Description
The very first dedicated quilt design software I ever owned was Quilter's Design Studio for Windows, now known as QuiltSOFT. That was 1994, and the version of the program was 1.0. At $100 it was a big expense at that time, but there were only two primary choices on the market, Electric Quilt version 1.0 and QDS. Since EQ was a DOS program which, in that version, wouldn't even support a mouse, I opted for the only Windows-based choice available. What I got was a mixed bag. The program supported a mouse and used an interface that was fairly close to the standard Windows template. It had a block-drawing module, a library of blocks, and a quilt layout mode and you could do some fairly impressive things with it. I designed one of my early quilts on it, based on a stylized dragonfly block which I drew with QDS. The problems with it seemed to be internal. It was written not in a standard programming language, like C or Pascal, but instead in a program known as Windows Toolbook. When you installed the program you installed Toolbook, and the program had its architectural underpinnings in a "go-between" interpreter. The problem with this is that it was enormously resource-intensive. It seemed like every time you turned around you were getting a message that you were "low on Windows resources" or worse, a flat lock-up that forced you to restart Windows. And of course you usually lost your work. Some operations, like yardage calculation and even quilt layout, were severely curtailed by these limitations. In addition the block drawing module was designed such that if you made a mistake in drawing a line you could only correct it by starting over again from the beginning. Not the beginning of the line, but the beginning of the block! I recount these painful experiences because these have colored my perception of QDS and those of many other early users of the program, and it is a significant hurdle to overcome in considering a much more recent version, 3.0. I still see slams of QDS with some regularity in the newsgroup and on the online services, and have more than once recommended against its purchase to those contemplating quilt programs. So is the new version any better? The answer is both yes, and no. Over the last few years and two upgrade iterations, the program has improved in almost all respects. It has a very nice interface, for one thing, one of the best-planned of the quilt design programs. Like these other programs, it has two basic screens, one for quilt design (the default when you open the program) and a block design screen which you can bring up through a dropdown menu or by using the key combination CTRL-B. Each of these has a highly configurable snap-to-grid feature, and the necessary tools for doing the job are conveniently available at the bottom and/or side of the screen. On the quilt design screen a color palette and a large selection of fill patterns are available in a moveable bar to color and pattern quilt blocks to simulate the appearance of fabric.