Mozilla and Google blast IE-only Windows on ARM

@Khamul Drafting is my career but it is focused mostly on electronic CAE (PCB design). I normally use Altium Designer (formerly Protel) on WinXP in VMware Player. It doesn't work on Wine but is perfectly usable via VM. The nearest F/OSS competitors are GNU EDA and Kicad, neither of which I've tried in several years. The customer determines the tools I have to use. Since there is no ubiquitous file format for PCB design like with DXF and DWG in 2D mechanical design, there are no alternatives.

My mechanical design tasks are mostly related to 2D machining drawings for enclosures. These are normally based on off-the-shelf enclosures which are either die-cast or extruded aluminum. Originally I used AutoSKETCH but the customer eventually upgraded to AutoCAD. Compared to the former, the latter is a rather clunky interface requiring many more mouse-clicks and keyboard usage to accomplish a task. I don't use it enough to justify buying it so I was relying on the time-limited demo version.

The customer later decided to switch to 3D, using SolidWorks by Dassault Systems after toying with Autodesk Inventor. Some work is still done on AutoCAD.

Dassault Systems is part of the Intellicad consortium. They released DraftSight which is a free (not open-source) cross-platform AutoCAD clone. I hate it almost as much as AutoCAD as its interface is just as clunky with the notable exception that it doesn't use the useless Office ribbon that AutoCAD has. I switched to using it instead of AutoCAD and it meets my needs perfectly.

I have used Qcad to create a basement remodeling plan for a friend. I also bought the commercial version to obtain support for ordinate dimensioning which the community version lacks. Its capabilities lie somewhere between AutoSKETCH and AutoCAD LT but it has an ugly interface. It's good enough for beginners but DraftSight is a much better option for professionals. But these are not the only options.

@jhansonxi: I do some PCB design on the side, and Kicad works extremely well for me. I tried gEDA but it really didn't agree with me. However, there absolutely are standard file formats for PCBs, they're called "Gerbers". Of course, this is an output-only format, but every PCB maker on the planet uses them (and any that don't aren't worth bothering with). Of course, this won't help you if you're trying to exchange unfinished designs with other people using different software, but for the final output, Kicad makes standard Gerbers just as well as anything else.

@dinotrac: I used a Metro phone for about 30 seconds before looking at Android phones. It worked well enough, but it was butt-ugly. Add to that the fact that it's not customizable at all, the app store sucks (i.e. not a lot of apps), the fact that it's by MS, and the fact that it's tanking and may very well suffer the same fate as Zune or PlaysForSure, and it's a terrible buy. I'm quite happy with my Android phone; I didn't like the regular Honeycomb on-screen keyboard included, so I downloaded the free "Hacker's Keyboard" app, and now I have full keyboard with all the symbol keys and more, and I can even set it to a Dvorak layout. Try that on iOS or WP7. Same goes for everything else on there: the dialer and contacts manager, the SMS application, everything can be replaced by 3rd-party versions, instead of being stuck with what the control freaks in Redmond or Cupertino want you to use.

@JaseP: If the Metro app store is the smartest thing they've done in a long time, that's pretty sad since it's just a ripoff of everyone else's app stores. What are they, number 6 or 7 in having an app store?