I have been doing CAD work starting from back in 1985. It was AutoCad for the most part with all the different trade modules. Arch, civil, mechanical, solids...
I landed a great job with a company that uses Softplan, although stripped of what I believed where standard tools I could blast out correct plans in one third of the time. You still need to know how to draw and there is always cleanup involved. I started on version 9 and now am at version 13. This is the dilemma. Version 11 finally presented an open directory tree (on the hard drive) for the program so you could manually move all those little symbols that make life simpler between machines and do backups . Version 12 took a performance hit to the point the on anything under 1.2 ghz was annoyingly slow. We updated to 2.8 ghz (Tops for the time) and it got better. Now we have version 13 and again it's even slower! It has to be to sorriest excuse for a new release I have ever experienced. Other then being able to spin a 3D model in real time there are NO production enhancements (for us) just a lot of fluff. They didn't even make a new program icon! Over the last 11 years I have spent hours forwarding detailed problems with drawing to their Tech support and to date not one has been corrected. Most are replied with some lame request for further system information. With four seats and all of them doing the same thing it should be obvious. Today, I just can not believe that a programmer could release code that is so flawed that simply canceling a menu takes close to two billion clock cycles. (Hesitates for a second, on everything) A second is not much but then when you have a beach full things change. Oh, one thing, we still uses it because it works, it's just when everyone else is getting faster and we paid for two expensive upgrades SoftPlan got slower. Granted some people may not be bothered by the slug affect but when you do this for 40-50 hours every week as a living it looks like we will be forced to replace our computer again!
I landed a great job with a company that uses Softplan, although stripped of what I believed where standard tools I could blast out correct plans in one third of the time. You still need to know how to draw and there is always cleanup involved. I started on version 9 and now am at version 13. This is the dilemma. Version 11 finally presented an open directory tree (on the hard drive) for the program so you could manually move all those little symbols that make life simpler between machines and do backups . Version 12 took a performance hit to the point the on anything under 1.2 ghz was annoyingly slow. We updated to 2.8 ghz (Tops for the time) and it got better. Now we have version 13 and again it's even slower! It has to be to sorriest excuse for a new release I have ever experienced. Other then being able to spin a 3D model in real time there are NO production enhancements (for us) just a lot of fluff. They didn't even make a new program icon! Over the last 11 years I have spent hours forwarding detailed problems with drawing to their Tech support and to date not one has been corrected. Most are replied with some lame request for further system information. With four seats and all of them doing the same thing it should be obvious. Today, I just can not believe that a programmer could release code that is so flawed that simply canceling a menu takes close to two billion clock cycles. (Hesitates for a second, on everything) A second is not much but then when you have a beach full things change. Oh, one thing, we still uses it because it works, it's just when everyone else is getting faster and we paid for two expensive upgrades SoftPlan got slower. Granted some people may not be bothered by the slug affect but when you do this for 40-50 hours every week as a living it looks like we will be forced to replace our computer again!
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