@kwistenbiebel said:

In the end, that means you can only use it as a student or to learn the software....
Which is exactly the same as a 'student/education version' or a 'trial version' of the other CAD programs.
The only difference would be that your trial doesn't expire.

Semantics.

I like Google sketchups approach better. You can use the free version for professionl use.
That is probably the reason it is so popular and used in almost every architecture firm in the world.

"the reason it is so popular and used in almost every architecture firm in the world" might also have something to do with the fact it is owned by the largest Internet firm on the planet and just the simple act of putting the name Google on the product generates more press buzz than progeSOFT could muster in a thousand years.

Now, if Google would associate sketchup with a charity and encourage users to donate just think what they might accomplish with their marketing juggernaut.

The main thrust behind progeCAD Smart! and before that progeCAD LT has always been that it is charityware. Utilize the software for free and donate to a worthy cause if you choose to. The brand awareness is a great benefit of that idea. As a trial though, Smart! is pretty crippled compared to the Professional version of progeCAD.

If everything in life were free, motivation and innovation would be priceless

@remus said:

Personal use is usually meant as 'non commercial use', so as long as you arent producing deliverables for people with it youre okay. Probably varies slightly from company to company, though, so worth waiting for the official answer.

I can not give you the "official answer" as we are not the developers but from the progeCAD website there is a pretty good statement that should be clear enough...

** Private use Only: progeCAD 2008 Smart! is for private, non-commercial use only. The use of progeCAD 2008 Smart! within any organization or for commercial and business purposes is strictly prohibited.

If you plan a business/commercial usage, please take a look to our Professional products or download the Trial Version*

To me that means that if you sell your stuff and you used progeCAD Smart! to help create it, your in violation of the agreement...

FYI to all, while the 2009 free Smart! version is not available yet, progeSOFT has just released the 2009 professional version of progeCAD Professional. 30 day trials available at http://www.icadsales.com/index.pl/Download%20IntelliCAD

@unknownuser said:

@unknownuser said:

I dont know why people waste money on costly CAD Software's when they can get the same results with ProgeCAD .

The reason why people buy an expensive license is the ability of creating your own tools. In AutoCad you can write in LISP since it came on the market and most of your old tools will still work in the latest versions of A-CAD. It is even possible to create tools in Visual Basic and Visual C++.

Hop on over to http://www.icadsales.com and download a copy of progeCAD and demo it for 30 days. It has AutoLISP, it has ADS (SDS C++), now, it doesn't have ARX, yet, but really, how many companies create custom objects anyway? If you can get the same software for 1/10th the price would you continue to buy the more expensive brand? In some cases the answer is yes, there are those who simply have to have Gucci, my wife for one, but I secretly buy her the knockoff and she is none the wiser, .

Well, the AutoCAD is the grand daddy Master flash and it's good you are getting to utilize that product. And Revit, haven't had the opportunity to play with that but when I was a developer back in the day I kept telling the other folks laying down the code that someday we would define everything in a building including the paths the robots would travel to erect the structure. As I understand it Revit can do that. What? oh, my buddy here just tapped me on the shoulder and said it couldn't but it could do everything else.

When your School applies for the Free for Educational program they get progeCAD Professional which is their version of grand daddy Master flash, at least compared to progeCAD Smart! and it has no watermarks out of the box, at least at first, unless you leave the box in a leaky basement or something. The School can allow their students to use the serial number to register it for at home or for their laptops as well as put it on every computer they own, used to own, or thought of ever owning! As long as they actually owned them.

Now for something completely diferent. Did you know you could use a combination of honey and boraxo to take care of that pesky sugar ant problem that happens every spring and winter when they decide it is to damn cold outside without a jacket and decide to setup in your house because it is nicer than the neighbors, who also snores loudly?

Back to your regularly scheduled channel...

progeCAD Smart! is free IntelliCAD, for non commerical use only. see http://www.progesoft.us and select IntelliCAD Download from the home page, then the progeCAD Smart! link on the left.

"I downloaded ProgeCAD- another Intellicad based Autocad clone, but it's so clunky to use, horrible stuttery/buggy interface and some annoying differences between Acad (like Z then A for Zoom Extents rather than Z then E). Combined with little or no support I gave up with it and took the plunge for AcadLT instead"

I am having a hard time believing you actually used the product on anything more than a 386 with 128 M of memory. I have been selling progeCAD for over four years and this behavior you are describing has never happened with any of my users. and the Z for zoom, A? for extents? Since when? I think you are trying to fib.

Everyone else on this post, try it out for yourself and lets see if Jackson is fibbing. LOL. Just kidding. I am suprised you said the support is non-existent. On http://www.progesoft.com and on our site http://www.icadsales.com there is a trial version forum and new user forum respectively. Did you go to one of these and request help? For registered users there is help desk support going directly to the developers.

"I use BricsCad (utilizing Icad) and am very happy with it. BricsCad seems to be at the forefront of tweaking/fixing Icad"

The only thing about your statement that I would be wary of is what direction the rest of those in the IntelliCAD consortium are going. I remember going down the path of a proprietary vendor and feeling trapped until I was save by a group who happened to crack their drawing code making it non-proprietary... That vendor was Autodesk. I would just be wary of going to far afield of the rest of the crowd for safety sake.

"Now I've installed it, it is a trial. However Gaieus I would say that it is totally legal, very similar to IntelliCAD. Did anybody find the price on the website? This standard version does not have the 3D tools but it is not save disabled so not totally useless, for 30 days at least."

We sell a standard version for $250 USD and our Professional version which has solid modeling, import to PDF, raster image support, advanced rendering, express toolbar, block manager with 11,000 blocks, etc. etc. is $375 USD. You can also download a free 30 day full trial of progeCAD 2008 Professional at http://www.icadsales.com.

The ITC (IntellicAD Technology Consortium) was Open Source when it was first formed. They gave away the software for free and you could compile it and use it. The idea was co-operative development but the only people who co-operated were the Developers the ITC paid. So a decision was made to make it "quasi open source" (thats the words the Chairman at the time used, I swear) whereby only the members who paid could play. Even with that impediment the ITC is a unique organization with one goal in mind, Software Development. Where Autodesk spends your hard earned money on lawsuits against competitors, executive salaries, and mass amounts of marketing, the ITC does no marketing, has volunteer officers, and the only reason they have a legal budget is to protect their trademarks. I am very familar with the non-profit, I was the sole employee for several years at the early part of the millenium.

I have to say it is nice reading positive things about progeCAD IntelliCAD. I have been representing it now ever since I left the ITC and have been very pleased with its usage. There was a time in the not so distant past that those who tried IntelliCAD came away with a metallic taste in their mouths due to the poor experience. The folks at the ITC have worked extremely hard to rid itself of the poor performance and reliability while trying to overcome users perception of those first couple of years. I think it is paying off.

"And just a note to Jon above: the crosshairs are editable but cant find how to resize the pickbox...which is annoying but am getting used to the smallish box."

How would you set the pickbox size in AutoCAD assuming you did not have a dialog box? I was trained to use AutoCAD on version 1.03 so I learned to use it with the keyboard. If you asked me how to find something on those little pictures up and the top I wouldn't know where I was but perhaps that, and the programming I did for years inside AutoCAD allows me to know you can type setvar at the command line. Tell progeCAD "pickbox" as the variable to set, then set the size you want!

"ProgeCAD Smart does not support 3d surfaces or solids so it is probably fairer to say that it is equivalent to AutoCAD LT."

But the big brother of progeCAD Smart! does. progeCAD Professional is less than $400 USD and if you are a student, your teacher, professor, the school can get progeCAD Professional free to all your computer labs and the students can have a copy at home, for free. We have supplied over 300 schools since the program has been active including large universities to junior high schools. Have your teacher go here: http://www.progesoft.us/index.pl/Free%20for%20Schools and request Free for Schools...

While some of the IntelliCAD members have use Wine to run the software on Linux, we have have taken a different direction. We saw that virtualization is a way to have your cake and eat it too. We have run progeCAD on both the Mac (http://www.icadsales.com/index.pl/Mac%20Users) and on Linux (http://www.icadsales.com/index.pl/Linux%20Users) using virtual machines and quite frankly it isn't much different than a PC running progeCAD standalone with Windows, except you are right on the Mac or Linux desktop and have access to all those OS capabilities and applications.

One of the things that isnt quite there yet for the iCAD crowd is the third party market. Of course AutoCAD doesnt really have one either since they either bought out or crushed the independent developers so they could move into their markets. Does anyone remember what it used to be like with the 100s of developers creating applications to run on AutoCAD. Now those were the days. We have a few progeCAD add-ons such as an [url=http://www.icadsales.com/index.pl?id=4434:3hdzp994]Architectural app[/url:3hdzp994] and a [url=http://www.icadsales.com/index.pl/IntelliCAD Products/IntelliCAD Civil Survey:3hdzp994]Civil Survey (cogo, dtm, road design)[/url:3hdzp994] package. We will be adding a CAM add-on soon and are on the lookout for other products which run under progeCAD. If anyone sees any send a shout out!

"There is a nifty little program that helped us out in getting rid of the tag but a headache all the same"

Shame Shame. I hope you donated to the charity progeSOFT requested when you downloaded and install progeCAD Smart!. They dont require it but I suppose if you are going to reverse engineer the drawings to remove the watermark you should at least help out the cause. I like the idea that progeCAD Smart! is Charityware, if you download and use it they ask that you donate to a worthly cause. A great company, great software, and a great price.