Wednesday, October 27, 2004

The Great CAD Smackdown

I just overheard part of a conversation that sounded kind of amusing.
 
Recently, we of the engineering department at the company I work for, switched from Mac to PC in order to run Autocad. Prior to switching, we used a CAD program known as MacDraft. After having become quite adept (if I do say so) at MacDrafting, I can say that it definitely has its merits. It's affordable, quick to learn and is pretty speedy once learned. On the other hand, it can be difficult to draw with very fine precision, and when exporting DXF files for vendors it frequently yields corrupt files. That being said it does what we use it for almost all of the time. It obviously runs on the Macintosh platform. Its quirks, occasional instability, difficulty with high precision and general Mac-ness have been a source of contention and an overused excuse since long before I came to this company.
 
The challenger is Autocad on the PC platform. This program, despite being one of the most popular CAD programs around, has a much steeper learning curve which I'm just beginning to get up on top of. That being said, while this program is versatile and probably will also be fast when I get a bit more proficient, I don't know if it can compare in terms of freedom of layout and speed.
 
Anyway, back to what I just overheard. The Mac fanatic/ Sole computer administrator until recently/ Partner in the company VP of operations and the stubborn/ obstinate/ Windows fanatic Engineering department head devising a challenge to see which could produce a certain drawing faster on his preferred platform. Silly.
 
We already made the switch. Just do the work, OK?

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