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Sep 24, 2010

Comments

Dove

"All Mac apps share the same menu bar (bad design, in my opinion)"

The Mac menu bar is based in Fitts' Law (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts'_law). By attaching it to the top of the screen, the elements can be reached no matter how much you move the mouse upwards, in contrast with the Windows-style menu bar where you have to specifically target a very small area. In the Mac, the ckick area is effectively infinite, since it has infinite height.

From Wikipedia: "Since the advent of graphical user interfaces, Fitts's law has been applied to tasks where the user must position a mouse cursor over an on-screen target, such as a button or other widget (...) Edges and corners of the computer display (e.g., Start button in Microsoft Windows and the menus and Dock of Mac OS X) are particularly easy to acquire because the pointer remains at the screen edge regardless of how much further the mouse is moved, thus can be considered as having infinite width. Similarly, top-of-screen menus (e.g., Mac OS) are easier to acquire than top-of-window menus (e.g., Windows OS)".

Placing the menu bar in any other place than an edge of the screen is bad design, since it makes things harder to use ;)


"Mac style -- all user interface elements are independent of one another, irritating, in my mind. Drag the drawing window, and everything else stays in place. Some people like this, apparently."

Where by "some people" you mean "all Mac users since 1984" :)

Ralph Grabowski

Here's the problem:

I have dual-screen systems on Windows and Mac. If I want to access a menu item, in Windows, I simply click on the program's menu bar.

In Mac, I first have to click on some aspect of the program's UI (usually the window title bar) and then access its menu bar. Less efficient.
- - -
In Windows, when I move a program (by dragging its title bar), all the program's UI elements move with it.

In Mac, I drag a program, and all the rest of the its UI elements remain behind, which messes up the screen and makes no sense to me.

Chris

As for the Application menu, once you have gotten used a Mac, this is a great design. All applications work in a similar manner, meaning if you learned one, you have essentially learned them all, at least from an interface standpoint. There are ways to modify this behavior through various programs out there.

Dove

Yeah, good points and very true indeed :) The single-menubar in a dual-screen setup is very awkward. It has been suggested to duplicate the menu in each window, but Apple has still to offer a good solution to the problem.

The detached-window interface is... well, strange to those who come from Windows. But to long-time Mac users, the strange thing is having monolithic windows containing sub-windows, palettes, and other UI elements.

Windows identifies the "program" with the "window" - in a sense, the "program" *is* the "window" - so, if you click "close", you are closing both the document and the program. Mac separates the "program" from the "window" - the latter is just an open document, and the former can keep on running even if there's no open documents. The design philosophies involved are so different I wonder a die-hard user of one system will ever feel comfortable with the other.

Mr. Ed

I can not get Draftsight to work on my mac ( OSX 10.6.4 ) I get a dialog box that shows "Library not loaded"!! I have tried to install multiple imes with no success. Any thoughts???

jim brown

I am attempting to run the application on a Mac Mini, 1.66 GHz Core Duo, 2 GB RAM, 400GB free HD space and OS X 10.6.6.

Every time I down load the app it installs and attempts to load and crashes with a message that it could not run. It then gives me the option to save my work (there isn't any yet) and runs through the send crash report process...

Any ideas? Anyone able to correct this??
thanks

EV

I'm very pleased with any free autocad alternative especially for MAC. This program seems to be a little sluggish but I'm not running it on the fastest mac (3 year old macbook).
All functions seem to work oke.
Thanks Dassault!
Now I'm looking for a 3D inventor (STP) look alike in freeware. Is there a challenge for Dassault??

erik de keyser, Bricsys

we plan to have Bricscad V12 Platinum for the Mac in Q1 2012. It's is a direct modeler with 3D constraint solving and Design intent capabilities. And yes, it is 100% .dwg compatible.

Heidi Helm

I am having no luck at all saving my printing settings in DraftSight. I select the options I want, and then use the + to save a present with a name of choice. However, after exiting the print window and returning to select the same preset, it does not change anything from the default settings. No matter what present I create and select, the default print settings are the only ones I get.
Anyone have any suggestions?

Lorenzo Daveri

I have the same problem on saving print settings. No way to reuse them after a print, and I have to change everyone of them form the start.
Macosx 10.6.8.

Thanks in advance for any suggestion.

Ralph Grabowski

You need to asked the question on the DraftSight forums.

Enza

I've been a PC draftsperson for years and I'm ready to buy a mac laptop, but I'm not sure which one to buy to efficiently run Draftsight on?

Ralph Grabowski

Dassault Systemes publishes the minimum system requiresments on The DraftSight Web site -> http://www.3ds.com/fileadmin/PRODUCTS-SERVICES/DRATFSIGHT/PDF/End-User-FAQ-DraftSight.pdf

matjas

how come that when I have saved a drawing it is a nightmare to work on it once it is saved...
I work on Apple's os HiSierra.
when drawing the program works just fine.

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