Free DraftSight For Mac Released

Autodesk recently announced AutoCAD for Mac. But the product has not yet been released to the public. Autodesk has put an embargo on beta testers and the only news about the product is from Autodesk employees, who not surprisingly, are raving mad about it and whetting people’s appetites.

On the other hand, SolidWorks quietly showed DraftSight for Mac to a few bloggers they invited to their Blogger Press Day event a couple of weeks ago. Here is a screen shot.

Click image for larger view

Today Dassault Systemes released DraftSight for Mac. As promised, its free and can be downloaded from www.draftsight.com.

This reminds me of something I wrote in a previous post titled “$0 DraftSight For Mac To Be Released Before $4000 AutoCAD For Mac“:

“So as I see things happening, on Windows, $0 DraftSight will need to try its best to dislodge the $4000 AutoCAD. Whereas on the Mac, the $4000 AutoCAD will need to do much more than its best to try and dislodge the $0 DraftSight.”

So while you wait for Autodesk to release AutoCAD for Mac, you can take DraftSight for a spin. If you do I’d appreciate if you left a comment with your first impressions.

Frankly, I’m not sure whether it was a good idea on the part of Autodesk to close the AutoCAD for Mac beta program for new participants the day they announced the product. They have their own reasons for doing that, but I think it would have been better to instead open up the beta program to everyone after the product announcement. I say this because now we have a situation where Autodesk has peaked the interest of its AutoCAD install base for a native Mac 2D CAD application and Dassault Systemes will ride on that interest by offering DraftSight for Mac before any of these AutoCAD users can even try AutoCAD for Mac.