Diehl Graphsoft's MiniCAD 7 incorporates hundreds of customer requests sent in over nearly 12 years. The resulting product is amazingly easy to use for a full-featured professional CAD system, and includes enough features and interface improvements that it may lure even die-hard fans of competing products into the fold.
MiniCAD can now tackle professional-grade 3-D modeling, with Add, Intersection , and Subtract commands that work directly on solid objects; you can build a library of 3-D objects in minutes, starting with a few primitive shapes. To display 3-D projects in their appropriate magnificence, version 7 uses QuickDraw 3D to support all sorts of shading options, light-source positioning, and third-party rendering engines. New dashed hidden lines give engineers an idea of what’s actually going on beneath MiniCAD’s beautifully shaded 3-D surfaces.
For day-to-day work, version 7 offers some major improvements. Dimensioning has been made more flexible: the same drawing can support both metric and English dimensions, and can feature varying decimal accuracies at different places in the drawing. MiniCAD’s Smart Cursor — already the most informative mouse-driven object in CAD (changing shape for different drawing functions, identifying objects with its own text bar, and so on) — now adds sound. And there’s a new audible click when you slide the cursor to the correct point in a drawing for modifying an underlying object... Although this feature seems simple, it’s a great frustration-saver in crowded drawings, sparing you numerous pokes at the same object.
A package of new features for architecture automatically generates floor plans, 2-D framing plans, and 3-D framing models, all with automatically joining walls. MiniCAD also includes a substantial tool kit covering major CAD fields — such as architecture, landscaping, product design, and engineering — and a tutorial that helps you use these prepared parts to build complex drawings in minutes. Worksheets have long been a key MiniCAD feature; as an additional time-saver, version 7 can generate a parts worksheet from your drawing using a single command.
AutoCAD import and export dominates the translation needs of most CAD users. Because Diehl Graphsoft also produces MiniCAD 7 for Windows, it’s fully aware of AutoCAD’s DOS-style oddities, including special characters and treatment of drawing layers. Nonetheless MiniCAD 7’s DXF/DWG file translator still experiences minor problems with details such as hatching and fonts when importing AutoCAD files; drawing elements translate correctly but style details don’t always map properly. (MiniCAD also includes a ClarisCAD translator to rescue that program’s abandoned users.) Graphsoft’s superior customer support offers workarounds for some of these glitches, but others remain unresolvable. MiniCAD’s only other weakness is that new users are likely to want a more intuitive or modern internal programming system than MiniPascal,
Macworld's Buying Advice
If you use your Mac daily for CAD, MiniCAD 7 is worth a look — even if you’re happy with your current program. If you’re using MiniCAD already, version 7’s $195 upgrade price is a hargain, considering the wealth of useful new features. In short, MiniCAD 7 offers the most powerful CAD software available, at a still-modest price.
Seiter, Charles. (September 1997). MiniCAD 7. Macworld. (pg. 73).
Diehl Graphsoft, Inc.
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out of 10 (6 votes)
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703updater.sea_.hqx
Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
SheepShaver
