Thank you for QCAD!

Please use this forum to post feedback and suggestions related to QCAD.

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0xdeadbeef
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Posts: 31
Joined: Sun Aug 10, 2014 11:58 am

Thank you for QCAD!

Post by 0xdeadbeef » Sat Oct 04, 2014 11:57 am

Being a developer myself (for a living and in my spare time), I know this happens too rarely but I just wanted to thank you for QCAD. And there's no "but" ... just a longer "because" ;)

I wanted to use CAD for certain hobby projects for a decade or so, but was scared away by either the prices or the lack of features or usability or a combination of these factors. So I helped myself with Inkscape, which is not a bad program, but certainly not meant for accurate constructions.
Recently, I investigated again into CAD programs for another more complex project which seemed impossible to achieve with Inkscape. I was euphoric at first to see that there are now several free "big" commercial CAD tools available and I tried most of them. Stuff like Solid Edge and DraftSight, then also NeoCAD, DesignCAD etc.

And all of them confirmed by prejudice against CAD software. Cumbersome software that makes it hard to even draw and modify simple geometric shapes. Well, to be fair, NeoCAD seemed promising, but had other quirks. I was about to give up when I found QCAD - and I immediately felt comfortable. Which doesn't mean that I understood all of the concepts. E.g. it took me some time to fully understand the idea (and beauty) of the local cursor. I had to ask stupid questions to learn to work with polylines and there's probably plenty of stuff I didn't touch yet, but I never would have come so far if my first impression wouldn't have been so good. And now I'm in state where I actually like working with QCAD.

Yes, there are some bugs and minor quirks, but nothing substantial. QCAD never crashed in hours and hours of working with it. The SVG export works excellently (while Inkscape fails when trying to import DXF). It feels fast and polished. There are so many things that simply work as you would expect them to - maybe not even noticing that other programs would annoy you in the very same situation. E.g. when dragging an object, it snaps to the nearest snapping point, so you can choose the point intuitively. If you select a local cursor, the tool bar on the left automatically changes to allow positioning. Love that.

Especially at work, I have to use software which is buggy, carelessly developed or just plain horrible. Often enough programmers tend to implement features without caring about usability. This gets worse with bigger projects and hired programmers who never actually use the product they create. Which is never a good thing. I'm pretty sure that every software that is a pleasure to work with was developed by people who use it regularly themselves. And I deeply esteem this as there are not many programs I would put into that category. Notepad++ comes to mind and some versions of UltraEdit. For me personally, DipTrace for electronics projects ... and now QCAD for my 2D CAD needs. I'm a hypercritical person and I don't tend to praise other people's work. So take that as a big compliment.

I'm also aware that especially CAD and eCAD tools often stem from a DOS area where user interfaces were proprietary by definition, so even when being migrated to windows, proprietary concepts survived. As these tools were also targeted at a small corner of the market, most of them have horrible interfaces by today's standards. It was accepted that you need a two week course to learn to work with this kind of software and so obviously the trained users would not accept a major overhaul of the GUI.
A non-standard GUI might be acceptable for someone who works with the same software every day, but for someone who needs it only now and then, every violation of the default (Windows) behavior is a nuisance. Obviously, it is hard for a program of that category to attract new customers who want a modern GUI while not scaring away people used to the old interface. While I'm not in the position to judge this, I think QCAD does a very good job in this regard. It keeps some proprietary concepts, but adheres to standard GUI concepts most of the time. This is why I chose DipTrace over KiCAD and Eagle and this is why I like QCAD.

So again, thanks a lot for QCAD and keep up with the good work!

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andrew
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Joined: Fri Mar 30, 2007 6:07 am

Re: Thank you for QCAD!

Post by andrew » Mon Oct 06, 2014 1:39 pm

Many thanks for your feedback, I appreciate it! :)
Thanks also for your bug reports and feature requests.

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