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Provides: Simple yet powerful 2D CAD tools
Developer: Microspot
Requirements: Mac OS X.4 or greater, G4+, or Intel, 350 MB of space
Premium Retail Price: $349 (CD) $314.10 (download). Upgrade price: (varies from the version you have).
MacDraft, at version v6, is now 25 years old. When I mention to people that I use MacDraft for all my CAD work, the typical response is, "Is MacDraft still around? I haven't heard of it in years." The answer is, simply, yes! MacDraft is not only around, but still vibrant after 25 years providing the same level of powerful 2D CAD work for users around the world. New to version 6 are some user enhancements such as a Customizable Toolbar, New Layer's palette, and some image enhancement features when bringing a standard rasterized image into your CAD drawing. But perhaps my favorite improvement is customizable scaling: now, you can create any scale to set the image size to the size of your output.
MacDraft is an interesting program in that it's been around since the beginning of the Mac and continues to satisfy the needs of the CAD market. Very competitively priced, it competes well against both big time applications like ArchiCAD and TurboCAD as well as VectorWorks, TurboCAD, and even HighDesign. The big difference is how easy it is to use.
Scaling is the heart and sole to a CAD application. Like any vector drawing application (like Illustrator), the circle on the screen is a mathematical calculation determined by either a radius, diameter, or three points and the thickness of the stroke. This is different from a raster program like Photoshop where a circle is only a collection of pixels that form a ring. When you zoom into a raster image, at some point you will start to see pixels. When you zoom into a drawing application, you only see your object closer but without any pixels.
The big difference between a drawing application, like Illustrator, and a CAD program, like MacDraft, is that in a drawing program if you drew an object at a 1:2 scale in one drawing and copied and pasted that same object into another drawing that had a 1:10 scale, the object would NOT be 5 times smaller in the 2nd drawing. Rather it would appear just as large as it did in the first drawing. This is why drawing programs are said to have "stupid rulers" because the ruler only reflects what you say it represents, and has no relation to any real measurement.
One of the hurdles that new users to CAD applications must overcome is that if you resize an object, you've changed its real size. Let's say that you have an object that's 16-1/4 inches wide and are drawing in a document that you've set the scale as 1:2 (one inch on the drawing represents two inch in real life. Since the page has 8 inches of useful working surface, you can't put the entire object on one page (see the top image below). The new user would simply drag the object a bit smaller and be happy that the image is not "leaking" onto a 2nd page. The problem is that the object is no longer 16-1/4 inches wide anymore and anything you are trying to design will be the wrong size. In the past you had two options: one is to have the object lie on more than one page (more on this in a bit) or select a different scale. Unfortunately the next option down is 3" = 1' (or 1:4) making the item half the size it was before (see the 2nd image below). This might be too small for your needs leaving you with two rotten solutions.
Now, with custom scaling, you can write your own needs. As shown in the 3rd image below, you define the scale. The one limitation is that you can only enter whole numbers. So, if you wanted to have a scale of 1:2.5, all you need to do is to set that to whole numbers or 2:5 and you can now easily set your image to a convenient size within your desired working range.
One new extra benefit with this feature is that now, if you are in the middle of a drawing and suddenly realize that your drawing needs to be in metric as opposed to imperial (or vise versa) (see the bottom image above), all you have to do is to select the alternate measurement system and you are good to go. In the past, MacDraft couldn't do this arithmetic and you needed to go from whatever scale you were using in Imperial, change that to 1:1, then convert to metric, then change the scale to whatever scale was best for your drawing. Tedious but doable. Now, MacDraft just does what it should do right off.
Not the first application (and certainly not the last), MacDraft has now expanded the region above the drawing to place common tools and actions as shown below. There is an option to exchange a variety of different tools and actions and these drop down in a standard OS X sheet. [Because of the 500 pixel width limitation we have at Applelinks, I've chosen to decrease the size a bit, but also to rotate the image CCW so that the items are intelligible. I apologize to your neck, but this was a compromise.]
MacDraft has had Layers for a long time and now the Layers feature has its own palette -- and it's a mix. while it's nice to have ready access to the features of the palette, I also find the dynamics of the palette confusing and at times frustrating. Let me explain:
First off, any connection and/or relation to any Layers palette or Panel in any other application is null and void. So if you are experienced in using a Layers Panel in just about any other application, put you expectations by the door, they are irrelevant here. As an example in the image below, notice that the rcr (round corner rectangle) is on the bottom of the list of layers but is on top in the image. This is 100 percent backwards of other programs, but that's the way it is with MacDraft. The one thing that's very screwy is that if you shift the arrangement of the layers (for example, shift the circle above the rectangle (to place it below the rectangle)), after you do this nothing happens. You have to click on the image for the adjustment to take place. It would be good if tapping the Enter key could be used or if they created an "Apply" button to accomplish this, but in either case neither exists so you need to click into the image several times before the re-alignment takes place.
Notice that there is an eyeball in the layers panel. As expected, this lets you see or not see a layer. Also note that there's a "lock" icon. There is a relationship between the two and it can be stated in a series of rules:
- Rule 1: only one layer can be editable at one time
- Rule 2: there is no relationship between a layer that is active (blue) and editable.
- Rule 3: You cannot shut the eye of a layer if it's editable
- Rule 4: the first time you click on an eye it goes into "Grey" mode where all you can see is the strokes (see the "circle" layer below to see the "grey" mode)
- Rule 5: the second time you click on an eye the object(s) become invisible.
- Rule 6: there is no modifier key to switch from visible to invisible and back again, you have to have to cycle through: visible - grey - invisible.
For longtime MacDraft users, the earlier layer access shortcuts still exist as shown below. When clicking on the "Layers" icon in the upper right corner of the drawing window you can select whichever layer you want/need and if you click on the up and down arrows just above that you can cycle up and down whatever layers you have. and if you click on the "arrow over layers" icon, you will still get the question mark to click on an item and that layer will become active/editable.
I should point out that while there are excellent popup comments all over MacDraft, strangely there are none available for the small subtle things that line up the bottom and right sides of a document window. One example of this gap is the screenshot above: there are no popup comments for any of the three features. Nor are there any pop-ups for the three item access on the bottom left corner of a document window: line thickness, Palette selection, and magnification.
The drawing board has been considerably expanded. Previously MD had the limited with of effectively 7 x 5.5 letter pages as shown in the top image below. This has been expanded to 23 x 18 letter pages (over 14' 10" square) as shown in the bottom image below (where I've placed a screenshot of MacDraft 5.5 and MacDraft 6 respectively). Almost since the beginning, MacDraft could print to wide-format printers. If you do not have access to a wide-format printer, and wish to have a large image, you can always cut off the outside 1/2" and either tape and/or glue the separate pages together. Besides creating a large document, I've also found that if you have multiple drawing for the same object, each can be placed on a separate page.
Libraries of pre-made objects have been considerably enhanced. In past versions, objects and symbols were kept in the Symbol Libraries and Media Assistant files. These are now both obsolete (but anything that you've created or owned in the past can be converted to the new format). The new format is a pleasant update but the interface has some issues.
Although rather clunky in design, it's easy to create new objects of your own. As individual items (each page has a ".spotlibrary" suffix), you can create a new page for placing (dragging) separate items to new libraries. To move an object from a drawing into a new or old library page, Control-drag the item from a MacDraft document to the lower-half of the Library window (where you see the objects).
What's a bit more hidden is how you can create folders of contained items. As much as I could figure out, you need to create your individual separate pages for each library item, then in the finder collect and organize them into folders in the Finder. Then, back in the library delete the link to the pages you've just made and once completed you can drag the folders of the libraries into the top half of the Library window (no modifier key is necessary for this operation).
As stated, this whole dynamic is rather clunky. There is no way to create a new folder to contain separate Library pages from within the Library panel. In addition, you cannot drag one Library page from one folder to another. Yet, any activity done in the Finder is only partially updated in the Library Palette. Thus, if you have a two folders: Folder 1 and Folder 2 and in the Finder you move files A and B from Folder 1 into Folder two. When you open up the Library Palette you will find these files in both folders but you will find empty information in Folder 1 that you have to manually delete. Hopefully in the future this will be streamlined up a bit. The Library palette does work but it doesn't work as slick as it should. Nonetheless, the new Library Palette is so much better than what we had before, it's worth dealing with the issues. Nonetheless, an improvement in the management of library files should be top on the list to do items.
A curious addition to MacDraft's are the photo-enhancement features. If you look at the image above, you can see that besides providing a containment for the library images, there is also support for Photos. This feature can be better seen below. You can drag images either from the Library Palette or from the Finder onto any MacDraft document. This is not as strange a feature as it may seem for several reasons. For example, one can place a photo of a piece of property next to the drawing of the house that an architect is designing for you. In addition, if you wish to populate your drawing with real objects to get a better feel for how it might look, real images can be a boon. Lastly, if you have an image of something you are trying to design plans for, placing an image onto the page can be a big asset. Since images have no scale, you can grab an upper or lower drag-handle, press the shift key to maintain the aspect ratio, and increase/decrease the image's size up or down to get it within the scale of your drawing. I've used this approach to design and dimension picture frames from only a photo.
Placement of photos is fine, but if the photo doesn't look at good as you'd like and do not happen to have Photoshop, Photoshop Express, iPhoto, or any other photo enhancement program, MacDraft now comes with some simple enhancement tools to do a basic image improvement. The catch is that accessing the adjustments is very cumbersome and not efficient. Consider the screenshot below showing that from the new "Image" menu, you need to constantly go back to this menu for any level of adjustment and/or fine-tuning.
I'm happy to accept that MacDraft is not trying to compete with Photoshop, Lightroom, Aperture, or any other image enhancement program. Even iPhoto is better equipped to work with images than what's provided here. All MacDraft is trying to do is to do a last minute fix of an image. My complaint here is that rather than work from a menu, the user would be better served if all of these tools were placed on a Palette or the like. That way the user wouldn't need to be constantly moving the mouse all across the screen, over and over to continue working on the same item on the screen.
If you need to export your image after any enhancements you've done, there are a wide range of image types as shown below. For what it's worth, I found that you can open a MacPaint image in Fireworks. There may be other applications that can open MacPaint documents, but overall, I'm not fully sure of the value that that saving option provides.
Besides the ability to save out images into a variety of formats, MacDraft itself can both read and be saved as both DXF and DWG formats (for versions 2000, '04, '07) which means you can share files with applications such as AutoCAD. In addition, you can export a drawing out to either any of the image formats shown above (this will rasterize the image so it is no longer editable in MacDraft) as well as PDF. The value of saving the drawing file in the PDF format is that if you wish to do any graphic design enhancements on the image, you can then open the PDF file directly in Adobe Illustrator and you will be able to manipulate the vector image within Illustrator. When opening the PDF of a MacDraft object in Illustrator, there may be some items in the drawing that will need to be fixed, your milage may vary. You can open a PDF in MacDraft but it only opens as a rasterized image of the PDF and is not editable. You can copy an item from Illustrator and paste it into MacDraft, but some things might be in sad shape. What is particularly vulnerable in this process are any curves, arcs, or circles -- they do not survive the copy-paste. Thus, you cannot round-trip images from MacDraft to Illustrator and back.
Let me not leave this review without pointing out one of my most pleasant "little" improvements. I've always had a strong appreciation for improvements in the little things, the things that are not ground breaking earth shattering features. Rather, it's often the little things that make you smile because it resolves problems that you've always had.
Like many graphic applications, you can either click the type-tool on the document and type something. However, if you drag out a marquee, a defined region is created causing the text to word-wrap within that region. Again, this is neither new to MacDraft or drawing programs in general. What is new with MacDraft 6 is that if you have overset text (more text than can fit within the confines of the text box) the text box turns red as shown below. That's it, that's all this does. And this is soooo nice. The number of times that I've done a global font or font size change and didn't catch all of the overset text, well, sheesh!
There's one other pleasant improvement. As you probably know, if you have a file selected in the finder and press the Space bar, a window pops up showing you what's in the file without having to open the file up. This image is created by an internally saved JPEG image. If there's no such JPEG file saved in the metadata of that file, the Finder does its level best to create as best an image as it can. Unfortunately there's not all that much for the Finder to generate from a MacDraft image so the Finder representation of what's in a file has often been, well, dreadful. As shown below using a file that was created in an early version of MacDraft (.mdd) and then re-saved into the new format (.md60) lets the Finder display very cleanly what's in any given image.
There is at least one issue you do need to be aware of when converting an earlier MacDraft image in the new MacDraft format. For reasons that don't seem to make any sense, when you convert an earlier MacDraft document into the new format, the dimension line ends default to no ends for subsequent dimensions as shown below. In the image below, I've selected the end-arrows that I had in the document prior to saving in the new format. But after reopening, the ends selected are blank. This does not change the current dimensions within the document, only new dimensions on that document. If you select the proper ends for your dimensions after converting the document, you will not have any problems. In other words, convert the image, set the end lines, save the document, you are done. This is not a big deal but it's something to be aware of if you have any plans on subsequent work on that drawing.
Despite the ease of use, if you are new to MacDraft, you probably will need access to the Help file. Now, the full PDF manual (616 pages) is accessed via the Help menu. Unfortunately something went screwy when the book was set up and all the hyperlinks link only to the first page. Thus, if you see a link to a different subject, chapter, or page number within the PDF manual, clicking on it only brings you back to the first page. [Tip: if you are using Adobe Reader, from the Windows menu select "New Window," and a new copy of the PDF will open. Then you can look at multiple different pages of the same document.]
In short, this is a good update to MacDraft. Some of the new features are wonderful, long awaited tools while others, such as the photo manipulation, is kind of a "why did they do this?" You wonder what feature updates/improvements s they held back to make engineering time for the photo-features. With out a doubt, the updated dynamics of the scaling is fantastic. The new tool bin above the drawing is a handy addition that I've found is already saving me a lot of time. The new Layers palette is a bit screwy because it's flipped from every Layers Panel/Palette I've seen, but such is life. Similarly, the new Library Palette is a big improvement but is hampered by a cumbersome interface. Lastly, the ability to see the contents of a drawing from the Finder via the new document format type is a big big improvement.
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[Personal note: there is a small story behind the 25th anniversary of MacDraft and me. That means I've been a Mac user for 25 years as well. When I first saw the Mac (the original 128 k), I was amazed and transfixed. If you've even noticed my byline at the bottom of my reviews, you can see that my day job is a scientific glassblower (which explains some of the images above). When I first saw the Mac and its graphic capabilities, I new that I could use that ability to pre-design glass apparatus before picking up a piece of glass. I came home and told my wife I wanted to get a Mac. We ended up waiting a bit and getting the Fat Mac, the 512 k. For graphic applications at the time, all one could get was either MacPaint or MacDraw. MacDraw was the vector drawing program but it had a "stupid ruler" and did not have accurate scaling (as mentioned early in this review) and I knew that without the scaling I couldn't do what I wanted. I called Apple and asked them if they knew of any real CAD program for the Mac. They told me of MacDraft, which at that time was made by a company called idd and was in beta. I was an early beta tester of MacDraft at that time and have used it ever since. When the owner of idd retired, he sold the rights of MacDraft to Microspot, the company that made the drivers for wide format printing. Microspot has maintained the goal of MacDraft, intuitive, easy to use CAD applications at a reasonable price.]
Applelinks Rating:
Buy MacDraft Pro
___________ Gary Coyne has been a scientific glassblower for over 30 years. He's been using Macs since 1985 (his first was a fat Mac) and has been writing reviews of Mac software and hardware since 1995.
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