HighDesign

Expensive ! ould be nice if Macupdate can work with the dev to get discount. Will buy immeduately

Nobody has mentioned Draftsight !?!

Hey everyone, I just got a Mac Book and I am needing a CAD software that does everything AutoCad would do from Residential designing to city structure and planning/designing with plan and profile and point search on TOPO's. Can someone please point me in the right direction, or tell me a little about High Design and if it's worth the cost for what I need it for? Thx

Great to see this application is still being supported! Best CAD program for the Mac under $1000.

Based on my experience and in comparing this software to other programs (MacDraft, Google Sketch, Cadintosh, TurboCAD , etc) this is the best CAD program on the Mac. Absolutely a joy to work with!

I am an engineer who has just changed to mac. I normallyget drawings of building in .dwg format completed on AutoCad. Can I import then and draw the building services to the drawing and save it in .dwg format with HighDesign 1.8.5

I'm learning AutoCad from a tertiary education provider, and because I prefer Macs, decided to buy and try High Design 1.5 Standard for home so that I could work seamlessly between AutoCad and High Design using the dxf file format. I am finding that the CAD drawing conventions that I am learning through AutoCad can be easily applied to High Design. I'm more familiar with the drawing conventions of Illustrator and Freehand, so initially, the CAD conventions seemed unintuitive and awkward. Now I am getting used to them, drawing in CAD is getting easier. AutoCad, possibly because of its age/history has a complex user interface. By comparison, High Design is definitely easier to learn, has a cleaner user interface, and so far (in terms of what I've learned) seems just as powerful for 2D work.

I have to disagree with the characterization that this program is particularly intuitive or easy to use. It doesn't implement the simple drawing convention of being able to drag objects with the mouse. Lines seem to be dragable but I couldn't figure out how to move text. Selecting multiple objects and dragging them seems difficult to impossible. Presumably there is some multi step process to do this but it left me wondering how productive the overall interface is. Any CAD program is going to take some time to learn. I'll give it the benefit of the doubt and assume that with time you could do great things. My initial impression has me questioning if it's worth the effort if all you were looking for was simple 2D CAD.

I am tired of being accused of being some sort of "spammer simply because I am a passionate designer who is trying to spread reviews, comments and insights on a product/piece of software that I think other designers,like myself, should take a serious look at and give both its creators and its product software a try. I'm not peddling Viagra in these forums for crying out loud!! I thought I was just trying to some good words and positive feedback about this product where I could to get designers to,at least take a look at this product. I am not usually this passionate about a piece of software, but i think that any tool that can make the act of creation and design simpler,more fun and more productive and creative should be reviewed and talked about For some strange reason I keep being labelled some kind of spammer because I am doing this! Maybe I am using the wrong kind of forum to do this sort of reviewing? I do not know,but I am done with trying to be of help to the designers and users of this forum to try to impart useful info on products Thought i was doing a good thing here,but I guess not. No one will hear from me,again at any of these forums. Hope everyone who's seen my posts are all happy now. Goodbye!

Michel PM, What is your relationship with ilexsoft? You are the only user profiled on their site. You slag other competitor products elsewhere and spam reviews of HighDesign. What gives.

High Design CAD,by far,blows away the competition in terms price,easy user intuitive GUI and feature set. True,there is no native Acad .dwg support (I am not sure why this is,either. Because,many of the lower priced CAD competitors do support .dwg),but the .dxf import/export works great! To Melvin Smart & mac daddy,what versions of Acad are both of you using?Currently .dxf support extends to only Acad 12,14 & 2000. When you export to .dxf you need to make sure you choose a lower Acad .dxf version to export to and everythimg will work fine. Did both of you even try to work with this program even though you couldn't open a native Acad file? Come on, the UI is cleaner,easier and more elegant to navigate tha Acad,lots of editability/customability of geometry,text and images,Hatch/fill pattern custom creation with ability to layer and combine multiple hatch/fill patterns in a single custom created hatch/fill,in program creation of bit-images, good color support,there is multi-sheet functionality within a single document file,transparency of sheets,layers,objects,bit-mapped images import/export to virtually every current conceivable bit-map image format in existence. I agree,at its current release(1.1.1),I find,too,that rendering is much easier done in an outside image editing or 3d app.(I use Adobe Photoshop 7/CS,Corel Painter 7),but decent professional-looking rendering can be done within High Design with a some additional effort. (I am currently working on a rendering excercise in this program to see what level of rendering I can get out of just working within High Design).As far as your comments about buying Vectorworks and Cinema 4D that should just about blow two grand. If you want to be able to do an easy to use Cad app but still need to do easy,but professional-looking rendering, Denaba Canvas at $349-399 blows your option away! If you use High Design with an easy to use 3d app,like Sketchup,that still comes in at a lower price point.Price would be about same if you use High Design with a painting/image editing program like I use. Heck, AutoCad LT can't even beat the cost of High Design's Pro version. Think some of you need to revisit this app and give it the try it deserves. I am a Acad user also, and I was able to learn this program within a very short time with NO help from the manual until recently. It's only real pain is that you can't open multiple files at once if you need to cut/paste geometry from one document to another. Other than that,this program works like a Mac CAD package designed and developed for Mac designers.

this obsession with dwg and autocad...what is wrong with dxf?