Claris CAD - thoughts?

[Scott Baret]

Has anyone here used Claris CAD? I'm looking to do a little drafting in the near future and with programs like AutoCAD being what they are (expensive, hard to use) I'm wondering how Claris's offering was. I haven't used it myself, but I do remember hearing it was basically "MacDraw on steroids".

I have MacDraw II and specifically want to know where Claris CAD stands in comparison for the sake of usability, learnability, and features. What does it offer that MacDraw doesn't, what does it not have that an older AutoCAD (circa 2000) would have?

 

[landoGriffin]

I've never used it myself, but Wikipedia doesn't have much love for it :undecided:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claris_CAD

I'm curious to hear what you find out though!

 

[finkmac]

AutoCAD is not really comparable to Claris CAD at all. They're both CAD apps but have very different takes on "CAD application".

 

[Cory5412]

Hmm. I hadn't looked at this much before.

Here's ClarisCAD running:



It appears to have a couple more options and prefers to work in slightly more accurate scale, see also:


I would expect here it depends very much on what you want to do with it. Could you this to plan furniture? Sure.

Should you build a house blueprint off of it? Probably not. (You probably shouldn't really have done in 1991, either.)

You'd want the documentation handy, I suspect. I couldn't figure out what most of the tools do. That's not really an unreasonable thing for CAD though, especially when you're learning to do it. It looks like the tools are more involved than ClarisDraw/MacDraw, but I haven't looked at those in detail in a while either.

 

[Scott Baret]

So I found a copy of Claris Cad on eBay. It arrived today and while I haven't installed it on a Mac just yet (I'm thinking of putting it on the 5200 I'm buying next week--go ahead and tell me how bad the 5200 is; frankly, I'm buying one for pure nostalgia) but did read through the books I got with it tonight.

It looks like it's a no-go for 3D. That's not really a huge detriment since architects and engineers got away with 2D for a long time. It looks fairly easy to use and definitely seems to be something this longtime MacDraw II user (29 years with it) can pick up. The tutorial book is top notch; why books like this don't exist for AutoCAD is beyond me.

The strength of the program appears to be its ease of use and documentation. I have seen the telephone directories AutoCAD comes with. Everything for basic use seems to just be in the tutorial book for this one, and while I know I'll have a lot of playing around/trial and error to do, I get a feeling it will be easier to pick up.

I got the latest version, 2.0 v3, in the lot. (There was also a copy of Acrobat and Netscape in there and I may wind up selling both, as I only wanted the Claris Cad). The video tape didn't come with it, likely lost to some VHS tape collection donation at a thrift shop somewhere. (I know it's possible to find stuff like that there; I found a Carmen Sandiego Desk Encyclopedia at a used book sale a while back for a quarter). I do know about the save bug, which is why I'm not planning on installing it on the iBook.

I also missed out on a copy of AutoCAD 13 on eBay, so this is a good consolation...who knows, I may even wind up liking it better?

 

[Cory5412]

go ahead and tell me how bad the 5200 is; frankly, I'm buying one for pure nostalgia)

The 5200s are valid, worthy of love, and to be perfectly honest, nowhere near as bad as Low End Mac has spent the last 20 years fleecing people into believing.

If you install Speed Doubler 8 or have a PowerPC native build of ClarisCAD, it'll run perfectly fine on the 5200. If it ends up not being a very intensive program to start with, it will also run fine.

The 5200 is a meaningful boost over the 500 series with the 832x624 display and should be meaningfully faster than, say, an '030. I have a 6200 and it can even run OS 9.1 and Office 98 and Internet Explorer 4 and 5, although it's not great at all that. I've said this a bunch of times, it's about as fast as a PowerMac 6100/60.

There was a recall, on a fairly large number of units, but any that survive today probably don't have the bug that caused the recall.

longtime MacDraw II user (29 years with it)

Just by way of semantics: Have you been actively using MacDraw II for 29 years, or did you use it 29 years ago but not develop it as a skill or exercise the skill the entire time? Computing-centered/oriented skills, like any other, get rusty when not maintained.

(I'd also argue that there's a difference between basic maintenance/use of a skill and development of it. Even if you've, say, spent the last decade designing worksheets in it as if it were a page layout program (which, it should do), that's different than spending time actively working on doing more complicated/technical/involved things with it. Although, how much that applies to MacDraw kind of depends.

In my experience, most  modern big software packages have a couple of different attendant skill levels and in various situations whether or not moving to the next skill level is advantageous really depends on the type and scope of problems you need to solve with it. I.e. it may or may not be worth learning semantic styling in a word processor if you never need to create multi-page documents.

The strength of the program appears to be its ease of use and documentation. I have seen the telephone directories AutoCAD comes with.

It would be interesting to see, from an experienced CAD user if possible, a functional comparison between them. In my experience, a lot of what made Claris software so interesting was basically split between two separate things: What they left out compared to bigger and/or more expensive software, and, the commitment to The Mac Way.

 

[Scott Baret]

Regarding my use of MacDraw II...I first used it Summer 1991 on my dad's Mac Classic and still have a disk with the files I made on it. I got a copy the following year with my LC and have since acquired a few more copies to use on the iBook and an SE. I used it actively for many, many years; most of the materials I made for college study sessions some time ago were done on it, as was an organizational newsletter I wrote in the early 00s. I still use it when I need a good graphics layout program and only a hard copy, though I've sometimes resorted to copying the drawings to a Word 2001 document and moving them over from the iBook to the MacBook with a flash drive. Nothing has really come close for me on post-OS 9 systems to MacDraw in terms of ease of use for object drawing, save for AppleWorks 6, and that hasn't been developed for years and won't run on any Mac made in recent memory. PowerPoint is the closest I can find to what I use it for (namely geometry exercises for my students), but even that isn't as good as I'd like it to be.

What I've long liked about MacDraw is its ease of use and feature set. Speaking of the comment above regarding feature sets, those are why I stick with certain programs. (There are also annoyances with some programs that prevent me from using them). A good example is Office...

I use Word over Pages because it has a good equation editor (mandatory for me), has good auto-correct options, and has an interface that makes sense. It does have an annoying bug that's been around since at least 97/98 where there is no way to choose what kind of wrap an object gets, but at least it's not like Pages where it randomly selects what it feels fit. Speaking of Pages, it's just too limited for my liking, even though there are features in Word I'll never use. Style sheets are a good example of this. I've always gone in and done the styling myself.

Excel wins over Numbers because it has more formulae and because I just don't like the charting capabilities in Numbers. I really think Excel can add a few features there as well, but this comes from someone who uses it for math instruction more than business applications.

There are many reasons I like Keynote, but the limited animation and sound effect options make me pick PowerPoint every time. Both have those annoying "double click to edit" slides, which I know I can work around sometime if I change the "normal" template, but it's still annoying that they come with them.

For MacDraw, there's been almost nothing I've forgotten, but that comes from using the program with regularity. I always have at least one machine with it set up at all times. In my experience, something that's done a lot will never really go away unless it's sat for a long time. I still remember some of the WordPerfect 5.1 commands from when I had a DOS laptop, and it goes beyond F7 for exit. (Savvy veterans will remember "escape" was used for typing repeated characters, of all things).

It's strange how some muscle memory things stick with you like that, years later. I can't tell you what I ate for breakfast three days ago, nor could I tell you the phone numbers of my closest friends, but I can tell you ALT-F3 is "reveal codes" on WP5.1, the monorail station is on the second floor of the Grand Floridian Hotel in Disney World (haven't stayed there in 31 years), and that I had PE at the end of the day during the winter months of my first grade year, yet it was after music during the fall and spring as the second class of the day.