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Now, why would anyone want to use a pee-cee? |
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I'm already a troublemaker, but would love to become a WildTools Troublemaker (Basic). I'm in my second semester of studying Horticulture Technology with a concentration in Landscape Design at Alamance Community College in Graham, NC. http://www.alamance.cc.nc.us/newsite/ I live in Greensboro and recently purchased PowerCADD, WildTools and the Landscape Library. The Horticulture Department at school uses AutoCad and Eagle Point for Landscape Design. I come from a land surveying background and used both of those inferior and very expensive software packages for five years. I designed subdivisions, road plan and profiles, erosion control plans, and produced coordinate files for construction stakeout. AutoCad and Eagle Point were a nightmare to work with -- unstable, poorly documented, with an inconsistent and confusing interface. Actually they just really sucked, which was one of the reasons I decided to get out of surveying. I've always been a Mac user anyway and surveying is pretty much Wintel only. Having said that, I must tell you how much I'm enjoying PowerCADD and WildTools. Wow! It's actually fun, and I'm a lot more productive. We surveyed a new house for a landscape design project at school and I finished drawing the lot, the house with deck, patio and driveway, etc. in about twenty minutes. Then I did three different versions of bubble diagrams on separate layers and was well into the design process before many of my fellow students had even finished their border and title block. My instructor got mad at me because before the end of lab there was a crowd of half a dozen students crowded around my iBook watching what PCADD and WT can do and oohing and ahhing. He wants me to use the school's equipment and software for my projects from now on. I'm glad I got the PowerDWG translator. I'll just fake it! I don't think I'll get in too much trouble. The head of the department thinks I'm a smartass, but he respects me, too. So far I've got a 4.0 average. BTW, the Commercial Art Department at ACC has an all Mac studio. I took a Computer Graphics course and Typography a few years ago. I dropped off a few PCADD demo disks I got from ES for them to play with. Maybe they can help me out since they're Mac people. Thanks so much for WT. It's great. The more I learn, the more amazed I am. Greg Gunn |
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I have been forced by business circumstances to acquire a Windoze machine and AutoCAD for a particular project, but believe me when I say, I only touch it when I have no choice. There is no comparison. AutoCAD has only grown more vast, and although I must say in fairness that it has improved somewhat in usability, it is still not even out of the driveway on the way to the freeway that leads to the parking lot of the ballpark, wherein the Dynamic Duo of PowerCADD and WildTools hit the ball over the fence every time I do a drawing which is several times a day, all day, and I never get tired of it. Mark Rhodes |
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PowerCADD & WildTools vs all the other CAD programs. Currently using Chief Arch & Turbo CAD & AutoCAD for modeling & construction doc's. I originally choose a PC platform because there were more CAD choices. Now looking at buying a Mac to run Power CADD. Is it than much better and easier, more productive as the Drawing Room articles state? Thanks for the help Bruce Glenn Bruce, My gut sense was a Mac and PowerCADD would do what I needed. I bought a Mac and PowerCADD. Bottom line is... 45 minutes out of the box in PowerCADD I had drawn and printed what had taken me a week with no results in AutoCAD. My drawings where at the foundry the next day. I will never contract with anyone using AutoCAD and will seek out PowerCADD users because I know how much more productive it is. Chuck Gallup I'm a partner in an Architectural/Interior design firm of about 15 people with 10 PowerCADD users. All have come from a non-Mac/non-PowerCADD background. With only one exception, all have bought Macs for their home use. My biggest "training issue" is getting "switchers" to accept how simple and straight forward PowerCADD is. Rick Clanton I used AutoCAD for about four years before I began working with PowerCADD. One of the more narrow-minded employees in my current firm is die-hard AutoCAD user, and he has never used a Mac -- "thinks they look stupid". He has convinced the firm to begin switching over to AutoCAD but I have stepped in. I have found that I can draw many many times faster with PowerCADD. Inserting doors and windows is a piece of cake, and the walls can remain intact. In AutoCAD, you have to trim everything out, use parametric techniques, and basically fight it to get it to do what you want. Even with an extensive library at your disposal, AutoCAD is still extremely clumsy. With PowerCADD, I have found that the use of fills can be extremely userful as opposed to hatches... this keeps files sizes down and the general appearance of the drawings is hightened with this effect. The use of a hierarchal layering system is critical for me now. You can organize groups of layers into "sheets" thus allowing you to keep several drawings in one file, ie floorplans, rcp, foundation, and even elevations and sections if you are up to the task. There is no need to xref borders or floorplans thanks to this sheet tool. These are just a few of the basic advantages PowerCADD has over AutoCAD, and there are many many more, which I should get back to using! Jason Locher I have been using PowerCADD since about 1994/1995. I had started by own practice and come from a large National E/A firm, which used AutoCAD. At the same time as starting the practice, I was teaching at a two-year Community College, where I taught a beginning course in AutoCAD. Yes, the stories are true, PowerCADD is very user-friendly and is built around the intutive nature of Macintosh. Using PowerCADD to me is like drafting with ink on mylar. It is sweet. I have had about 8-10 assistants (College Students-Graduate Architects) working with me since opening the practice. Many of these folks were die-hard AutoCAD users. They learned how to use and be productive on PowerCADD in one to two days. NO LIE. I have converted all of these people into PowerCADD junkies. They usually begin to show me things this program can do. Patrick Hansford |
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I think there is room in this column for those of us whom have always been Mac users but switched from other Mac CAD applications to PowerCADD. I am a recovering ClarisCAD addict who, prior to finding PowerCADD, was being bashed and abused by the MiniCAD/Vectorworks maze. I'll do my thinking for myself, thank you very much. Patrick Hansford put his finger on it quite well when he said "PowerCADD is very user-friendly and is built around the intuitive nature of Macintosh." The intuitive nature of PowerCADD is what makes using it such a satisfying experience for me. Simply, I can do what I wish to do in the way I want to do it. As for AutoCAD, as a programmer at Autodesk once wrote . . . "FATAL ERROR" Michael M. |
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We have five seats of PowerCADD 2000 which I am trying to upgrade to PowerCADD siX. The problem is that I have a couple window loyalists that have the ear of my bosses and are trying to convert us over to a 3D CAD Windows package. We are a production style job shop with turning/machining center CNC equipment and a engineering department that produces approximately 300 assembly drawings and 900 detail parts/fabrications a year. We have been using PowerCADD since 1997. 99.9% of our work can easily be done in 2Dand I have found PowerCADD to be both fast and easy. I and am especially pleased with the flexibility of the dimensioning and tolerancing. My other engineers (rotten Apples) have seen demo's and are telling my superiors that a 3D Windows package like Solid Edge is easy to use, can draw 30% faster, and revise drawings 50% faster. They also say it is superior when it comes to loading and altering our customers drawings (usaully tiffs, dxfs, dwgs, or pdfs). Can anyone help me defend PowerCADD?! Please direct me to comparisons, competitions, first hand knowledge, or anything else that I can use as fuel to fight this fire. I know what I want but how do I convince others? Tom Beno
Tom, I've seen Solid Edge demonstrated to me by a friend in Denmark. My friend, who is an exceptionally bright man and one of the world's experts on acoustics doesn't know how to use it, but his assistant was very facile with it. At first glance, it was very impressive. You build a model by starting with a basic shape like a rod or block, and then you start punching holes in it, adding other pieces and then you can flip it around on the screen, look at it from every angle, then let the software produce a set of drawings for the part. I thought it was pretty neat stuff so I started to look into it more and then think about it. First, I realized that anything you could do easily in Solid Edge is something you can easily draw with PowerCADD and WildTools. Second. All software has limitations, and it's only after the honeymoon is over that you come face to face with the facts of what you can't do with your new, beloved software. I know what I can do with PowerCADD and WildTools, and what I can't do. And then I starting thinking about all the things that I can do in a drawing, if I feel like it and want to, that I KNOW you can't do with Solid Edge. Third. I took a look at the company. Solid Edge is produced by EDS, Ross Perot's old company that he sold to GM and which was then spun off. It's a great company, that primarily does big software contracts for government, like Medicaid programs, or air traffic control system. I believe the old Intergraph mainframe CAD company is now part of EDS. EDS has 137,000 employees in 60 countries, and more than 35,000 business and government clients. IBM, Hewlett-Packard, EDS are all great American companies, but can you name one really great piece of software that has come out of any of these companies? Do you really want to be client number 35,001? How many layers of people are there between you and the people who create the software? If you have a problem, can you communicate directly with them? Can you get your problems fixed? I wrote WildTools, and anyone can email me at alfred@seqair.com. Brian Huculak sent me a note yesterday about a little tiny thing wrong with the Tornado tool in WildTools, I fixed it right away and sent him a note back. If you send a note to Mike Cleveland at Engineered Software, it gets passed around the office and is read by everyone there, as a matter of office discipline. Since PowerCADD 6 and WildTools 7 have been introduced, there are a lot of little things that people have noticed about the software that they don't care for, and we've been fixing those things right and left. Do you really think that you could even be noticed by the Solid Edge folks if you have a problem! I have a lot of friends and suppliers who have machine shops and small manufacturing companies like Allor Manufacturing. Every single one uses 2D orthogonal drawings in their shop. Most use AutoCAD, and each has tried 3D and reverted to 2D drawings. Some have bought 3D solid modeling programs for specialized purposes, and they use these only when they have to create a solid model. My nephew George Stanley, who hates computers, shares my office and has learned to draw with PowerCADD and WildTools, and he cranks out drawings without much thinking about it. He has a big construction job going on, and the architect who got the job uses ArchiCAD, which is the same concept as Solid Edge (build the model, the software produces the drawings). The architect bought the program believing all the claims, and now admits it does very little for his overall productivity, and George can't believe what they have to go through to make even a tiny little change. If you want a good comparison between PowerCADD/WildTools and any other program, talk to Chris Roehl, Kevin Craft, or anyone else in a large office that has a broad range of software running on Macs and PC's, and get a comparison from someone who watches their people crank out work every day with each one. Every single knowledgeable person I know in this field has come to the conclusion to do their drawings in 2D and to use a separate solids modelling program when they want to produce a solid model. Finally, I think you can never go wrong by buying software on the 'happy user' test. Ask your boss to take a trip through the Drawing Room at www.engsw.com and tell me that you can find the passion these users have for PowerCADD and WildTools for any other software in the entire world. Alfred Scot Great Post Alfred, Some people get what they ask for..... here's a case for you... Last year our landscape arch here came to me with a poorly done, hand rendering that was done at another engineering firm. The client was fed up because the firm could never get the color right and revisions took forever. I told him that these type renderings can be done on computer using PCADD. My son was working here at the time (summer help) so I gave my son a brief PCADD tutorial and he was assigned to do this rendering. The rendering that he did is the one that is used as the artwork on the Engineered Software's website, promoting PCADD SiX. Well, guess what.... that dept has since gone through a management change and the new Head is very anti-Mac and pro-ACAD. Now, they are back doing renderings by hand and PCADD has been pushed to the side for more mundane tasks.... and my son has moved on to another company. The reason I was told for this was.... "well, everybody else uses ACAD...." Moral of the story..... if you a follower and not the leader of the pack... the scenery never changes... Too Bad Kevin Craft Tom, In the past year, I have conducted training sessions for four architectural firms leaving AutoCAD and going to PowerCADD. Three of these initiated the move, and one of them responded to my incessant yammering to finally try PowerCADD. In each case, the decision was made in a two-step process: 1. They bought a new computer and the software, and trained
one person to run the new package (PowerCADD). The choice of
this person is important but usually out of my control. All the while, we kept careful records of the times involved, and in every case PowerCADD comes out ahead. I should point out that the cost of the hardware is an objection that is sometimes hard to overcome (but not relevant in your case, perhaps). I like to point out that we are using Macs that are more than 12 years old (we use a PowerTower Pro as an internet and file server, for example), so the true cost of ownership is low. The cost of the software speaks for itself. Certainly, you want to head this of, so that you do not need to do the expensive comparison test, but if it comes to that, the software either stands up and succeeds in your shop, or it doesn't, right? Be aware that AutoCAD and the AutoCAD-derivitives are formidable opponents and they are very worthy competitors; they have a very strong range of capablities, some of which PowerCADD cannot match, and they have, perhaps most importantly, a ready supply of trained and loyal users. In general I have found that PowerCADD can be weak on some features when comparisons are made, feature by feature; but the weaknesses, when examined, are immaterial. A great example of this is the importation of DWG: the requirement for flawless functionality is vastly over-rated (but that is the subject of a different rant). And of course the chief argument is ease of use, and the resultant productivity. Also remember that in the case of your shop you have folks trained and productive on PowerCADD. The disruption is not to be under-estimated. I hope this helps you. I know it's not directly the evidence you are seeking, but it's what I have experienced. And one more thing: moving from a Mac shop to a PC shop has wider implications: servers, email, networks, etc., are all part of the process and can be deal-breakers/ Michael Spencer 30% faster than AutoCAD is still 20% slower than PowerCADD ; ) Lenox Boyd Where on earth did they get THOSE statistics? I can't draw 30% faster in my own mind than in PowerCADD. John Morse As with any software (even an upgrade). One seat should be used to train and find out if it works for you. If they can't prove it is better, then you still have PowerCADD to fall back on. It could go the other way too. This is a little different than the pressure to use AutoCAD because it is the "industry standard" or someone already knows how to use it. But management (non-user usually) often wants to throw over one way and the other. Make a clean break. It doesn't always work that way and you get forced into something that never did work very well because these claims like "30% faster" are easy to make, but rarely proven. EG. In our office there's an urge towards Chief Architect because there is a "holy grail" concept of making models of buildings and quick perspectives for design and presentation--and having smart objects for the construction drawings. There's a belief that this is what computers "should be able to do"-complete the drawing for you. The complexity and lack of flexibility is often overlooked. Peter Bacot I use both PowerCADD and SolidWorks and there are distinct advantages to both. I will continue to use both where they have their strengths, though I am a "sole practitioner". I do not consider it a hindrence to have to use both PC & Mac simultaneously. With faster Macs on the horizon, I may even run SolidWorks again on the Mac in Virtual PC or Real PC. Both are relatively easy to learn the basics. The subtleties in 3D are probably 5-10 times as complex as 2D and require far more than 10 x the 2D expense in the 3D application and the mandatory accessory applications and training & all new high end PC hardware you will surely have to buy. 3D can pay very well with complex machined part generation and molds and stamping dies, etc. 2D has its own well known engineering documentation system to work with for ECRs, ECOs, BOMs etc. Once you enter the world of 3D solids you now add a level of complexity to the management of the data that you didn't have before. The 3D is fine, but you still have to generate 2D drawings and keep all the revisions organized. It takes a literal PDM document management system to keep it all straight. Then there are decisions about how you handle fasteners. Do you use a library of standards and have to deal with managing the standards or do you just put the individual fasteners into each project. Tooling and manufacturing can have differing needs. Running the files on a server and giving proper access to various individuals and different access to others is mandatory. You can't "give" 3D files to purchasing, so do you give them 2D files generated from the solids application or another form of easily viewable document that shows the 2D file. How do you give view/use only access for the shop. Some processes will run from the 3D solids files in the shop and some will use 2D and some will use both. It is not a simple decision based on ease of use, or software cost or hardware cost. It is a new regime, to go to 3D that is distinctly advantageous for certain applications. If customers and vendors use 3D then there is even more reason to consider 3D. Bo Clawson Tom After thinking about your note for several days without finding answers several thoughts begin to emerge. Everyone in forum probably believes the 'Basic Premise of Faster' is seriously flawed. When speaking about 3D everyone who has ever used any 3D package knows the 'Premise of Easier' is flat wrong. Computer hardware and software sales people do tend to advise their products will walk, talk, dance, and sing. They are never correct. Your management is likely looking at $50,000 software/hardware costs. Training and lost production could easily result in another $30 k expense. Whatever the number might be, it is not small. Before spending large sums of money your management should have verification of both basic premises. It should not be difficult run evaluations on a dozen or so of the type drawings currently made. A high dollar mistake can be a disaster for the management of any company. If an engineer simply wants a new toy decisions can be made on an entirely different basis. As an engineer, I like new toys. Toys fall in the category of research cost and are eventually discarded. Thanks for asking. Bill Stanley |
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Life is too short to use bad software |
