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Evidence of AutoCAD ‘Mac Edition’ surfaces

By | May 23, 2010, 9:59pm PDT

An Italian Mac site revealed screenshots from a beta version of AutoCAD for Mac. Aside from a few native Mac applications, Autodesk’s official solution for Mac support has been the Parallels virtual Windows environment.

The images were taken down over the weekend, but still can be seen, at least for the moment, on MacRumors.com. One of the screenshots shows a drawing running in AutoCAD “Mac Edition”  Beta 1 (18:1).

AutoCAD is a 2D and 3D design and drafting application that was first released in the 1980s. AutoCAD for the Mac was discontinued in the early 90s. According to the tester that posted the images, this beta runs pretty poorly, but, obviously, there is much time for improvement as this is the first seeding. The Beta is 64-bit only and support for multi-touch gestures (see above screenshot). No word on when the final is expected.

Autodesk’s staying out of the market has let other developers fill the vacuum. As I wrote in February, German developer Graebert, is working on ARES, an AutoCAD-compatible program, that will be offered in native versions for Mac, Windows and Linux.

Earlier month, Graebert said it is “on target to provide DWG 2010 support this May [in the Windows version], and continues to conduct beta testing for Mac and Linux versions in anticipation of their forthcoming release.” DWG is the AutoCAD design file format.

Check Out: Is a shake-up coming to the Mac CAD market?

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Apple Macintosh, AutoCAD, Beta, Desktops, Hardware, David Morgenstern

David Morgenstern has covered the Mac market and other technology segments for 20 years.

Disclosure

David Morgenstern

Freelance journalist/blogger David Morgenstern has nothing to disclose.

Biography

David Morgenstern

David Morgenstern has covered the Mac market and other technology segments for 20 years. In the recent past, he founded Ziff-Davis' Storage Supersite, served as news editor for Ziff Davis Internet and held several executive editorial positions at eWEEK. In the 1990s, David was editor of Ziff Davis' award-winning MacWEEK news publication as well as its successor title, eMediaWEEKly, which focused on multiplatform professional content creation. His byline can be found online and in print publications including CreativePro.com, Peachpit Press' Mac Bible and Popular Photography.

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Ares CAD
Jkirk3279 24th May 2010
I've tried the ARES CAD beta for Mac.

I salute them for their efforts, but they're GOT to lose the Byzantine command line interface.

I swear to you, MasterCAM is more intuitive !

I thought MasterCAM had waaay too many tiny icons until I realized that a CLI was 10 times harder to use.

The whole 2D vector drafting paradigm has been refined over decades; there's no excuse for still using a CLI.
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RE: Evidence of AutoCAD 'Mac Edition' surfaces
phatkat 24th May 2010
Wow! After a long absence in the CAD market and using either Virtual PC (during PPC era) and now Parallels or VMware to run Windows XP to make AutoCAD work is welcome difference. I tried several Mac CAD packages over the last few years and they had problems converting .dwg to their format and then back. I think the last version for the Mac was version 5 and it is now version 2011 which should be version 26 (I think they converted to year version in 1999 with version 15=2000 to year version). It would interesting to see how they would run AutoCAD nativity on MacOS X versus on a virtual machine.
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Try Vectorworks
PaulatFox 24th May 2010
I've been using Vectorworks, which is a great program that runs on a PC or Mac. Best of all, the drawing files will open directly on either platform without conversion. It works with .dwg files pretty well, although there are occasional import problems, especially with fonts.

I've never been a big fan of AutoCAD because of it's arcane interface, but I do respect its power. Vectorworks is much more Mac-like, and I've been using it to do everything I need, including 3-D. I've noticed more architectural firms starting to use it too. Maybe Autodesk is feeling the heat.
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+ -
Ares CAD
Jkirk3279 24th May 2010
I've tried the ARES CAD beta for Mac.

I salute them for their efforts, but they're GOT to lose the Byzantine command line interface.

I swear to you, MasterCAM is more intuitive !

I thought MasterCAM had waaay too many tiny icons until I realized that a CLI was 10 times harder to use.

The whole 2D vector drafting paradigm has been refined over decades; there's no excuse for still using a CLI.

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