Product Reviews

The TurboCAD range of products is popular with many engineers, architects and other technically oriented designers who need to produce blueprints and technical drawings. There are several versions of TurboCAD, ranging in price from £250 to less than £50, and TurboCAD Designer is the baby of the group. It costs just £30, and is aimed at beginners and hobbyists who might want to use it to design a new layout for their home or office

There's no denying that TurboCAD Designer is great value. It's packed with precise and versatile drawing and design tools that enable you to create complex technical drawings. It offers dozens of options for drawing geometric shapes such as rectangles, polygons, circles and sets of concentric circles. There are tools for creating arcs that span precise angles, for drawing freehand or mathematically defined (bezier) curves and for grouping and combining objects to create more complex drawings. This program also has some extremely useful time-saving options, such as the ability to display automatically the dimensions of objects that you draw. This is great whether you're a designer facing a deadline or you're simply trying to figure out how many desks you

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can squeeze into your new office. All the tools work well, and for the price they're an absolute steal.

People with CAD experience will feel right at home with TurboCAD Designer. But beginners, who are the program's target users, are more likely to be baffled by the vast range of tools and the dense manual. A few tutorials are provided on CD-ROM, but they're too perfunctory to explain in any detail how the program works. Additional tutorials are available on the TurboCAD website, but if users have to root around on the internet before they can even get started, that's an admission that the program is not suitable for beginners.

The interface is also erratic and badly behaved. The program starts in its normal mode, which is awash with a confusing array of tools. We noticed a button in the main menu bar marked Beginner UI, which seemed to convert the user interface into a less-crowded beginner mode. Sadly, the manual didn't mention this button or explain the differences between the two modes, and after clicking it we couldn't figure out how to switch back to normal mode.

We experienced other interface problems, such as the non-appearance of the Symbols palette, which displays ready-made drawings for various items of furniture and technical equipment. This would sometimes appear onscreen but was often obscured by other palettes or toolbars. Only by clicking randomly around the edges of the screen were we able to make it pop back into sight.

TurboCAD Designer is an extremely competent CAD drawing tool with an impressive range of tools for a very reasonable price, but the developer's attempts to tailor it for beginners haven't worked. It remains very much a tool for people who already have some experience of CAD or technical illustration work.