No Classic on Intel Macs

The Engineered Software product for ClarisCAD translations is called PowerDraw Translator, not Power Drawing. Sold for $295 in mid-2005. You can review or download a demo of PowerCADD at: http://www.engsw.com/webpage_content.html But for some reason PowerDraw Translator is not listed on their site, you'll have to contact Engineered Software directly. Bob

The Engineered Software product for ClarisCAD translations is called PowerDraw Translator, not Power Drawing. Sold for $295 in mid-2005. You can review or download a demo of PowerCADD at: http://www.engsw.com/webpage_content.html But for some reason PowerDraw Translator is not listed on their site, you'll have to contact Engineered Software directly. Bob

Many Mac users in technical design used ClarisCAD to create thousands of engineering drawings, because it was so much easier to use than existing CAD programs in the 80s, yet had enough power to do some really fine work. I discovered how many people are stuck in this abandoned format while searching for a way to get my own mass of work translated to something that would be easier to share with non-Mac platforms. Finally came across an almost seamless solution that cannot be done without access to Classic or a System 9 or lower machine. PowerCADD is a great OS X drafting program, what ClarisCAD could have been had it continued to evolve -- or ever started to evolve to be more accurate. An element of a pre-OS X version of PowerCADD called Power Drawing translates ClarisCAD and MacDraw files into PowerCADD format almost flawlessly. Power Drawing requires System 9.2 or lower and remains available now only because the developer, Engineered Software, is aware of the many people and organizations that need a way out of ClarisCAD. The translations done in 9.2 can then be opened in OS X, including Tiger. You can certainly translate on an old machine and transfer the results to Tiger on a newer one It's just a heck of a lot faster and easier to do both jobs on one computer, especially in bulk. Bob

Unfortunately geologists who use Macs for geological purposes will suffer greatly with the loss of Classic. During the late 80's and through the late 90's there were still a number of Macs in the earth sciences world. With no support from Apple the number of vendors making earth-science specific software for Macs shrank along with the audience. During this time three major geological mapping programs were produced, MacCadContour, Surface II and MacGridzo. These are all classic-only (the companies that made them are either long gone or they stopped making Mac software) aps that have no modern counterparts - they support very specialized functionality required in geological mapping. So.. yes.. the loss of Classic will, at the last, cause us to keep a fleeting of aging non-Intel computers around for years. I just hope that someone else comes up with a viable Classic emulator for the Mactel machines.

There is no development for Folio Views period. I have looked for four years for a Mac OS X replcement, but with ZERO success. I use Folio Views almost daily.

re GReg: http://www.silhouetteonline.com/ Should solve your vectorization needs.

As to the writer who suggests indesign as an upgrade path from pagemaker ... don't. It's not that great and always needs a lot of tweaks if you use the upgrade path. My mission critical pair of packages are Adobie Streamline and Fontographer. They have never come out with an OSX version of those, and they still sell the OS 9 versions (Works fine under emulation). I kow of other font editing packages I could in theory move to, but I don't know of any other tracing packages for OS X. Any help anyone? -GReg

I have used Pagemaker since 1988, version 2, when it was made by Aldus, before they were assimilated by Adobe. They dropped Pagemaker at version 7. I have literally thousands of files I need to get into once in a while, but since I do very little layout anymore, it's not worth buying InDesign to import the Pagemaker files. So, I guess I'll just keep an old iMac around for this purpose. But it's no big deal. I have a ton of old computers around here. I think I'm up to three iMacs and various older pre-G3 Powermacs. I will miss OS 9, though. It still does a few things better, though I much prefer OS X.

ClarisDraw - nothing out there imports those drawings yet.

eClass grades. That means that the school where I work will need to switch to a new school management system. This should cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $100k. Very expensive upgrade. Oh well... we were planning on it in a few years anyway. This will simply force the issue in the board of ed.