cad-casd program for Mac OSX

[naupigos_gr]

hello!
any mac osx users ?
which cad-casd program use on mac?

rhinoceros 3d coming soon for mac osx

[ludesign]

Originally Posted by naupigos_gr

hello!
any mac osx users ?
which cad-casd program use on mac?

If you search for "CAD" here:
http://guide.apple.com/
..you will find that there are quite a lot of programs available.

I use TouchCAD (of course! ) and to some extent Vectorworks.

[naupigos_gr]

im a undergraduate student and i cant afford license for Touchcad

[Andrew Mason]

I use a Macbook Pro as my day to day machine, running Win XP via Bootcamp. I have recently installed VMware Fusion to allow me to run Windows applications within the Mac OS.

Works very well on the laptop screen, although there are some performance issues using a large external monitor. If you can buy a copy of Fusion and a copy of Win XP at reasonable cost this may give you the best of both worlds.

[CGN]

Viacad

[kroberts]

One thing that I don't think people know about is that Mac OSX is Unix underneath.

I'm a Linux user. I was looking at CAD apps a while back, nothing serious just seeing if something jumped out at me. What jumped out at me is the number of CAD apps for Linux which also had versions for Mac OSX.

I was browsing here http://www.tech-edv.co.at/lunix/CADlinks.html (which you get by googling "Linux cad" and picking the first link) and then clicking on each thing that was interesting to me.

Some of these are commercial products. Some of them are free. Some are in the middle somewhere, often with a free or reduced price for students. Some are Open Source, and some are very much not finished.

Capability wise, many of these programs are very specific in terms of type of use. Some are a guy's senior project, and some are not very easy to use.

I would start by looking at Mac OSX CAD searches, but after that maybe look into the above page. Searching on MAC OSX tends to get you very polished commercial products. This list above, some of the apps run on Mac but they might not have the polished interface.

It will take you some time to work through that list, and some of the apps are pretty crappy. Maybe one of the mac ones has the features you need and the price you can afford?

[aaaaron]

Originally Posted by Andrew Mason

I use a Macbook Pro as my day to day machine, running Win XP via Bootcamp. I have recently installed VMware Fusion to allow me to run Windows applications within the Mac OS.

Works very well on the laptop screen, although there are some performance issues using a large external monitor. If you can buy a copy of Fusion and a copy of Win XP at reasonable cost this may give you the best of both worlds.

I don't see how this is the best of both worlds -- you have the added cost of branded proprietary mac hardware and the full glitches of the windows operating system. It seems great if your primary application is mac based to give you that extra flexibility, but if your primary application is windows based, doesn't this actually give you the worst of both worlds (higher cost + same glitches of windows) ?

[kroberts]

Is Boot Camp a virtual machine environment, or a dual boot? Apple's site is typically vague about how things actually work. It appears to be a VM of some sort.

Virtual machines is something I know about, unlike boats.

If it's a virtual machine environment, there are actually good reasons to be running Windows from a VM on a Mac. Virtual machines like VMware emulate a single type of video card, a single ethernet card and so on. They pick an extremely common, reliable example of each, for which every OS builds good drivers. The VM software maps the real hardware over to the virtual hardware. There is much less to write for in this case, and the possibilities are easier to test. Your host OS handles the real hardware, which you presumably have working properly.

At one point I used a dual-boot Linux/Windows box for testing at work. I also installed VMware in the Linux side, and ran Windows from that. The Windows install was more stable running from VMware than it was on the bare metal, with no significant loss of speed. The memory hit is pretty tough though, as is disk space.

One thing people don't seem to get though is that in environments where you are running more than one OS, you need to have a license for EACH INSTANCE of the OS on the computer. My above example required two Windows licenses, the way Microsoft works their licensing model.


That said, if you can get what you need done without multiple operating systems, then you should do so. Emulation is almost always a second-best to running natively, at least in a home environment.

Mac OS X is the most commonly used Unix in the world. Those Unix-based CAD apps I linked to, many of them run on a Mac, or at least claim to. You may not get the quality you expect if you try the free ones, and make sure your virus/spyware protection is up to date. Apple makes concessions for ease of use, and in some cases that has opened up some vulnerabilities.

[ludesign]

Originally Posted by kroberts

Is Boot Camp a virtual machine environment, or a dual boot? Apple's site is typically vague about how things actually work. It appears to be a VM of some sort.

Boot Camp enables you to choose OS when booting the machine. When running Windows it is like any Windows machine based on similar hardware.

You can also run Windows under OSX using for example Fusion or Parallels. These systems works quite well though you typically loose a bit in performance, especially in video performance, vs Boot Camp. Perfectly OK for bulk desktop work though and occasional CAD work. I typically use it for cross platform testing and for demo and training work.

[kroberts]

Ok, thanks.

Then my previous post does not apply.

Video performance is one thing we don't care about where I am. Business applications typically don't tax the video card.

Thanks for the explanation.

[Andrew Mason]

Originally Posted by aaaaron

I don't see how this is the best of both worlds -- you have the added cost of branded proprietary mac hardware and the full glitches of the windows operating system. It seems great if your primary application is mac based to give you that extra flexibility, but if your primary application is windows based, doesn't this actually give you the worst of both worlds (higher cost + same glitches of windows) ?

I already have the proprietary Mac hardware because thjat is what I chose to run Windows on. As strange as it may seem, the Macbook is the best Windows laptop I have ever owned and worth every penny that it cost over the price of a Dell.

Bootcamp is not a VM, it runs Windows natively, so its fast and reliable (well, as reliable as Windows XP can be). VMware Fusion, or alternatively Parallels, are VMs, but the neat thing is that they can be set up to use the Bootcamp disk partition, so I can start up as a Mac, fire up the VM and be running Windows.

The integration between Fusion and the Mac OS is impressive - Fusion has a feature called Unity (Parallels has something similar named Coherence) which shows individual applications on the Mac desktop rather than being contained in a Windows window (see screenshot). Copy and paste works between Windows and Mac apps and files can be placed in shared folders for both OS to use.

I agree with kroberts that Windows XP running as a VM may be more reliable due to the fact that the driver issues are simplified. However, I'm not yet sold on the VM approach for day to day work purely because of the issues with performance across multiple monitors. Until I upgrade my machine from 2 to 4 Gb of RAM I wont know whether this is a memory issue or something deeper, but from what I've seen so far the approach is very promising.

[kroberts]

Knowing how that stuff works, your video performance will be a weakness of the underlying VM scheme. The VM is also emulating a standard graphics card, so there is going to be an additional layer of translation code that would not normally be there. Video is especially sensitive to that sort of thing.