Architosh Staff (info@architosh.com)

29 May 2003

 

MacCAD: ZipCAD for Palm to go Mac - developer interested in hearing from users

ZipCAD for Palm OS based PDF devices offers professional CAD users the ability to create, edit, and work with CAD files on their Palm OS based devices. Now architects, engineers, designers and facility management professionals can take the features of CAD to where they need them in the field.

ZipCAD Features Summary

First off you can see ZipCAD in action on the very attractive new Palm Zire, an indication that this app will run very well even on low-end/low cost handhelds. We spoke to the developer -- who is based in the Boston area -- and he said ZipCAD runs on a very large range of Palm devices (Palm, Sony, Handspring, IBM, and other Palm OS devices running at least Palm OS 3.1 or higher). Features include:

• Draw Tools - Line, polyline, 3-point arc, radius arc, lines and gaps, box, circle, ellipse, text
• Build Tools - Line offset, corner trim, line trim, 2-point trim, break line, mirror...
• Select Tools - Pick, select all, deselect all, area select, area inclusive
• View Tools - Previous view, last view, view all, recenter, refresh, window, saved views, pan, zoom, anytime recenter and zoom
• Edit Tools - Infinite Undo/Redo, duplicate, cut, copy, paste and delete
• Snap Preferences - End-point, mid-point, perpendicular, intersection, snap-to-angle, snap window size
• User Preferences - Metric/English Unites, Polar/Cartesian Coordinates, Tips On/Off
• Layers, Line Types, Custom Colors, Shortcut keys, DXF exporting and more...

A software developer turned architect, ZipCAD's developer created the software based on his original needs and has expanded it to reflect the real life scenarios that come up in practice. In our phone conversation he remarked how popular the Palm devices are and how the Palm interface is simple and elegant -- something that is important for architects in the field who just want some clearly defined functionality to get specific tasks done.

Mac Support Requested

The developer said that Mac support has been a common request so he is clearly interested in doing the port to the Mac. In essence, it's just the conduit software that needs to be written for the Mac OS platform. Those that are interested in buying ZipCAD for Palm with Mac support should send email to the developer's email address here: feedback@zipcad.com

ZipCAD sells for $149US.

Architosh Analysis: We had a very nice conversation with the developer and he expressed enthusiasm for doing a port for the Mac. While PocketPC devices have had little CAD apps for quite some time those devices don't support the Mac platform natively. As the developer noted, people on the Mac platform tend to prefer the Palm OS while some (certainly not the majority) Windows users tend to prefer the PocketPC OS. We strongly encourage users to contact the ZipCAD folks and express interest in the port as ZipCAD would be the first CAD app that we know of to run on the Mac for Palm OS.

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