Thursday, September 30, 2010

DWG CAD on Linux - Ares Commander Commercial Release

Last week I wrote about Ares and Draftsight, and how they where close to go full comercial (Ares only, Draftsight will be free as Mac and Win released versions), so this is it....

So, since 18 Set., what happened here? Let's go back a few days, and:

22 September - I found out that Draftsight for MAC was available for download
28 September - After reporting a bug for ARES, I received an email from Graebert, that says "BTW:
We have released a final version of  ARES Commander on Linux yesterday evening.".

So this last 2 days I've been using final version of ARES, so now I'm capable of write something more about than before.

- Interface is really polished, very nice and modern icons
- It has a built in table creator (really usefull)
- I don't remember if Autocad or Bricscad, does this but in hatch window, we have "create hatch for each boundary". How many of you had to delete hatch and create it all over again?
- When in a command, line for example, you don't loose focus on main windows and you can do F3 or F8, for example. This bug is not solved in Bricscad for Linux.
- Plot works really good in Linux. I've been plotting large format drawing for hand drafting. With "DEMO VERSION" watermarked.
- I opened 15 dwg at once without a single hiccup, and changing from one drawing to another brings no problem in performance
- It has a full-screen feature (very usefull for my eee701) on view->Clean Screen, or Ctrl+0 shortcut
- Layout tab is much smaller than in beta version, and you don't need it, so if your screen is small just take it out and use "Model" "Sheet" button on bottom bar
- Real time zoom and pan is somehow slow when very zoomed out, and I haven't figured out why...
- On Beta there was an option for opening DWF (it didn't work), but in final release is not implemented, maybe in the future we will see this (afterall Autodesk has a Open Source SDK for DWF)
- They are releasing packages for every main Linux distribution.

In general is a very polished piece of software and I can say Graebert did some really nice work from Beta to commercial version.

The price of this Software is till the end of October 495€ (with 50% off).

Linux is getting easy, Correction, even more easy.....

4 comments:

  1. Thanks for the review. To gain feature parity with the Windows platform we need file previews on our desktops. Any idea what is required to make this happen ?

    Disclaimer: Currenly using Bricscad v10.

    ReplyDelete
  2. @Brian - File preview in linux file managers is actually pretty easy to achieve. Basically almost all of them follow the same standard, they look (in the gconf file for ex.) for a thumbnailer application associated with a paticular mime type. Then, that thumbnailer is called with a couple of arguments (file to thumbnail, size of the image, etc...), and must return a png image. What the thumbnailer does to generate that image is up to you (blender quickly "renders" a view of the scene, freecad extracts a png image which is saved inside the file, etc...). If the thumbnailer doesn't return the expected result, a default icon is used.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I'm just nitpicking really, but
    "...you don't loose focus..."
    the word is lose.

    http://www.ross.net/notes/loose.shtml

    ReplyDelete
  4. Ojm, thank you, sometimes my English play tricks on me. It's not my born language.

    ReplyDelete

 
Made in Portugal