TurboCAD Mac Designer 2D v.6 (Mac)

package was opened missing manual and missing bonus dvd tutorial which should of been included

This product is very good value, I did have previous experience of CAD drawing with a very expensive competitors product and have found TurboCad Designer has performed all the functions that I required very well. Obviously a little practice is required but their online assistance is good and the on board help assistance is good once you find the correct terminology to use.

Great design capabilities, easy to use, lots of online help, if you can take the frequent adverts from the supplier.The only downside being the program's incompatibility with earlier Windows based TurboCad files.

Bought Turbocad Pro V6 for Mac, and after nearly a month, I'm giving up and switching to another programme. There are too many software conflicts to list, and the programme crashes all the time. The smart walls sometimes work, sometimes don't, the wall hatch editor crashes with a kernel panic, and I've never got it to render anything! Such a shame, as it appears to offer almost everything that Vectorworks offers at 20% of the price. Today, I spent over 4 hours trying to draw a basic box with 2 dividing walls. Couldn't get the hatching to show up except when I moved the drawing area with the mouse, and the smart trim tool just stopped working.

Whilst I didn't have too many issues installing TurboCAD for Mac 2D ... I find the interface to be quite unhelpful and turgid. Sure it will support many CAD file formats, but I can't see that anyone would be particularly keen on doing so.The interface is very old fashioned, and having installed all of the additional floor plans and objects, but could not find a logical way of index them, and therefore would have to wade through until I found what I was looking for.TurboCAD for Mac is priced for a beginner, but to get the most out of it, you would have to be a reasonably experienced user ... and an experienced user is just not going to buy this software.I really wanted it to work for me, and it just didn't ... a bit of a fail I'm afraid.

Anyone expecting an Adobe or Apple-quality piece of software will be very disappointed. This feels like it was designed for both PC and Mac, and the interface is a little bit clunky and unattractive. The main drawback is the lack of 3D, although this function is available in the more advanced versions of this software, which are available for only a little more. Installation was fine and once you get used to the interface if is easy enough to render simple plans; however, I would personally go for one of the higher-specification versions if I were buying this myself.

Three drawbacks made me hate this software, it cannot open .dwg files, I really need 3D drafting which it doesnt have and it just doesnt work intuitively, its for a Mac but the interface seems all Windows to me.

Installation. At first I couldn't get the cd to install to my macbook air via "remote disc". Not the fault of IMSI, and I was very pleased that it was possible to download a trial version from their site, install and activate using the full product serial.Now for the program itself. At first I was met with an incredibly ugly interface. Completely grey with some very old school Windows 95 style "paint" icons. Essentially to the beginner this looks like ms paint with an array of extremely varied geometric functions. On first play, it seemed pretty easy to start drawing. Essentially you click points to chain them together. you can drop walls, windows, however it isn't made clear how to do more advanced things, like see from a 3d-perspective. Or increase the height of a wall so that you can see it properly from a side view.Add to this the frustration of not being able to work out how to use the included 500 floor plans with the "drafting assistant" and you have some very frustrating software. It might just be that I haven't used the program for enough time, but it NEEDS to be more user friendly, particularly with it being an introductory beginner's type software. There is no excuse for a manual that lists features for ALL the different TurboCAD products which means plenty of the documentation is immediately irrelevant because I'm not using the pro version. When it's a tome over 500 pages long. You have users that may give up before giving it a chance.So essentially, the interface needs updating, user friendliness too needs improving with even simply things like tutorial guides, and wizards. The software is probably great at it's core job, but it's not well exposed to beginners like me to CAD software.