I have always been a sucker for con­sis­tent and smart graph­i­cal user inter­faces, and work as such mostly on OS X. But I am even more of an effi­ciency, as in short­cuts, advo­cate. There are very few appli­ca­tions which bal­ance the rather mouse ori­ented OS X inter­face with a smart short­cut system – Aper­ture being a pos­i­tive exam­ple. Dia­met­ri­cally opposed to the Mac approach is Autodesk’s Auto­cad appli­ca­tion, a tech­no­cratic and absurd mess of an appli­ca­tion full of incon­sis­ten­cies due to her­itage, which still has a nerdy 1984 feel to it. Nonethe­less, I love it. All com­ments are acces­si­ble via a com­mand line, which enables you to just draw on a icon-​free black canvas with the mouse hand, while the other hand rests on the key­board typing out com­mands (we have dis­cussed the noto­ri­ous maxwan auto­cad short­cut system before). Purity. Zen.

This week Autodesk put up a survey on their site asking Acad/Mac users what fea­tures they would like to see most (and first) in a Auto­CAD on OS X ver­sion. The survey is detailed enough to sug­gest that Autodesk really means it: Acad on OS X would elim­i­nate one of the last rea­sons to ever boot into Win­dows again, and make me happy enough to jump around. It seems to be a chance to throw all that legacy bal­last over board and give us a lean Auto­cad. But this will most prob­a­bly stay a dream, and we’ll prob­a­bly get another layer of weird­ness added to Auto­cad. But we’re enthu­si­as­tic about Acad on a Mac nonethe­less, and thus urge you all to par­tic­i­pate in the survey to give it some momentum.