It appears that during the holiday rush Engineered Software wrote a statement on its website about the future of PowerCADD being restricted to only Intel Macs. This low-key notice wasn’t lost on Architosh readers who picked up on the item. The note describes a bit of history about how the developer moved to Apple’s Xcodedevelopment environment and the challenges they ran into.
PowerCADD 8: The Future
Engineered Software says that when they began work on PowerCADD 8, the next major version, the intention was to produce a Universal Binary version. Secondly, they planned to make PowerCADD 8 as fast as possible and moved to OpenGL to achieve this speed in the Overview Window and for an optional fast drawing mode in the main PowerCADD document window. OpenGL is a graphics subsystem like Quartz and the older Apple QuickDraw, but it is ten to one hundred times faster than Quartz, says the developer.
Unfortunately, for all the speed gains possible, they began to see screen drawing problems on the PowerPC machines while testing the new Universal Binary version. The company reports the decision was to concentrate development on just the Intel Macs as testing the older PowerPC base would add a year or more to the development schedule.
Accordingly, PowerCADD 8 will be Mac Intel only.
For more info go here: http://engsw.com/
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