities of VW to make it even easier to provide our clients with files in the format that they want with us using the CAD package of our choice.

[Bob Holtzmann]

A slight consolation over Machine Design's retirement: I've found some of its plug-in tools (hardware and gears) and commands (for beam design) in Vw Architect 2011. And, of course, all of it can still be found in Designer 2011.

I also am too comfortable with the Vw CAD environment to fall back into (ack!) ACAD. But I did download Draftsight to do some collaboration through viewing and editing DWG files.

[Alan Boughey]

If we are talking about Machine Design specific applications for the mac environment then there is really no news that I know of, other than that ACAD for mac is now out (but that is not truly a vertical application). While there are a number of applications in the Windows environment that are more suited to Machine Design, these ate yet to be translated to the Mac environment. These have been discussed in a number of other threads.