Clarification-the future of PowerCadd

[Rik Negus]

My email to Todd:

Hello Todd

It is now six months since we last communicated and it is six months of not a word from you about the future of PowerCadd.
Reading the PowerCadd form we can see that there is a lot of concern and a lot of support for you.
I fully understand your personal position and I want you to know that I will support you in what ever way I can, but the truth is we are all very concerned.

PowerCadd is not just about you, it is about all of the faithful users of the program who's livelihood depends on the continued life of it.
I am a 31 year user and have no desire to switch to an inferior program as do others.

What is the legacy that you want to leave with regards to PowerCadd? You can let it wither away ( which it is doing) or you can give it a great future, only you have this choice.
If the load is to great for you to handle, say so, there is nothing wrong in that, if you need help ask for it, we all need to do that at sometime or another.

What about partnering with another developer, where you can still be involved but get the additional resources required to make it happen.
You have users waiting to send you money and support the ongoing growth of PowerCadd.

Your silence is deafening, you need to communicate with us, we are all in this boat together, if it sinks we all go down.

I am here to help and listen, you can Facetime call me at 778-658-----

Sincerely,

Rik Negus

[johncruet48]

Rik-and others:

I was always under the impression that PowerCADD was a team effort, yet where is this team in time of need?

[cadmonkey]

I will be completing my last project in PowerCadd this month. Given the lack of information regarding updates, I made the decision last year to slowly transition to new software. It has been a long and steep learning curve, but I am ecstatic that I have eliminated the possibility that I'll be caught with my pants down due to hardware failures, conflicts with OS updates, or an EOL announcement. There are things I love that far exceed the capabilities of PowerCadd, and there are things I will miss about PowerCadd.

I'll likely purchase a new license if one becomes available, just to have access to 18 years of old projects that may need to be converted. An annual license is out of the question.

No software (or software company) is perfect. But software that is not compatible with a computer purchased in the past 18 months is obsolete.

[bellarchitect]

I am sure there are others beside me who have kept their older Mac's to use for PowerCADD. I've gone ahead and purchased new equipment, upgaded this equipment and run the latest software - without PowerCADD installed. I use my older 2016 MacBook Pro running Mojave with PC9. I also have an older 2006 24" white iMac which runs PC7 so I can open and modify those older files. And, i have my daughters old 2011 15" MacBook Pro as another backup.

I have practice that generally works on residential, light commercial and small government projects. I rearely need to coordinate with a consultant and trade files. If I do, I just get AutoCadd in version 10-14 and I'm able to open them and coordinate my work. If PC never goes beyond what we have now, I'll just keep up my older equipment and save files to my external hard drive to access them from my newer equipment just like I do now.

It's really a pain to work like this, but, I'm not about to change after 35 years in practice and another 20+ years more to go at least ......I'm not going to retire, I'm having too much fun!

Maybe 20 years may be pushing the equipment and technology, but, we'll see if I can keep the old stuff going. Heck, I still have my 1990 Macintosh Classic and it still runs!

Have a great night and a great year!

Frank

[Joe Mattei]

I have an assault from two sides. Powercadd... don't have to beat a dead horse... and Canon, that has made my wide-format printer obsolete if I update my OS. Yikes! I don't want to buy another printer, but I will probably do that if PC updates. You feel like, "They" got you coming and going?

[pjmeli]

Seems to me we already got a clarification recently…that it would be close to 2022 before the new version of PowerCadd would be released…

I currently run PowerCadd on my old MacMini…that'll work until the mini gives up the ghost.
I have a VMware version of Mojave with PoweraddC running on my new (not M1) mini if/when that happens. I expect to be able to use that on an M1 eventually so I should have years of use left for the current version of PowerCadd…

Paul

[PeterKona]

I currently run PowerCadd on my old MacMini…that'll work until the mini gives up the ghost.
Paul

You can buy nice refurbished Macs.

Currently I don't see a reason to update Macs. But my computer focus is work, and that is primarily PowerCADD and SketchUp. Others might have other SW needs. I also need internet tools, and it's possible those will migrate beyond the old MacOS someday.

[pjmeli]

I get a new Mac every 4-5 years but I like to keep two running just in case. I have a 2018 and a 2014 Mini for work
The 2014 runs PowerCadd…

…I'm jonesing for an M1 to play with though…

Paul

[Jon Buswell]

It's two and a half months since I suggested that we pay an advance or something to get PCADD 10/11 finished and released. I'm grateful to everyone on this forum who are all clearly as wedded as I am to PowerCADD continuing to be developed.

For my part, I'm now working mostly in Vectorworks, but its clearly not well scripted as there are so many things that make it crash, and whilst the VW crash team are interested in the problems, they rarely get fixed before the next full release which causes another set of problems to discover. I pay $1,000 AUD/year for this service - and to keep VW at the latest release and it's frustrating to know that I am a glorified Beta tester for their software.

I have never had that kind of issue with Powercadd since PC6 and I haven't paid for anything since PC9 ten years ago. I remember that a subscription model was proposed a while ago but it was seen as too complicated and time consuming to administrate.

Todd, I have seen from your reply to a member of this forum that Apple have shifted the goalpost and now everything that was in progress has to be re-written in another language. Can you please tell us how many programmers you need for how long (and a rough estimate of cost) so we can do a kickstarter to raise the funds to make this happen. Sometimes things need a push, as a collective of users we're falling away by the week. If you don't act now, by the time you've finished your updates there will be no one left to buy it.

I personally like the idea of a co-operative ownership or even the notion that we become shareholders in ENGSW to give the company the financial boost it needs to further develop this software for the M1 chip environment. PowerCADD has been with me since PowerDraw 4 and having learned AutoCAD, and now Vectorworks, PC is still my go to for fast drawing.

Please answer us...

[JaiCheswick]

Totally agree.