IntelliCAD 7 Released A Year Ago

Today I was fiddling around with the recently released GstarCAD 2011 and stumbled upon something quite interesting. GstarCAD is an AutoCAD clone based on the IntelliCAD platform developed by the ITC. IntelliCAD has a read-only system variable called “ICADVER” which holds the internal version of IntelliCAD. To my surprise I found that the value of ICADVER for GstarCAD 2011 is 7.0.

I know that the ITC has released Beta 2 of the long delayed IntelliCAD 7 to its members. At least that is what is said on the ITC web site. I didn’t know that the members had already started shipping it to customers. I also found that the value of ICADVER in GstarCAD 2010, a product that was released almost a year ago, was 7.0 as well.

To make sense of all this I asked GstarCAD if versions 2010 and 2011 of their software were based the new IntelliCAD 7. I got a reply saying that they were. So this means IntelliCAD 7 has been out in the market for about a year now. So either the ITC web site is hopelessly outdated or GstarCAD has been shipping beta software to its customers for a year.

From the versions of the DLLs in the GstarCAD installation folder I see that GstarCAD 2011 is based on DWGdirect 2.04, the ODA’s AutoCAD clone platform which I believe was released around 2007.

Update (10-Mar-2011)

Darcy Detlor, the treasurer of the  ITC, left a comment below clarifying that GstarCAD 2010 and 2011 is not IntelliCAD 7 and that according to the rules of the ITC members are not allowed to change the value of the ICADVER system variable.