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Software Businesses Apple

GPL-Licensed QCAD Ported to Mac OS X 52

Posted by timothy from the slickness-and-light dept.
AlwaysTimeForCoffee writes "QCad, a free open-source 2D CAD system for Linux, various Unices and Windows, from RibbonSoft, has been ported to a native OS X version by Gilbert Duivesteijn. A screenshot of the OS X version can be found here. Qcad is a light, GPL'd version of the commercial available CAM Expert. It truely is an outstanding program and has earned 5 out of 5 Penguins on Tucow's Linuxberg and IceWalker review. With this native OS X release, a commercial quality CAD system has been made available to the Apple community."
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GPL-Licensed QCAD Ported to Mac OS X More

GPL-Licensed QCAD Ported to Mac OS X

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  • Really?! (Score:2, Funny)

    by jsse ( 254124 )
    It truely is an outstanding program and has earned 5 out of 5 Penguins on Tucow's Linuxberg and IceWalker review

    You mean 5 out of 5 penguins use it? Get me one baby!
    • Hm reminds me of a sticker in my sister's room...

      One by one the penguins steal my sanity...
    • So, there's this guy walking on ice and he views two cows on a Linuxberg (is that some kind of an iceberg?) and five penguins are sitting on them? Would that be three on one and two on the other one?

      Sounds quite psychedelic to me...what were we talking about? Er, forget it.

  • NonNative (Score:5, Interesting)

    by norwoodites ( 226775 ) <pinskia AT gmail DOT com> on Monday July 07, 2003 @09:06PM (#6388055) Journal
    It is not native, it uses QT which uses custom widgets so it is slow, a native would use Cocoa (or maybe Carbon) libraries and almost no custom widgets.
    • I'm not sure you are right in the sense you mean. It does of course use QT, but I am not sure how much more "custom" QT on Mac OSX is than the Aqua widgets themselves, It is still drawn by Quartz, and thus gets the hardware accel. I could be wrong though. It is, however, more native than running through the X11 server. I think this is really what they meant by "native."

    • Re:NonNative (Score:5, Informative)

      by lpontiac ( 173839 ) on Tuesday July 08, 2003 @12:34AM (#6388964)
      It is not native, it uses QT which uses custom widget

      I'm pretty sure QT on OS X uses the native Aqua widgets, rather than rendering it's own. Ditto for Windows XP (otherwise themes wouldn't work..)

      It's true that on plenty of platforms (Windows prior to XP, Motif, raw X11 etc) that QT does all of it's own drawing and doesn't rely on the native UI for anything more advanced than a window, however that's not true here.

      • That is not true on Mac OS X, QT still uses its own drawing, that is why themes in QT works for Mac OS X, because there are not themes in Mac OS X. In fact I am using a semi-QT based browser which uses native widgets, Safari.
        I think they (troll**) should look at Apple's bridge between QT and Cocoa.
        • Safari has nothing to do with QT. IIRC, when Apple ported KHTML they replaced all the QT stuff with native code.

        • Re:NonNative (Score:3, Informative)

          by WatertonMan ( 550706 )
          WebCore isn't QT. It may share a bit of code, but it is different. The earlier version of QT did have its own widgets. However QT/Mac released last week uses Carbon widgets. It's true it doesn't use Cocoa though.

          KDE Discussion [kde.org]

  • Finally... (Score:5, Funny)

    by psyconaut ( 228947 ) on Monday July 07, 2003 @09:09PM (#6388071)
    ...a CAD package for OS X that I can afford! :-)

    -psy

  • It's a bit buggy... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Green Light ( 32766 ) on Monday July 07, 2003 @09:10PM (#6388079) Journal
    Select "Preferences..." under the QCad menu. You get the "Print..." dialog.

  • Screenie mirror (Score:3, Informative)

    by dema ( 103780 ) on Monday July 07, 2003 @09:27PM (#6388175) Homepage
    That screenshot was slashdotted pretty quick. I grabbed it and dropped it here [haxors.com] if anyone is having trouble getting it.

  • Apple needs to attract some CAD companies (Score:5, Insightful)

    by xtal ( 49134 ) on Monday July 07, 2003 @09:29PM (#6388183)
    I'd love to use apple workstations, but they need to get out there and make some sells to the big names - someone has to listen, because I am sick of paying mad money to buy overpriced Sun crap to run EDA tools because there's not much choice for >4GB workstations, and sick of bugs in Windows versions of software.. and I want Unix, damnit!

    QCad. I'm sure it's a nice package. But 2D? That's so 1980's. Apple should get some hot sales reps over to some big names.. an open source package being made to run (non native) isn't worthy of news.

    How about any one of the following, that would immediately justify the purchase of a G5 for me.. although I'll break down eventually, ha. These would be news:

    On the mech front:

    Solidworks
    AutoCAD
    Pro/Engineer
    UniGraphics

    On the EE front:

    Synopsys Anything
    Cadence Anything
    Hell even OrCAD..
    Mentor Graphics Anything..

    Come on, apple! The memory limit is gone, so get some big guys on board.

    • Re:Apple needs to attract some CAD companies (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Thomas A. Anderson ( 114614 ) on Monday July 07, 2003 @09:50PM (#6388298) Homepage
      I agree that qcad is not for the big boys (don't get me wrong - i've used it for a while in linux and love it - but autocad it's not).

      It's too bad AutoCad dunmped their unix versions about 7 or 8 years ago (somehwere around version 11 I think). I used it in unix back in college and was blown away at how pewerful it is.

      It is true that the G5 is up to snuff - maybe this is just the begining...

    • Autocad and OS X (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 07, 2003 @09:51PM (#6388303)
      Autodesk is considering porting Autocad if they receive sufficient indication of interest - it was a big enough deal to make Apple's news page. A Google search might turn something up. Here's what I could find:

      http://www.architosh.com/news/2003-05/2003c-0512 -a cad-update.phtml
      • ThinkSecret posted an article [thinksecret.com] about this back in May... Eric Stover from AutoDesk is interested in receiving email from people interested in a port of AutoCAD to OS X... According to the story, you can email him here [mailto] (be sure to include "AutoCAD for OS X" in the subject line). He'll send you a survey which takes a few minutes to fill out... Even though I'm a student who can't afford the full version of AutoCAD, I filled it out anyway. Send it in and hope for the best!
        • I tried to post the survey that I received from AutoCAD, but Slashdot gives me this error:

          Lameness filter encountered.
          Your comment violated the "postercomment" compression filter. Try less whitespace and/or less repetition. Comment aborted.
    • Just as you say Apple should increase their presence in the market now dominated by the "small" Unix workstations. *Real* apps, and not just ported OSS projects, should get big companies over!

      I worked on COMPASS for several years, did some Cadence work as well. I was lucky because of my HP9000 workstation but i feel sorry for the people running them on win32...

      Maybe we could compile a list of big, real world, apps for each line of industry and make petitions for a port?

    • Then you should try out VectorWorks. [nemetschek.com]
      It imports and exports to AutoCad very easily.
    • Speaking for the unwashed multitudes, whatever it is, it won't do anything for me without a CAM package 'cause machining is how I earn my living. Now that I'm in the process of upgrading Pro/E, I've got to get another box to replace the Dec Alpha/NT 4.0. How feasible would it be to boot Yellow Dog Linux on a Powermac and run the Linux version of Pro/E?
    • How about Ashlar Vellum? Pretty serious 3d, solids, etc. CAD app. It's been mac-compatible for ever, and it's out for os x. Here's the Ashlar site [ashlar.com]

  • and the moral is... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 07, 2003 @10:14PM (#6388397)
    For ghod's sake, use Quartz!

    The screen shot looks like an X-Windows nightmare. Jaggies, jaggies everywhere!

  • Modal dialogs, eeeeewwwwww! (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I feel like I just stepped back to a few years ago, before those abominations were eliminated by OSX.
    You can't even drag the main window when preferences is open.

  • Vectorworks, anyone? (Score:5, Informative)

    by zangdesign ( 462534 ) on Monday July 07, 2003 @11:07PM (#6388654) Journal
    Vectorworks has had a Mac-based CAD solution since the mid-90's. It started with Minicad and now it's called Vectorworks. No, it's not free, but it's also not 2D and it is a native Carbon/Cocoa app.

    If you want to do serious work, get real tools.
  • ... that the guy actually took the screenshot on the Panther WWDC preview ??

  • What QCAD really needs (Score:5, Interesting)

    by baywulf ( 214371 ) on Monday July 07, 2003 @11:51PM (#6388832)
    I have used AutoCAD and Mechanical Desktop for many years and the biggest thing QCAD is missing in my opinion is keyboard macros. This is what made AutoCAD entry very fast for me. For example, you might first press 'L' for drawing a line. Then it asks for a starting point. Since features must me precisely placed, you must give exact coordinates or snap to an existing feature. So now you might press 'X' to enter cartision coordinates or 'P' for polar coordinates. Then it might ask you for the second point. You could snap to an existing feature. For example your press 'T' for tangent to an arc or circle or 'L' for parallel to another line. Once a good macro set is developed and you practice it, it is almost like typing on a word processor. The toolbars and menus should still be there by they should only be to help the beginner learn.

  • MacDraft - worthy low end CAD solution for Mac? (Score:4, Informative)

    by navig ( 683406 ) on Tuesday July 08, 2003 @09:44PM (#6397446) Homepage

    You could always try Microspot's MacDraft package. Its history dates back to the very first Macs and it is now a true native Mac OS X application (Carbonised). It is fairly powerful for a budget CAD package.

    Microspot MacDraft [microspot.co.uk] - it even loads AutoCAD files :-)

    Higher end CAD users should look towards Nemetschek's VectorWorks [nemetschek.net].

  • Me thinks that this is only to see how many people have pirated the beta in one way or another. I mean, this Panther release must be one of the most distributed Mac OS X developer seeded releases yet (a wild guess by me, but I think it's quite accurate) and at the same time they release a patch for it which they have NOT done with their previous seeds. Coincidence? I think not.

    Flame me for being paranoid, but things like these are just too big to be small.

  • Great program. I used the X11 version of this to do a quick layout of my new house. I have to say, it was easiest to use of the free/lowcost options out there. Not perfect, but good enough for me.

    Glad to see a native OS X version of this, yes, it would be nice if it were Carbon or Cocoa, but for free I won't complain. For those that do complain, the source code is just sitting out there, feel free to roll up your sleeves and make it Carbon/Cocoa!

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