Re: Bobcad 17 Review

At 10:35 PM 12/3/2000 -0500, you wrote:

> Hard to believe an entity cannot be moved @.005<180 for instance.
>Quickcad won't support this type of basic command?

Peter,

No it won't. In Quickcad, if you highlight a single entity, the
appropriate X and Y coordinates are displayed in boxes and can be
edited. If you want to move something .027, you have to do the math
yourself, and type the new value(s) in the right place(s). If it's a line,
you have to compute both the new start and the end value or you'll change
the length as well. This is a hassle and error prone compared to Bobcad
where you can just tell it to move something by X (and/or Y) amount and it
does all the math and moves it.

My bigger gripe with Quickcad, however, is it cannot move a group of
entities (which for me is more common than a single entity) without going
through all sorts of painful gymnastics (unless you just use the mouse and
live with the resulting sloppy precision). Again, in Bobcad, you can
select as many individual entities as you want (by very flexible means) and
then move the whole lot easily in one precise shot.

Perhaps I'm wrong, but it does not appear to me Quickcad is aimed at anyone
trying to do precision manufacturing. It's better suited to making nice
looking drawings that will end up in a report, not on a shop floor (unless
you fudge the dimensions and the machinist is just reading those off the
piece of paper).

I'm sure there are other good CAD alternatives out there, but none that I'm
aware of in Bobcad's price range that have integrated G-code generation.

Mike