| I needed a 2D drawing program, and when I saw this I figured that it would be a decent product given that it's sold by Autodesk, maker of Autocad. FYI I'm a UNIX programmer by profession, with high school level instruction in drafting, woodworking, and mechanical engineering. I wanted software to document some woodworking projects I'm doing. Autosketch isn't it; it has numerous problems: 1) there's no commercial documentation for it, and the supplied 400 page user guide (on the installation CD; not in print form) does not explain how to use the software adequately. It tells you how to press the buttons on the interface, but it provides no information about how to do basic drawing functions such as drawing a rectangle to a specific, in-scale, size. 2) I don't think you can composite drawings. I.e. if I draw a frame made of 2 x 4's and I want a detail-drawing of the butt joints on the same page as the elevation drawing, you can't do that (at least not that I've been able to figure out with the supplied documention), *unless* the details are already in the larger drawing. You also cannot draw the detail view on a seperate page and then transfer a scaled down version of it to your elevation drawing, as "detail view"s must apparently be limited to the same drawing. 3) The drawing screen doesn't redraw right when you delete or move entities. Ever. AutoDesk implmented a "redraw screen" button rather than fix this problem, and you will be using that button a LOT. 4) It seems very difficult to navigate around a picture when you're zoomed in, using a mouse. I may not yet have found the easy way of doing this (since there's no useful documentation) but currently navigation involves zooming in, then pressing the wheel down to move the drawing around in the pane. It's hard to find your way around even a simple drawing this way. 5) Autocad basically punted on the install software. They don't add a desktop shortcut, and they don't offer an option to install the 400 page .pdf users manual, so you have to be lucky enough to find and read the README, which tells you to copy it off the CD. This type of attention to detail typifies the Autosketch user experience. My overall gripe about the software is that the price and packaging seem to market it to people who just want to do some basic drawings. However the lack of documentation and the complex user interface mean you have to be pretty sharp, and spend a lot of time, to figure out how to use this. My feeling is that if I have to spend that kind of time to use the program, I may as well just buy TurboCad and have a full featured drawing program to start with. |
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