Dezignstuff SolidWorks Blog

SolidWorks has issued a hot fix to repair the problem addressed by the latest technical alert for 64 bit Photoworks users:

http://www.solidworks.com/sw/support/CustomerBulletins.html

If you have SolidWorks 2009 sp5, 2010 sp1 or sp2 installed and use Photoworks, you should apply this hot fix immediately. Symptoms of the bug include corruption of data and operating system.

Thanks to SW for getting the fix out so quickly, but the discussion about how this slipped through QA is going to rattle around for some time. I’m not clear about how many people were affected by this, but it has been said to be associated with activating the Photoworks add-in when your machine is using more than 2 GB of memory. You know this stuff has to be hard to test, but they aren’t exactly giving it away.

How soon? Real soon. I dunno, nobody knows, and if they did they wouldn’t say.

You are either self-punishing, uncurably curious, serious fanboy material or simply have too much time on your hands. It’s that time again. SolidWorks 2010 beta will shortly be available for download. I won’t be able to say anything else about it outside of the SW 2010 beta forums because of the non-disclosure you have to agree to when you sign up. You can remember back to SolidWorks World 2009, with all of the what’s new info that they put out there… Brian McElyea had some of the 2010 enhancements.

One thing you can do that is easy is to download the Whats New PDF and read it over to see what is going to affect you. So for whatever reason you do it, early learning, curiosity, testing, development, or self punishment, come and get it.

Click here to learn more about SW10beta.

Here are some tips for testing:

• Bring lots of patience and an open mind
• Don’t just accept that because a button is in the place where it is supposed to be that it works correctly
• Don’t just accept that because something produces a result that it is the correct result
• make a copy of your data that you want to use, and make sure when you open an assembly that it is not looking to the original data for references
• do not beta test while doing production work
• download the What’s New first, and read it while the rest of the software is downloading (if it’s not bundled in the main download…)
• Don’t expect the What’s New to be comprehensive – look for those easter eggs! and discuss them on the beta forum!
• Do a parallell install – yes, you can have 2010 and 2009 on the same computer and even both running at the same time.
• Don’t overwrite your TOOLBOX!!!
• identify areas that are of interest to you
• methodically go through each area of interest to you, test all the options, try out every button to see what it does.
• keep a log of how each feature measured up to what you expected it to do
• report bugs when you find them, even report old bugs, even though the SW guys will yell at you for doing it – they need to fix the new and the old bugs.
• participate in the beta forum
• don’t discuss beta issues publicly outside of the beta forum
• don’t get your heart set on prizes – Lin ShaoDun wins every year by a LARGE margin, you can only dream of second place

Here’s one that just won’t go:

The purple surface and the blue surface clearly intersect, and intersect fully enough to do a mutual trim. But it simply won’t work. Cases like this normally are caused by errors on one of the bodies, but I have thoroughly checked both bodies with Check, and VOR. I can’t find anything that would indicate that anything is even remotely wrong or questionable with either body. One body is a simple extrude. The other is a compound surface body. It is somewhat complicated by the fact that there are some interior faces which also need to be trimmed, but everything is clean. 

The error is that when I select the Selections To Keep box, nothing highlights. The need for this edit came because the Trim Tools selection lost a selection. I know there has to be a reason for this, but I don’t know what I need to know in order to troubleshoot this. In the end, I got around it with a work around using a new feature rather than editing an existing one, and selecting the features in a different order. This is what I call the “random button pushing method” because I don’t have any rational reason for trying that. There is no way I would have predicted that that would work when the other method didn’t.

If you wonder why I get so wound up about stuff, just imagine you woke up one day and your cut extrude or revolve features wouldn’t work. How would you react?

Ok, this looks minor. But it’s not. It’s potentially huge and costs me or my customers vast amounts of rework time for nothing. I was working on a complex surfaced part today, one of those parts with a lot of interior features, so visualization is really difficult. It’s a part last saved in 2008 probably, and I’m working in 2009. I roll back the tree, and then roll forward. Bang, tree is red, part is a mess of stuff all over the place. Why? A Split Line feature decided it was going to do things differently this time. Here’s the proof. And no, I’m not sending the files to tech support. I’m done with that. I’m showing the problem, I’m paying them to figure it out. I shouldn’t have to hold their hand. 

Before rebuild

After rebuild

That simple change is going to take 45 minutes to troubleshoot and fix. Where do I send the invoice? Do you guys realize people use this software for businesses, not just for pretty demos? It matters that it works. Please take this kind of thing more seriously. Was it wrong before or after? I don’t know. All I know is that stuff has to work consistently. It has to be predictable. Yes, you have to make progress and improve things, but you can’t mess with the way things work. This is not a curmudgeon who is afraid of change, it’s someone who depends on a tool to work predictably. To the extent that I cannot rely on this software to do what I tell it to do predictably, that’s the extent of the value it has to me. Right now the value is well into the red.

If people kept track of all the awkward modeling situations they came across, I think it would be very instructive for software developers. I usually just shrug my shoulders and continue on, but today I decided I’d share some of these with you. Maybe someone has a good workaround out there that I’ve been missing.

The first one today started when making a dimensional change to an elliptical sketch used in a loft. For some reason the edge of the loft broke into multiple segments, causing a converted sketch to fail, which caused a planar surface to be incorrect, and a knit to be incomplete, blowing the thicken feature sky high. I was thinking it was March in Washington DC with all of the cherry blossoms.

So I had to rework the sketch without deleting anything. As bad as a regular edit can be, editing by deleting and recreating is 10x worse.

Anyway, due to these simple changes eventually a surface that used to be planar turned out to be non-planar. That sux because I’ve got 1000 things down the tree that relate to this the ONLY planar face on the entire model. So I have to create a plane on or near the face and move all of the dangling sketch plane sketches to the new plane. Of course the plane normal turns out to be flipped from the face normal, and so all my sketches turn over.

Next, mirror and delete face functions blow up because the additional edge in the planar face caused the face to get a different internal ID or whatever. These things were just workarounds because some other more direct route to getting symmetric model didn’t work last time I made an edit. 2I’ve got a whole tree of red to correct just because I changed the diameter of an inlet by 0.75 mm. This is a 2 hour modeling exercise. To make a simple change, all caused by one extra edge showing up in the model for no obvious reason.

What I really wanted to talk about was just something simple. A line on a plane, and I wanted to make the end point coincident with a perpendicular plane. You can’t do that. You can’t dimension from a plane that’s perpendicular to the sketch plane either. So I had to sketch a line on the plane, reorder the line, and then create a sketch relation.

Why do we have to do this kind of workaround? We use software that tries to automate lip and groove features, vents and will automatically dissect your model into a thousand sketches and features (!?!) and 3 different ways of getting shiny pictures from our models, but we are still in the cold for doing simple low level sketch relation type things.

What are modeling situations you’ve come across that seem like obvious and easy additions to the software?

And another thing. Why does it require a rebuild when I delete a failed feature? It doesn’t change the finished part at all, it doesn’t even work! You know, the direct modeling people wouldn’t have such an easy target of history-based modelers if the history-based modeling made more sense.

I’ve got an idea. Instead of trying to make tools that do the work for us that don’t really work, why don’t you just make tools that we can use for tasks that we need to do, and let us decide how to use them?

Oh, here’s another good one. Have you ever had a feature that failed, so you replaced it with another feature that worked, but the failed feature still had a bunch of child features that will also get deleted if you delete the failed feature? That one drives me batty. I’ve wasted hours and hours on that. Blame this on long rebuilds for this part I’m working on. I just blog while its rebuilding.

Here’s one. If you have a feature that is selected in the feature manager, and you select it again to show the Left Click context toolbar, it first shows the toolbar, then it switches to change name mode and the toolbar goes away. Even Microsoft had the sensibility to change the rename functionality in the folder window (left window in Windows Explorer) so that you had to actively select Rename from the RMB because too many users got into rename mode accidentally.

At last night’s user group in Richmond, one of the guys piped up and said “looks like it was programmed by somebody who doesn’t use it”. Bingo. Couldn’t agree more.

And another. If you want to change a sketch and change a feature, you have to first change the sketch, get out of the sketch, then change the feature. If the feature is rolled way back in the tree, you gotta do it twice!?!? How about giving the user control over rebuilds? For software with such serious performance problems, you’d think that they’d figure this stuff out. But no. We must think for you. You cannot possibly make good decisions. I’m tired of software aimed at the lowest common denominator doing things for me, especially when it doesn’t do what I want it to do.

And this. Why can’t you repair/reattach converted entities when they are splines? Why? To go ahead with your work with parametric relations, you have to delete and recreate!?! WTF?

More! In sw09 the display of sketches seems hosed up. Sometimes clicking on a sketch in the feature manager doesn’t show it highlighted in the graphics window. Sometimes double clicking it doesn’t show the dimensions. This one is on my new, totally compliant video card computer, as well as the two machines that previous SW versions have obsoleted.

Focus on basics. Don’t need no more shiny $#!+.

Do these bugs effect everyone? No. Do they effect me? Yes. You might have run into bugs that don’t effect me. At the best, these inconsistencies are the things that make it difficult to learn new parts of the software on your own. You think you understand how the software works, but they keep changing the rules.

The main victims in this round are video and interface consistency. This is the second release in a row that has obsoleted hardware that is still useful. In this case, my 1 year old laptop cannot be used with all of the functionality.

Granted, this 1 year old laptop has mother board based graphics. I expect that the only price I am going to pay for that is speed in graphics display. Unfortunately, some PropertyManagers like the new SpeedPak and Convert To Sheet Metal PropertyManagers do not display at all on this computer. This happens whether the PM is docked or undocked, and don’t refresh even if moved around.

Another bit of unexpected limitation is the new Change Curve or Sketch Color function. This got caught up in the whole Color/Appearance mess, and they spun it off as a separate icon and renamed the function. You can now change the color of curves, except for Projected Curves. Helices and all the other curve types work, but not (for me) the most often used type. Another odd limitation is that you can’t preselect. It seems like SW has a fresh crop of coders who don’t understand what makes SolidWorks SolidWorks. Preselect or Post select, Click Click or Click Drag options are both victims in this 2009 release. These are long standing established practice in the software which I don’t think are ready to be thrown aside as old fashioned yet.  It’s not clear if these are bugs or “working as designed”.

The new Freeform feature removed limitations is a great step forward. The problem I’ve run into is that with the simplest non-4 sided patch causes a self intersection error and some really odd results. If you make a circular split line on say a sphere, rotate the grid, and use Freeform to tug and pull, it gives you a self intersection error and shows only the tips of the 4 sided patch it uses behind the scenes.

Sometimes the feature in the tree will wind up with a little exclamation mark, and sometimes not. It was like this also for changes to the Fill surface for 2007. Later in the release it was fixed.

I welcome the new functionality, but I want it to be useful when it arrives, I don’t need a research project every time something goes wrong.

Another problem is overlapping with the CommandManager and the FeatureManager tabs at certain points in the workflow. This was another one that SW beta support techs dismissed as non-existent. I have time to beta test because of other things I’m doing with beta, but I don’t have time to argue with people who assume that I’m wrong.

To fix it, I just change the width of the FM panel slightly. Notice also that the FM filter is chopped off on the ends. This is also my imagination, according to beta support. Anyone else see this?

And the final one for today is the color changing on save, again denied by SW beta support. Boy, I should’ve been in the top 10 beta testers with all of these bug-non-bugs.

Of these, the Freeform is the most serious, but the ignoring of established practice is the part that worries me most.

Next time, a stroll through the Help files to see what has become of the new SW initiative to improve the Help.

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I’ll just keep adding bugs to this post rather than making new posts.

Here’s one I found today, very annoying. If you have a sketch picture in a sketch, and you are editing the sketch, not the picture, and you happen to click and drag as if to box select something, the first time you click and drag, it exits the sketch, the second time you do it (because you think you made a mistake the first time), it deletes your sketch picture. That’s a lovely one, especially when the sketch picture is difficult to size and position.

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Add to the list of PropMgrs I can’t see with this computer:

- Delete Face
- Split Entities

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If you place a row of toolbars on the same row as the CommandManager, in the next session of SW the toolbars are moved to new rows above the CM. This was reported in Beta.

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I’ve had trouble with the Pack and Go creating corrupt zip files.

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If you use the Large Icons setting (tools, customize), some of the icons in the Commands tab, on the Flyout Toolbars category are shown large, but trimmed to fit into a small space.

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Face selection colors don’t work with draft analysis turned on.

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When draft doesn’t work on the lip/groove, it pops up a message every rebuild.

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Multibodies with one hidden, reshow the hidden body when the above lip/groove draft error is displayed.

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Lip/groove makes 2 features. When one is rolled back, the other isn’t shown on the part.

Thanks to Mark Biasotti of SolidWorks, we have some answers for some of the questions in my last post:

Radius or Diameter?

This is what Mark has to say:

A number of use here conferred today and we agree with your assessment that when drawing circles, logically the Diameter dimension checkbox should be checked by default. We don’t know why it was not checked by default other than just an error on our part. We will try to get this fix in a near future SP. We also have a few other minor grammatical issues as well as the consideration of adding a diameter numerical box to the PM. Please note that for the meantime, it is a system option so setting it once should keep it on by default between sessions of SW.

Thanks for bringing it to our attention.

Well, that’s good to know. Thanks, Mark.

Colors?

I just reproduced the problem. It is a regression from 2008 and I just submitted it as SPR 454643. In RealView, it behave correctly. With realview off it regresses from correct behavior of 2008.

 

As an R bug should get immediate attention.

 

Thanks for bring it to our attention.

 

Matt, the workaround (and don’t ask me why this works) is to instead of clicking on the edit appearance icon, instead RMB on the part name in the FM and do the remove and then remove all there. Please verify that this workaround does work for you too. BTW – the reason that the face turns grey when you go into the PM for the face color is because it just removed your part color (blue) and defaulted it to the default material color – waiting for you to assign a new color to that face. Hope that makes sense.

More good news. Cross your fingers for sp1. Why does Mark have to do this? I reported this stuff to Beta support and just got arguments.

Part of the problem here is due to using old part templates. Is it my fault for using an old template or SolidWorks fault for not paying attention to existing data from long time users?

Draft Analysis?

Well, it turns out that you CAN save colors out with the new Draft Analysis, but you have to have the Face Classification option enabled, and you have to have Draft Analysis turned on when you save. I tested IGES, Parasolid and eDrawings formats, and all round tripped as expected (with draft colors).

SolidWorks might have saved themselves some unnecessary bad publicity if they had added a simple sentence about this to the What’s New. Of course that would approximately double the existing What’s New Draft Analysis entry. Sometimes that little extra effort is well spent. If functionality changes, document it for users, please.

So, this part of the story has a happy ending. Still, its unfortunate that I’ll get more bugs fixed by exposing them publicly than I will by doing beta testing. It’s also unfortunate that Mark B has to do this when support people have already seen each of these issues and rejected them. Where is Rich Welch’s 80% support satisfaction statistic when you need it?

More bugs to follow.

Well, SolidWorks has shipped it, so they must be feeling pretty good about it. They branded it sp0 and out it goes. I spent a fair amount of time using Beta software, and reported bugs. What I’m interested in is if these bugs got fixed in the shipping software. SolidWorks ran a beta contest so that users could find bugs. I can’t go through all of the bugs in one post, so I’ll hit my favorites, and then post some more later. If you have bugs that you reported in beta and they still got shipped with sp0, leave a comment. I’d love to hear from Shaodun Lin. I’ll bet he has an impressive list of shipped beta bugs.

Add Dimensions

The first one I want to look at has to do with some otherwise fantastic new functionality. The ability to add dimensions to sketch entities while you are sketching. If this one works, it will save me a lot of time. Let’s take a look.

The Circle PropertyManager enables you to select either a center point circle or a three point circle. The new options are Add Dimenions and Diameter Dimensions. Add Dimensions is the one that obviously adds a dimension to your circle when you draw it.

Radius or Diameter?

The Diameter Dimensions option is maybe a little misleading. Add Dimensions does not add multiple dimensions, but only one. By default it adds a radius value, and if you use the Diameter Dimensions option, it will put a diameter  on a circle. There is no functionality to add linear dimensions to the center point of the circle, but both dimension settings are plural.

This is talking about a full circle. And it puts a radius value on by default. I asked a SW person about this and was told this is working as designed because this is the behavior that users told them they wanted. Interesting. I wonder who puts radius values on full circles? There may be niche applications where people do this, but standard mechanical design practice is for diameter dimensions on full circles and radius values on arcs. Even the rest of SolidWorks software works that way, why should the new functionality be different? Is this right or wrong?

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Click Click or Click Drag?

One of the strengths of SolidWorks in my mind has always been that they allowed you to do things your way. Preselect – post select. Click-click sketching or Click-drag. In order to use the Add Dimensions functionality, you have to have the Tools, Options, Sketch setting called Enable On Screen Numeric Input On Entity Creation turned on. The bad thing is that it only works if you use click-click sketching.

The other bad thing is that it has a special mode of function, it doesn’t work with the Tools, Options, General Input Dimension Value setting. So one setting overrides the other. Why can’t they both work at the same time? Why does SW now start giving precedence to the AutoCAD way of sketching? Why do I have to change the way I work to accommodate the software rather than the other way around?

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Colors

The colors functions went through some traumatic changes in SW2008, and then beta testers forced some more changes in 2009. I feel pretty good about the changes except that they broke something that had been broken from the beginning until it was fixed in 2007, and is now broken again.

I get really frustrated when “progress” means that we have to take a step back in terms of real usability. If you change a face color in what I guess has to now be called the “old fashioned way”, by clicking the face, clicking the appearance icon, clicking the face option, then clicking the color from the pallette (not too bad, only 1 or 2 clicks more than 2007), there is no way to remove that color using any equivalent of the Remove All Colors function that worked in 2007.

Further, I think the whole Remove Appearance functionality is still messed up. If I start a part from a template and Remove Appearances, the part turns gray. I don’t understand. I think the whole thing is not figured out. SolidWorks people design the software using an entire set of assumptions that are simply not valid all of the time.

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Draft Analysis

Another potentially great new functionality is the change to the Draft Analysis. You can turn it on, and the colors update as you work! How great is that?!? The only problem is that you can’t save the colors like you could in previous versions, so you can’t send a molder a model colored for the draft as an IGES or eDrawing. This is why you have to consider existing functionality when you “improve” something. In this case I’m simply screwed. There really isn’t an option other than manually coloring faces.

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So can you?

So can I implement SolidWorks 2009 sp0? Well, I’m just one guy. I’m a contractor. I do work for other people. I still have projects in 2007. I get rare projects in 2008, and I’ve already done several projects in 2009. Some people might argue that the things I’ve listed here aren’t bugs, but I think they are. They are functionality that used to work, but no longer works. They are conceptual bugs, because functionality I used has been designed right out of the software without a reasonable replacement. When I have the choice I use 2009, because I can’t use 2008, and 2009 really in most respects is better than 2007. I guess I just keep hoping that they will do what they say they will do.

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For some people the question of implementing a new version hinges on specific functionality. I want to keep examining 2009 beta bugs that got shipped. Send yours in. Let’s hold their feet to the fire on this. I want to know why I wasted so much time finding bugs in beta if they are just going to ship them in the released product.

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If you haven’t heard from your friendly neighborhood SolidWorks reseller yet, you will. The terms of SolidWorks subscription services are changing. It seems the main force of the change is that the penalties for missing a year of subscription are going up. Here is a screen shot of the letter from my reseller:

This is a dangerous gauntlet for SW to throw down. They are betting that this is just going to scare people into never letting their subscription lapse. But what if it confirms that the subscription is simply not worth the check you have to write? For me personally, the reseller provides nothing of value whatsoever, not to say that this is everyone’s experience, it’s just mine. The service packs are of dubious value. In 2008, how many *.1 releases did we have? 0.1, 1.1, 2.1, 3.1? *.1 releases mean that there were errors that no one counted on. Too many sloppy mistakes.

It’s a little maddening to me, because I pay the subscription mainly as a formality. I have a license by virtue of being a partner (in the Publishing category) and a commercial license for which I have to pay maintenance. I still do commercial work alongside my writing activities, so technically I need a commercial license for that work. Of course I haven’t had the commercial license installed for a couple of years.

With the SW08 release, I’m sure more than a few companies have bailed out of the subscription treadmill. This new policy may be aimed at intimidating these customers or former customers into hopping back on. With such a junk release (08) immediately after a reasonably usable release (07), its easy to see why people would just freeze at 07 and choose to forego updates.

What do you think of the “subscription treadmill”? Does this new policy look like corporate bullying to you? Do you think you get your money’s worth out of your subscription money?

Most of the real straight talk you (or I anyway) get from SW employees is under non-disclosure or personal conversations that really can’t be made public. Bummer. I wear multiple hats in my relationships with SW Corporate. Personal friend, Customer, Partner, Alpha/Beta tester, User Group leader, and big-mouth blogger. The blogger side of the equation is at odds with the other aspects, except maybe as a customer advocate. So I have to pick which battles I’m allowed to fight, and what tools I can use while doing that. Sometimes its an uncomfortable relationship because while the right hand is ranting and bashing the interface and documentation, the left hand is being calm and rational while alpha testing new functionality that I can’t mention or I’d never get the opportunity again.

So if I want to post criticism of SW and use facts based on a SW employee’s words to do it, I have to be very careful to get those words from a legitimate source, probably not one involved in any of my NDA type endeavors. That’s what I did this time.

I started by asking if I could interview a behind the scenes person who was not a direct SW employee, and was not executive level, but who had a lot of direct hands on knowledge of how things got done. Of course that got nixed. It was a little too raw maybe for SW Corp, but exactly what I was looking for.

Instead, the official channels supplied an executive, albeit one I didn’t know. I sent a bevy of questions looking for some sort of an indication of how SolidWorks learns as an organization. I wanted to know how they determined when they had made a mistake and how they changed directions.

In the end, out of maybe a dozen questions, I got one answer that was usable for my purpose. The rest of it is the same sort of guarded and carefully measured language we are used to hearing from executive level, and the folks who get promoted. I think in the end what I got with this one answer was inadvertent straight talk. It is an admission of sorts that it seems like this fellow did not think was a very important matter, but to me seems to explain a lot of what we see going on in the software today.

The victim offered up by the PR folks was Paul Chastell, and in his own words “I’m the director of SolidWorks software development, responsible for development of SW Office, both new releases and maintenance of old. ”

My question to Mr. Chastell was: Does SW employ anyone who plays devil’s advocate when negotiating new functionality? What sorts of tools or techniques do you have to look at ideas critically?

What I was looking for here was just an indication of how SW looks at issues critically. How they might take into account multiple points of view. I wanted a statement other than “we do extensive customer testing”, which is simply a blind assertion which explains nothing at all. Here was Paul’s response.
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We do not employ any devil’s advocates but nor do we work in a vacuum either. Our project cycle is not one where Product Definition throw a spec at development, who throw the result at QA who throw the bugs back. The entire project team (Product Definition, QA, development, usability) are involved from the very birth of a project. In addition certain projects will have other “sponsors” from other groups such as Technical Support who have an interest in the outcome and involvement in the process and with some projects we will include customers in early discussions and early testing.

So while we don’t have a devil’s advocate we do have a number of people, with different concerns, who are able to change the direction of a project even before any code is written.
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Most of this is something you have heard before. The only parts of this that I have not heard before are “We do not employ any devil’s advocates ” and “we don’t have a devil’s advocate”. It sounds to me that he didn’t have the same take on the question that I did. He completely ignored the “looking at ideas critically part”.

One phrase I heard from a SW employee many years ago was “you never think your baby is ugly”. The people evaluating the ideas all have a vested interest in the idea. They don’t have anyone to ocassionally stand up and say the obvious: “Hey, what an ugly baby!” While it is often an uncomfortable function, all product development groups do need someone willing to be a critical voice. Not to say “negative”, but someone who is not afraid to look at the downside honestly as well as the upside. SW owes their customers that much. It is irresponsible to only look at ideas they send us from the sun-shiney side of the street.

I agree that you do need blind optimists in an organization. They will sometimes see things that aren’t there, and while delusional, that point of view can be a valuable source of unconventional ideas. Still, when it comes to shipping actual software to paying customers, you really do at some point need to connect with the ground and fess up to reality. Hope is a good thing, but it is not enough when it comes to engineering products.

When you look at the changes to the 2008 software in some depth, I think the lack of a devil’s advocate in the process becomes obvious. To me the biggest giveaway is the irresponsible change of defaults to the most radical options possible. It is as if they are expecting that no one is going to read the what’s new, and that the only way people are going to know what’s new is if everything new is right up in your face like a raw Boston cabbie trying to get your attention on Boylston St. That point of view is actually valid for an Alpha or Beta release, but not for SP0.

It looks to me that there was no advocate for the user. The changes served the needs of the company. You can save a lot on documentation if change is right up in your face.

Further, there was no advocate for the CAD administrator. Large installations where training and settings are controlled are the ones most affected by the changes in 2008. If someone had taken a critical look at the default settings from a CAD administration point of view before cutting the disks, I firmly believe that 2008 would have been received much differently. I know my reaction to it would have been different if it installed looking familiar, and added options, rather than installed looking quite foreign and removed options. If that were the case, 2008 would have looked like a benefit rather than an impediment, without having changed the actual content of the new software.

In the end, I think SW2008 is a slap in the face for long time users. SW employees have suggested that 2008 is a transitional release, and that we can look for future releases to complete the changes started in 2008. Is that supposed to make me feel better or is it aimed at making me think I should skip 2008 and wait for 2009? Why would you release something as “released software” which is in fact only half done? This is another argument for lengthening the development cycle.

[As an aside, SolidWorks Corporation seems to be operating under the crazy assumption that the Beta cycle is for users, and shortening it is a favor to us so we don't get bored with a long Beta. From my point of view, Beta is partially for finding bugs, but it is even more for fixing bugs. Cutting the length of beta essentially cuts the amount of time SW has to fix bugs, which is exactly backwards from the rest of the positive signals we've had from Concord since SWWorld.]

I don’t think there is any room left for the optimist/cynic to question the assertion that SW08 is a slow adopter. My 2007 book is still selling better than any of the 2008 books on the Amazon SolidWorks category. SW needs to take a critical look at the software that ships out the door, and look at it from the perspective of a customer rather than a QA “good enough” manager or a Marketing “on schedule” manager or a Development “too many resources” manager. The Devil’s Advocate role is one that we now know for certain is missing from the SolidWorks process.

Read this bit from Yahoo! news. Wow. Microsoft might have to cave in to users. Deja Vu all over again. Vista is a useless step backwards. There are no compelling reasons to move “ahead” into Vista, when XP does what you need it to do without upgrading your hardware. Another blow to those who seek empty change for the sake of needing more money.

Sound familiar at all? SW08 has bogged things down with (mostly) useless interface changes, and has obsoleted a lot of previously perfectly good CAD hardware. Who needs that? What compelling reason do you have to move to SW08? My customers still aren’t moving. I’m still doing most of my paid modeling work in 2007.

The adoption rate for SW 2008 I’m going to guess is currently in the 40-50% range right now, based on talking to a lot of user group users, and the 2008 release life cycle is well over half done. That’s dismal.

At this time last year, SW08 beta was available to customers. So SW’s 9 month cycle has slipped to 11, 12, 13… Users have been demanding this, so maybe they are caving in a little. Maybe Jeff Ray isn’t as utterly full of bovine ordure as that starched and spit shined exterior suggests. As I’ve said before, “the proof is in the pudding”. We’ll wait and see.

These software companies trying to horse around the user are clearly out of touch with their customers. They’ve got the cart before the horse. SW continues to claim that they are customer driven, but I don’t believe a word of it. They are driven by competition, and internally by career oriented politics. There is very little customer driven about this company.

C’mon, where’s that next big thing?

I always dread the indignity of airports and being herded into planes. Plus, I’m a little socially claustrophobic. Airlines know this and put me in the last row on the plane in a middle seat – as trapped as you can get. In my trip to San Diego, of 4 flights, I was on the absolute last row on 3 of those flights. Somebody needs to show me that secret handshake.

Anyway, on the flight from San Diego to Atlanta, I was wearing a SolidWorks shirt, and the stewardess stopped to say “SolidWorks! My husband loves that stuff!” I don’t usually get people I meet out in the everyday world recognize SolidWorks, so it was kind of cool to make a connection like that.

I noticed the guy next to me was reading everything in French, so not being a French speaker myself, decided to let him fly in peace. But later in the flight he started the conversation in English. It turned out that he was a SolidWorks reseller from France. I didn’t catch his name, but we talked about the relationship between SW and DS, and also how the French were happy about the #2 at SW being Bertrand Sicot (hope I’m getting that right), who MCed the main stage during the general session one day at SWW.

We talked briefly about the SW08 release. He was in general very excited about the new version, but said that they as a reseller were in some hot water with their customers because of problems with the software. His impression was that SP3 and SP4 were going to fix the biggest problems that they had.

I had one SW07 Bible left in my carryon bag, and gave it to him. He hadn’t heard of it before, so I figured it could only be a good thing to spread the word a little.

I didn’t envy my French friend because he was boarding another flight at 8 pm to fly to Paris to arrive at 11 am after the ride from San Diego to Atlanta.

Fielder is another tech support alumn who has been promoted in the organization. Fielder is now the Director of Product Management. The tech support people are probably the best ones to have in positions like this since they know first hand about customer pain due to bugs and quirks.

In this interview Fielder gives us a run down of what he does and how they make decisions at SolidWorks. Interview in three YouTube parts:
part1
part2
part3

Fielder did 22 interviews at SolidWorks World. I selected him because I thought he was a name I knew that most other people didn’t know, but that looks to have been a wrong assumption. I can’t imagine doing 22 half hour interviews over the course of 3 days. That’s a lot of work.

Thanks to Fielder, and also to Laura K and Nancy B for setting this up.

I just went to the first SolidWorks user group meeting in Richmond, VA tonight. A couple of weeks ago, the 100th US user group was started in Augusta, GA, so this is probably #101. Sometimes I feel like I live in a bit of a bubble because I work for the most part by myself, but I try to stay in touch with other users, and I do a lot of stuff with user groups. I know what I do can’t be classified as “real” because the book writing stuff is pretty idealized, and most of my modeling work is pretty far removed from what most of the users I run into do. It’s easy to get caught up just in the little corner of the world where I live. User groups are a great place for me to re-connect with reality.

So I had my presentation ready to go, a general tips session on SW07 and 08. When I started I asked how many people were using 2008. Out of about 40 people, 2 raised their hands. When I asked why people weren’t using the new software, I got answers that fell into two categories: because of the new interface, and we have enough bugs in 2007, why do we need more?

Something in the air

There is something in the air in the SolidWorks community these days, and I hope SolidWorks has the ability to see it for themselves and do something about it. There is a lot of increasingly vocal discontent. I have been approached off-line by three high-profile people active in the SolidWorks community this week with serious misgivings about the direction of the product. This is not imagined. Go to the SolidWorks forums and look for the frowny faces and thumbs down smileys. There have always been people who complain about the software, but there are two changes in the tone of these complaints – the people doing the complaining are not the typical screamers, and the underlying noise has been turned up a notch or two.

Reason #1: Users want quality software

One of the questions that came out of the Q&A session at tonights user group meeting was how do we get SolidWorks attention when it comes to product quality? That, my friend, is the $64,000 question. I’ve been involved in quality initiatives of one type or another, and they all start with an explanation of all the things that they are doing to catch problems, and they all end in the same place we started. SolidWorks is convinced they are doing everything they could possibly do, but we don’t seem to make much progress. I have to say that I’ve never felt that anything I have ever participated in has ever resulted in less buggy software.

I should probably qualify that a little. By my non-scientific measure, crash bugs are way down compared to say 2001. That much seems clear to me anyway, and it is a notable acheivement, but it comes at a cost. The cost is that the number of little annoying bugs seems to be up. Given the choice, the current situation is preferable to crash bugs, but still, the situation is unacceptable. SolidWorks is treating the software as if it is a retail consumer commodity, with more attention to quantity than quality.

Visualize whirled peas

One of the group members looked a little puzzled when some of the others were talking about specific little things that are clearly wrong. I don’t doubt that there are users who rarely see bugs. I visualize the whole problem kind of like this:

This is basically how I see SW bug structure. The center ring is the really core stuff in SolidWorks – extrudes and revolves. This stuff gets the most attention, and it is rare to find a real bug in the first two rings. As you get further away from the center, you’re going to find more and more bugs. There is far less traffic out in the Yellow, Orange and Red bands. When there is little traffic, SW allows more bugs. Granted, that’s an efficient way to handle things if you don’t really care what the folks out on the fringes think of you. Unfortunately, I spend most of my time in Yellow and Orange, making a conscious decision to avoid anything in the Red, because out that far from civilization, you are truly on your own. Support people don’t know what the software out there does, and you’re frankly lucky to find anything that works reliably.

Most users stay inside the green circle (3rd ring counting from the center). This is well trodden safe territory, and most of the kinks are worked out of most of it. Do those of us who work in the outer rings really have to accept inferior software? Well, yes, it seems so. SolidWorks cannot be all things to all people, they prove that pretty strongly. Maybe folks like me get pushed to Rhino, a software that focusses more on those Yellow and Orange rings.

Reason #2: What has happened to the interface?

A lot of long time SolidWorks users feel that the rug has been unceremoniously yanked out from under us with the SolidWorks 2008 interface. You can still find some people who say that after working with it for a while they were able to get used to it, maybe make it almost as good as it used to be through what settings remain, and some even say they prefer it. So far, all of these folks are the early adopter risk takers or the blind optimist types. I have yet to see anyone take an analytical look at the interface changes and come away with a favorable impression. In case anyone has been under a rock and missed what I think is wrong:
- CommandManager has fewer options: can’t undock it, can’t dock to side, can’t put other toolbars next to it, is not easy to add complete new toolbar
- CommandManager tabs are small and hard to click
- scrollbars and screen splitters have been removed presumably to save space
- heads up View toolbar is not flexible enough to be usable (limited tools) and yet is not easy to get rid of
- all of the interface elements that are running into the upper right hand corner of the graphics window are causing an inexcusable train wreck: confirmation corner, task mgr tabs, window control icons, heads up view toolbar all potentially overlap with one another in the corner.
- the Office 2007 ribbon interface is widely reviled, no sense in immitating something so widely despised – instead of looking for a tool in a line of icons, you have to scan a 2D area of icons and text in various positions, which is a big mental shift
- taking apart the RMB menus I think turns out to be a bad idea. I can never find the thing I’m looking for. For example, the Hide Body tool is no longer under the Body heading in the RMB menu, it is shown as an icon in the toolbar area of the RMB menu. So I first have to determine that its not where it should be in the 1 dimensional list, and then I have to scan the 2D toolbar for something that could be a Hide function, look at the Tooltip and then click the button. This takes WAY longer than just going to the selection in the RMB menu. The alternative is to re-memorize the entire RMB interface.
- possibly my biggest complaint has to do with the choice of defaults on install with 2008. They are trying to force feed you the most radical settings by default, thus forcing you to deal with the interface right up front. This is reason enough to avoid installing it. If they had chosen more “default-ish” defaults, I think they could have avoided so many reactions that are so negative, but they are forcing the issue. Bad plan, guys. Very bad plan.

They seem to be treating the software as if it is some research project and they are simply presenting their results. I’ve got news for you: people are using this software, and you need to understand their needs. These people are paying to use this software. The software doesn’t need to be so self-promoting, it should serve the needs of the people who paid for it.

SolidWorks interface development people need some hard lessons in software implementation and CAD management. Even without seeing things through the eyes of real end users, if they just looked at the implementation and management aspects of what they have done to literally hundreds of thousands of users, they might have chosen a different path. The changes in 2008 are irresponsible.

I personally believe that one of the causes of the current situation is that SolidWorks is an increasingly bureaucratic company. It was inevitable, really. Falling as a victim of their own success. I’m sorry to see this. I hesitate to say much, because I do count some SW employees as friends, but here and there you see careerism take precedence over user needs. Its frustrating when you know you are talking to the right person, and you know they are hearing you and understand the issue, yet nothing ever happens. The question is never seriously raised.

Conclusion

What can you say after that? Users are frustrated. They feel that the company and the product have taken a sharp left turn with the 2008 release. Another focus group? Hire a consultancy to get to the root of users frustration? No, how about some good old fashioned common sense. It would make a nice change, anyway.