Regular updates are a good sign that a software company has staying power in the CAD industry, and my rather bland headline tells us that in the past month China's ZWSOFT has shipped updates to its ZWCAD+ AutoCAD work-alike and ZW3D CAD/CAM packages.
(The "+" in the ZWCAD+ name indicates that the CAD program is no longer based on IntelliCAD code.)
ZWCAD+ 2012 service pack 2 improves image underlays, handling 1GB raster files easily (see figure), according to the press release. There's also enhancements to hatching, such as dynamic preview and boundary editing.
ZWCAD+ 2012 SP2 showing off a big raster underlay
ZW3D 2013 offers automatically generated constraints, constraint resolving, and drag'n drop actions inside the History manager -- plus a bunch of improvements to the CAM and mould modules.
As a bridge between ZWCAD and ZW3D, the company offers ZWCAD Mechanical for 2D mechanical designs. On iOS devices, they have their free Touch software for viewing drawings downloaded from Dropbox or email.
ZWSOFT has moved itself from an object of curiosity to a CAD vendor to watch as they aggressively expand -- and improve -- their software packages.
- ZWSOFT+ demo: www.zwsoft.com/products/zwcad+.html
- ZW3D demo: www.zwsoft.com/products/zw3d.html
- Touch download: itunes.apple.com/us/app/zwcad-touch
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