Yep, it's unfortunate that they just let MacDraw fall by the wayside. I think the last update was around 1992 or so. For the drawing that a lot of folks do (like me) it was a pretty user-friendly and not overly complicated program. It's certainly not as sophisticated as Illustrator or some of the other current ones, but it could do some nice stuff. I actually did my whole book on it. I wrote the text, did all the drawings and even did the original mock-up of the page layout all on MacDraw Pro. It drove the people at WoodenBoat nuts because authors don't usually come in and say "here it is and this is what it should, and will, look like" but I knew how I wanted it to look and I'm pretty hard-headed (no kidding). MacDraw is also pretty byte-stingy. My entire book with all the text and the layout for 265 pages, with 200 color drawings, fit on twelve, 2MB floppy disks!
It does draw to scale when needed. I use it that way for all the sailplans when I'm figuring proportions, boat balance, yardage needed, etc. but then I can also draw freehand if I want a boat from some obscure angle. The one thing that it can't do which would sometimes be helpful would be translating dimensions from one angle to another. If I want a profile, an end view and a top-view I have to draw them the same way we used to do in drafting class using reference lines. Newer programs can do that much faster.
Here are a freehand angle-view, a scaled plan from a quote and a scaled plan to finished sail. It's kind of unfortunate that our desire for bigger, fancier and faster computers makes previous models obsolete so quickly. Many of the computers that could still draw quite well and efficiently with a simple program like this went to the scrap heap years ago.
