Dezignstuff SolidWorks Blog

For any of you NorthEasterners still standing after Earl blows through, I will be at this year’s NESWUC (North East SolidWorks User Conference). It’s like a one day mini SolidWorks World held in Westford, MA, between Boston and Nashua. I’m presenting a session on plastic part modeling. It’s an all day event on Sept 17. Here’s the website, there is still time to register. Registration is $55 or $70, depending on how much you procrastinate. It’s a great deal, even if you have to travel to get there. I think this is the biggest one day events outside of SolidWorks World. It looks like a lot of SW employees will be there. I got invited to this one because it is not run by SW Corp., but by users. Randy Lennox is the fellow in charge of this one.

Here are some of the names Randy has pulled together for this first class event:

• Keith Pedersen (CAPINC reseller)
• Tom Cote (Central Mass/ Northern CT-SWUG leader)
• Richard Allen (SolidWorks)
• John Matrishon (WMass-SWUG leader)
• Jay Patterson (SolidWorks)
• Gabe Enright (CADD Edge reseller)
• Robin Richter (SolidWorks)
• Assorted SolidWorks Developers
• Mike Puckett (SolidWorks)
• Sylvain Trudel (SolidWorks)
• Randall Bock (Happy Valley SWUG leader)
• Ed Gebo (ConnSWUG leader)
• Jason Pancoast (CAPINC)
• Rob Rodriguez (Northern Vermont SWUG leader)
• Jeff Holliday (MARISUG leader)
• Rakesh Keswan (SolidWorks)
• Eric Leafquist (SolidWorks)
• Aaron Kelley (SolidWorks)

I’m most eager to hear Keith Pedersen speak on surfacing, and a session with the SW Developers on the same topic. Rob Rodriguez is speaking at the same time I am, so I won’t see his Photoview 360 presentation. All the topics are covered.

If you’ve got a day you can spare, come to the NESWUC, and you’ll never miss not going to San Antonio this year.

Every year something odd happens at my SW World presentations. It’s never scripted, but stuff like that kind of follows me. At SW World last year during my Hybrid Modeling presentation I sold a book from the stage 15 minutes into the presentation to Steve Calvert. I also acknowledged Mike Wilson and Kieth Pedersen from the stage, and wondered out loud why I was giving the presentation with guys like that in the room. The infamous “hybrid” picture of Michael Jackson’s head on a woman’s body…  It was a lot of fun. 

This was a decent presentation, I thought. It went a little slow from time to time, depending on your interest in the topic. The video is over an hour long, but it has a few laughs to break it up. 

The powerpoint and SW files for this presentation are on my nearly forgotten CVSWUG site. The video is hosted on SolidMentor. I was glad to see this show up. It only took a year to get it published.

 Every year at SWWorld, in the final general session on Wednesday morning, from the big stage they announce the “Top 10 Enhancement Requests”. Last year, the #1 enhancement request was “Dual Monitor Support”. Huh?!? Of all the things you could ask for, why that? There were all sorts of right and wrong explanations or speculations about how that happened. In the end, what it showed was that the process SolidWorks uses for prioritizing customer requests resulted in bizzare conclusions. 

Here is a capture of the current state of things on the Top Ten List. Stuff is fuzzed out so you can go to the site yourself and see what it is. Plus, if I just posted everything here, no one would need to go to Orlando to see it. Anyway, its fuzzed out, deal with it.

Anyway, I’d love to take credit for the turn around this year to something exactly like I asked for, but I’m sure I had nothing to do with it. I asked for, in fact I made a lot of noise almost demanding that SW do something like a “wish list” that was transparent and user-based. I wanted users to nominate topics, and then users to vote on the topics.

Imagine my surprise when a couple months ago, SolidWorks introduced “Brainstorm”, which selects the SolidWorks World Top 10 Enhancement Requests from a list compiled and voted on by users. Geez, this sounds familiar, but I really like it. I think the feedback they get is valuable, and because it is transparent they don’t just get static feedback, but peer review and discussion of the ideas. I don’t know what kind of info they got before, but I highly doubt that it came any where near the quality of the data they are getting now.

Dual monitors still makes the list, but it is down where it belongs, around #8, not on top. This list reflects the  reality I run into at user groups, not the fairy-tale you get when you don’t have users selecting the list. For example, I don’t see “gut the interface again” or “give us another half-baked rendering program” or “make the software think for me because I’m so stupid” or “automatically move parts in my assembly because I don’t really know where they should be anyway” on the list.

Also, the very presence of one item on the list shows that something is seriously different about the list this year. Notice at #3 you have “SolidWorks backwards compatibility”. Until this year, SolidWorks has never EVER even admitted that such a thing as backwards compatibility even existed. It has been one of those “head in the sand” topics. And now for it to show up so high on a list that they pride themselves on implementing 80% of each year… well, this really is ground breaking. (Other head in the sand topics are anything that tries to give users options for subscription, and product documentation).

Someone is going to expect this is the part where I chow down on a fistful of crow because if SW implements backwards compatibility it will be because they listened to users, right? I’m always arguing that SW is driven by competitors, not customers/users.  I think as this plays out you will see that’s exactly what’s happening here. The SolidWorks bus is driven by competitors even though it looks like users are driving the change.

SW knows backwards compatibility is important to users because they have all of this survey data that they don’t make public. But this year, something is different, something is forcing their hand. The rejuvenation of direct editing, and the mostly unsung implication that direct editing obviates the problems of backward compatibility means that SW has to start acknowledging that backward compatibility is indeed a technical possibility. Read this.  It turns out that Jeff’s source was just a public thread on Twitter where Hirschtick was thinking out loud about the topic. Read it from the bottom up, Twit style.

So. Direct Editing has a resurgence. Direct Editing doesn’t have any problem with backwards compatibility. SW is forced to admit backwards compatibility exists, because you can’t let a competitor have something like that without SW also having it.

Anyway, SolidWorks Brainstorm is a useful wish list format enhancement request voting site. If you haven’t visited the site and weighed in on your favorite enhancement requests, this is a great time to do that. Click on the Top Ten List banner above. And to whoever didn’t stand in the way of this bit of common sense data collection at SolidWorks, you have my hearty thanks. I really hope this is continued after SolidWorks World. It hasn’t received much publicity, but in my view, it is one of the most positive research methods that SW has ever used.

Wow. I’ve met some great user group leaders, like Dan Podmizek, Gerald Davis or Ricky Jordan, but now I’ve got to add Randall Bock to that list of overachievers. Randall works at Penn State University, and is a relatively recent convert to SolidWorks from AutoCAD. He started this new user group to bring together his students and the area industry.

The first meeting had a presentation from the inventor of an artificial heart. I was very honored to be the presenter at his second meeting. Randall had a posse of students helping him with various titles such as the “Manager of Impossible Situations”, or the “Master of Disaster”. I should have had pictures of these guys. They helped Randall pull it all off, getting the food, helping set up the AV, checking attendees in, giving out name tags, giving out door prizes.

If there weren’t 100 people, we were at least close to that number. He got a great mix of students and industry to attend, which is a feat.

I met several people that I knew in one way or another, the prolific professor JD Mather, Kyle Mason from Twitter, Charlie of the mad hatter fame, and a few others I had known from training in my reseller days or other events. Joe Galiera (aka “Flow” Joe) is a SolidWorks simulation tech rep. I never met Joe before, but we had a good conversation about a lot of things. He’s a really personable guy and down to earth. If you have any needs in that direction, look him up. I hope to run into Joe at other events like this. Maybe in Orlando at SolidWorks World.

Ok, we were NOT posing for this. At least we were trying hard not to pose. Notice that I did not wear my customary painter shorts and Keen sandals.

I got a special parking place in the machine shop right behind the huge New Holland tractor. Randall works in the Agricultural Engineering department. In the image above you see the pallet of stuff ready to go over to the show. With the drink coolers, we had 2 pallets to take over. The fork lift was handy in getting it all over there easily.

My presentation was on surfacing, and I had a lot of software problems. I had to bring my new XI box, because my little laptop can’t do RealView. At home I use two monitors, but here I could only use one. I also use a detached PropertyManager. On a single monitor, the detached PropMgr was off the screen and could not be retrieved. I torched the SolidWorks registry to reset the interface to defaults. Of course this happened live.

Next I had problems switching back and forth between SolidWorks and Powerpoint 2007. SolidWorks would just never show up. Not sure what was going on here, but I had to restart SW several times due to this intermittent problem.

Then I was walking through parts with my rollback bar. I saw all sorts of strange stuff. First the features under the rollback bar were not gray, they were regular color, but they didn’t show up in the graphics area either. The next problem was that the rollback bar at one point disappeared altogether. Then while I was editing a sketch, I could still see the feature (and instant3D was off). There’s another problem where you can’t get to the splitter to split the FeatureManager if you use the CommandManager. Geez, guys, this is SLOPPY stuff.

Anyway, this doesn’t even address any of the difficulties in actually modeling the parts, this is just keeping the software running and getting the interface to behave. For reference, I was using Vista 64, SW09 sp0, with Office 2007. I know, bad ideas all the way around.

More than surfacing, what I had to show was how to deal with quirky software under pressure.

The crowd asked a lot of questions. Some really good questions. When they asked about my underdefined sketches, I remembered that I was not in a surfacing type crowd. I showed how you could fully define stuff if you wanted to, but it didn’t make any sense with splines. People are very concerned with how to be precise when working with splines. How do you make parts fit together? That sounds like another blog post to me… The surfacing and appearance/rendering tutorials for the Model A will also become blog posts on their own.

The main ideas I wanted to convey at this user group meeting were:

• If you’re going to do “real” complex shapes, you’ve got to get comfortable with splines – lines and arcs with fillets do not do the same thing
• The primary surface creation tools each have situations where they are best applied (boundary, loft, fill, sweep)
• You have to understand what’s going on behind the scenes a little bit – stuff like nurbs, degeneracies, curvature concerns and the b-rep concept really help out a lot
• Most surfacing in SolidWorks is really troubleshooting, and knowing multiple methods to accomplish the same thing
• SolidWorks is not the best tool for this kind of thing, but you do sometimes need to use it for this purpose, and it does work.

On November 12, I’m going to be speaking at the Happy Valley SolidWorks User Group in State College Pennsylvania. The topic will be Complex Shapes with a special focus on medical and automotive applications.

I’m excited about this user group meeting. The leader, Randall Bock, has really put together a nice group. The last meeting included a presentation on designing an artificial heart. Randall is expecting 100 people for this meeting.

So if you are within a couple hours drive, this is a great user group to associate yourself with. Free food, giveaways, and all the SolidWorks surfacing you can cram in your head. Check out the website,  and if you plan to attend you might want to RSVP to let Randall know you’re coming.

I will have a few copies of the Surfacing Bible on hand if anyone is interested.

And they are having a SolidWorks user group meeting Wednesday Sept 17, at Penn State from 6-8 pm! It just doesn’t get any better than that. Here’s a brochure just for you, and a website to visit.

Randall Bock of Penn State University has pulled together a great line up, including Dr. Gerson Rosenburg who will speak on Designing the LionHeartTM (artificial heart). Dr. Rosenburg is the Professor of Surgery & Bioengineering Chief, Division of Artificial Organs at Penn State Hershey. Wow. This bioengineering stuff is amazing, and I’m disappointed I’m going to miss this. Randall had invited me to speak, but I’ll be in Barcelona at that time watching my back.

Mike Sabocheck will also be speaking on top-down design. Mike is the regional technical guy for SolidWorks. He’s a great guy, and very knowledgable about the software. You’ll definitely want to hear what Mike has to say and get his insiders perspective.

If you’re within a couple hours of State College, Pennsylvania, you owe it to yourself to go and check out this event. Give Randall an RSVP heads up to tell him you’re coming. Check out the rest of the agenda for the meeting at this link. Industry, education and user groups are a great combination that benefits everyone.

It’s easy, and will only take either 60 or 90 minutes of your time, your choice. No heavy lifting involved. You don’t have to embarrass yourself or even think hard to do it. You will still have to get there and get a room, but you’ll save hundreds of dollars of the admission fee, and you’ll still get to attend all the events and learn from all the other great presentations.

All you have to do is give a presentation. You still have time to sign up. There are some qualifications, of course. You should have previously presented at a local or regional summit group, have some public speaking experience, and have an interesting topic. It’s not that hard, in fact, it’s easy. Every SW user has experience with the software, and all you really need to do is to share your experience. I’m convinced that if we had more volunteers especially for local groups, that we would all learn a lot from one another. I learn stuff every time I talk to other users. Honestly. We all have lots to learn and we all have lots to teach. Don’t be so stingy with what you know! Share it with other users!

Is SW World worth the trip? You will come back with so much to tell your coworkers, that you’ll be talking about it for months. Even (especially) if you are an independent and work alone, this trip is well worth the money just because of all the other contacts you’ll make. Suppliers, contractors, vendors, customers, you name it, they are there and they are also looking for you.

Anyway, follow the link above and submit an idea for a presentation. Even if you just want to show people how you modeled your grandmother’s tea kettle, there is always valuable info to learn just from seeing other people do things. Plus, it’s an experience you’ll never forget.

Jessica Rivera, pictured above, of CCNTV, reports that David Weisberg is putting together a 650 page freely distributed ebook entitled The Engineering Design Revolution. Cadalyst reports that the book will be available on July 1 (2008) at www.cadhistory.net. So far, it’s not there.

David is not taking any money for this book, but asks that you donate to a charity specified on the website if you like.

I look forward to seeing the book. I’ve enjoyed the many versions of the talk that Jon Hirschtick and John McEleney have given on the History of CAD at several user group meetings I have attended. To have all of this and more rolled into a book written by one of the guys who helped make the history will be instructive.

Will someone give a holler when this thing hits?

Before the SWUGN Summit in Baltimore even started, I was having a great conversation with a guy from a Philadelphia area user group about some of the details of SolidWorks Routing, in particular the Wiring side of things. I am familiar with the piping side from many years ago when Piping was still a new package, and I did a demo for a Buffalo area processing plant.

This fellow (sorry, I’m terrible with names) was knowledgable and interesting. I was very interested to listen to how he set things up and seemed to be getting good results with the software.

I’m hearing a fair bit of interest in the Routing package, now more than ever. Since SW added the electrical wiring functionality, demand for this part of the software has greatly increased. I keep hearing also how bad the documentation is for Routing, so could become a potential project for me.

I worked for a time at a electro-optical-mechanical manufacturer, and was responsible in part for running the wiring (“noodles” as we called them) around inside the sheet metal between circuit boards and connectors. We did a lot of ribbon cable as well as round wire and multi-connector wire harness. We used the Linius wiring package before its sale to Autodesk. That was a painful software experience for me. Linius was possibly not one of the better executed modeling tools I have worked with.

After the Linius sale to Autodesk, SolidWorks turned around and developed their own new Routing package with surprising speed, but from most accounts, the general Routing initial introduction was also pretty questionable. Since it is becoming more popular, I think they have taken it more seriously, and are paying more attention to the quality.

Anyway, I want to hear your thoughts about the Routing package. What functionality do you like or dislike? Have you learned some cool tricks with it, or found a great source for library parts? What did you use as a reference to build your custom library parts? Do you use it in conjunction with Smart Components? What type of input do you get from your electrical engineers? What sort of output do you need to produce? Are you expected to create assembly instructions or illustrations for a manual?

I’m also going to check out some of the forums for Routing and see what information I can bring together. If you know someone who wants to learn more about Routing, please send them here.

Kind of a light turn out for such a heavy SW usage area of the country, we have just 40 users here, but some really good sessions. I can’t say which session I’m blogging during instead of listenening to, but I just went to Greg Jankowski’s CAD Admin session, which is always relevant and informative, and I’m looking forward to Richard’s RealView presentation.

I combined my trip here with some tourist type activities in Washington, DC. The Air and Space Smithsonian is still my favorite (the one on the mall, not the one out at Dulles).

Last night I spent some time with Devon Sowell and Greg Jankowski. Guys like us seem to not be able to avoid talking shop, although Devon and I did have a normal non-work related talk. Its nice that these events bring together friends.

Of course, my blog is being changed into a Siemens / Solid Edge Synchronous Technology blog by other bloggers writing about ST like Ralph Grabowski, Christian Kelly, Mark Burhop,  Roopinder Tara, Luc P., and Scott Wertel. I don’t want to get stuck in the Siemens rut, but with the gag order on SW09 beta, what else can we talk about? 

****Late edit – I’m looking at my incoming links statistics, and I’m getting hundreds of hits per day from Siemens related sites and forums or other blogs talking about the SEwST. (Very interesting that NXwST gets almost no press). This is about 30% of my total traffic. I wanna talk about stuff people wanna hear about, but this topic is wearing me out. I have to try to rescue my blog from becoming irrelevant to SW users, or as we Siemens accolytes say, “Works” users. ****

Is Synchronous Technology making a stir at SW user groups? I haven’t heard it mentioned yet, other than having mentioned it myself once to a couple of other people who are in on it. I’m not saying people aren’t aware or that they don’t care, just that they aren’t talking about it.

If you haven’t heard, there is going to be a SWUGN Technical Summit in Baltimore, Maryland this Tuesday, June 17th! This is a full day event with the price of $40. You just can’t beat that for this amount of information, including breakfast and lunch. There will be several presenters who have presented at SW World giving talks. You can strike up conversations with experts during lunch or between sessions. You can meet other users from your area at the sessions. All in all its a great opportunity. Come with a big empty notebook and a couple of pens.

Veteran presenters include:

Matt Lombard – DezignStuff - session on 3D Sketch

Devon Sowell – 3D Design Solutions - Enterprise PDM and FeatureWorks

Greg Jankowski – Director of Customer Services Strategic Planning – CAD Mgt and Drawings

Richard Doyle – User Community Manager

Joe Galliera – Territory Technical Manager

The meeting will be held at: 

Tuesday, June 17th, 2008 7:30 AM  - 5:30 PM

Holiday Inn – BWI Airport

890 Elkridge Landing Road

Linthicum, MD 21090

You can sign up here:

http://www.acteva.com/booking.cfm?bevaid=157341

If you haven’t done it yet, buy your plane ticket, book your hotel, and pack your bags. Many of you are using your Memorial Day vacation just to travel and get ready for this event. Tony Cantrell’s two-day South East SolidWorks Users Workshop is getting ready to hit the state of South Carolina This week.

SESWUW has a website with descriptions of the events, names of presenters, a sign up and directions. The meeting is being held at a technical college with access to computer labs where we can do hands on sessions and other things. It is drawing presenters from Florida to Virginia, along with several SolidWorks employees.

If you can’t take a week off and shell out $700 for SolidWorks World, maybe you can take two days and $45 for this event. This promises to be the highlight of the summer user group season. Even if you can’t come for both days, just come for one, and I guarantee you will learn enough to make the trip worthwhile.

Do it!

The first Baltimore/DC SWUGN Summit will be held on June 17th a the Holiday Inn near BWI, link for directions is below. This is convenient to get to from the Columbia, DC and Baltimore areas.

Do this NOW:  Go to your boss, and tell him you will be telecommuting June 17th and that you need $40 bucks cash. Tell him that you will learn several pieces of useful information, and that you’ll finish that project he has been hounding you about if he lets you go. These Summit events are mini-SolidWorks Worlds for a fraction of the price. Most if not all of the presenters have presented at SolidWorks World. This is also a great opportunity to get face-to-face time with SolidWorks employees who love to talk to users.

Sign up here! The cost is $40 per person, which includes lunch on-site, and some nibblies for breakfast. The sign up states that there is a $10 parking fee at the Marriot, but the event is at a Holiday Inn, so who knows what relevance that information has.

Cast of Characters:

Matt Lombard – Dezignstuff

Devon Sowell – 3D Design Solutions

Greg Jankowski – Director of Customer Services Strategic Planning

Richard Doyle – User Community Manager

Devon is coming to Baltimore from sunny San Diego. He brings with him a wealth of experience in machine design, animation, and especially PDMWEnterprise. You’ll want to sit in on Devon’s sessions.

Greg Jankowski comes from Madison Wisconsin. Greg is a recognizable name from SW Corporate.

Richard Doyle is from Austin, TX. He’s the guy in charge of user group affairs from SW Corporate.

Additional presenters from the user and reseller communities will also be on hand.

There are always great giveaways including 3dconnexion controllers (worth several hundred bucks) free passes to SolidWorks World (worth several hundred bucks), and at this meeting, we’ll give away a SolidWorks Surfacing and Complex Shape Modeling Bible (worth $50), and lots of other stuff as well.

These events are always informative and well attended. BE THERE!

Tuesday, June 17th, 2008

Holiday Inn – BWI Airport

890 Elkridge Landing Road

Linthicum, MD 21090

The third part of this fish story is an all-encompassing story that includes fishing, mechanical engineering, SolidWorks user groups and bluegrass music. It just shows how all of your life is interwoven into a single fabric, and you really can’t separate any part of it from the rest, and leave it all intact.

It all starts with this guy:

This is Wes Cobb, the leader of the Western North Carolina SolidWorks user group, who has been known to smile from time to time, just not in this picture. It turns out that he is also a mold designer, a former resident of Rochester, NY, and lives in the same small town as the lead singer of one of my favorite bluegrass bands. He’s also a fisherman of sorts, but only likes to use a single plastic lizard, in green if you’re looking for a birthday present for him. A case of green plastic lizards, weedless hooks and split shot would be your best bet.

Wes tells me he’s getting ready to turn 60 years old shortly. Let’s all say Happy Birthday to Wes! Happy Birthday, Wes!

Anyway, so Wes wrote me an email and asked if I’d come back to Asheville, NC and speak at his user group meeting again this year, just like last year. Wes lives in Brevard, NC, which coincidentally is the same small town where my parents had owned some land and were getting ready to build a house to retire to. My brother threw a wrench in those gears unfortunately. Brevard is one of the most beautiful places on earth.

Of course the other connections here are also that I used to live in Rochester, and Wes knows one of my other buddies, Ray “Obi Wan” Fiore, who lives in Rochester and is another mold designer. Mold designers and plastic part engineers sometimes work closely. What a tangled web we weave.

Along with speaking at the user group, and again like last year, I planned to stay at the Deerwoode camp, renting a cabin. Beautiful place. Really. If you prefer mountains, clean air, ponds with fish, wildlife and all that to another chain hotel, this is the place for you.

It just so happened that Wes lives in the hometown of some of the members of the Steep Canyon Rangers, who are one of my favorite groups. These guys are probably the best new bluegrass band around. Some people say the bass player looks like me. I always thought he looked like Animal on the muppets.

Anyway, Wes knows Woody, the guitar player. It just so happens that Woody is also an amazing trout fishing guide. So Wes hooked me up to go fishing with Woody.

Woody took me to a local hot spot, and we had to show up early. He had said that we would probably catch 15 or more fish, which sounded like great fun to me. Trout fishing is rarely that generous, especially if the fish have any size.

We caught several. Actually, Woody didn’t fish. He just rigged rods and gave instructions. I’m not the most subtle trout fisherman out there, but even I was able to catch more than a few fish that day.

Meanwhile we caught rainbows, browns and brookies.

Altogether, the tally was 37 trout in a few hours. If I had been on top of things, I might have caught twice as many easily. Woody was patient with me, and spent a fair amount of time taking flies out of trees, and re-rigging lines. Plus, I showed up with my 9′ 6 wt instead of a 7′ 4-5 wt. The stream was small, and the smaller rod wouldn’t have made me more graceful, but it would have kept me out of the trees some.

Wes asked me what Woody had taught me. I said I learned some techniques, some set up things, and that I needed more equipment. Wes was impressed that I thought I needed more equipment. I drove the Z down, and if you have to pack clothes, a computer, and fishing equipment, you’ve gotta leave something at home. I had 3 rods, 8 small boxes with tackle and flies, a net, a vest, and loads of junk in the vest. More equipment indeed.

Not exactly a fishing vehicle, but with a couple of fly rods in the passenger seat, I was forced to ride with the top down all the way to Brevard. Some sacrifice.

Of course the story has to come full circle. Woody and I talked about several things during the day, including what I did for a living. I told him I was an engineer, and that I often help inventors design manufacturable products. So Woody asked if he had some sort of a fishing invention, would I be able to help him with that? And that’s how fishing, bluegrass, engineering and user groups are all intertwined. Amazing, isn’t it?

On my final day in Brevard, Wes and I went fishing in a private pond. Er – he told me these are LAKES. Well, I’m from NY, where you can’t see across lakes, but you can swim across a pond. All of these were swimmable, so I thought they were ponds. Not like Ontario, Seneca or Champlain.

Anyway, we didn’t hit the trout like last year, but this year we got in the weedy end of the po…. er…. lake, and hit the smaller largemouths. We even saw a beast swim by that must have been 9 lb +. No luck getting a hook in it.

Of course, I couldn’t forget the user group side of the equation. Thursday night was his user group meeting, the original cause for the whole thing in the first place. There were several familiar faces at the Western North Carolina SWUG – Michael Jolley, an engineer with Trimech, Christine Longwell, another Trimecher. Jeff Cox is a local, and the author of the new WNC Soapbox blog. Check out what Jeff has to say! Tom Wilson was responsible for some extremely delicious barbeque. Wow, I haven’t had ribs like that maybe ever.

I didn’t get off to a good start for the meeting. In writing the new book, I’ve installed SolidWorks 2009 Alpha, and have been using that for a couple weeks now. What I didn’t realize was that it hosed my SolidWorks 2008 installation. So when I got the user group, all I could run was 2009, which is of course under NDA. So Wes loaned me his computer, which is just like my Notebookzilla from an earlier post. My notebookzilla has problems with USBs that remain plugged in during boot. So of course I plugged in a thumb drive and my external drive before booting Wes’ machine, and it puked all over the place, eventually not booting at all. We had to get help from Walid and Jeff to get the bios to see the hard drive again. I felt terrible for screwing up Wes’ machine, but it all turned out ok.

Once we got going, we were supposed to have a topic that was Tips and Tricks, but we turned it into a bit of a Stump the Chump on 3D sketches. I went through as much info on 3D sketches and related functionality as I could remember. Again, head over to Jeff Cox Soapbox. He said he took notes and was going to post some of the better points of the discussion to his blog.

To me, the best user group presentations come when A) you have a great speaker or B) the audience interacts and brings in a lot of questions and contributes on answers as well. So, we didn’t have A, but we did have B in abundance. One person would bring up a question, and I would build a model on the screen, and we would have a general discussion about it and try some things, and we all learned a lot. I enjoy these kinds of group meetings best because its not a lecture from one point of view, but rather a moderated discussion that is exactly focussed on what users want to know. This way I’m not guessing what people want to know, they ask the questions.

Sorry for an immensely long blog post, but everything you do in life is somehow related. Fishing gives you the clear mind to answer 3D sketch questions. SolidWorks gives you the ability to help a fishing guide with some new invention. Bluegrass provides a soundtrack for work and play, and of course the link between bluegrass and computers is obvious.

What do users think about the adoption rate of 2008?

How do you find out answers to questions like this? Do you ask Matt Lombard? Do you ask Mike Puckett? Everybody has a personal agenda to push, so asking an individual who hasn’t studied the question scientifically isn’t much of a real answer, it’s just an educated and biased opinion.

Solidworks has recently put out another survey. This survey is trying to characterize the future of the “SolidWorks Community”. To me, this is a bit like trying to push a dollar sign shaped peg into a user shaped hole. SW Corporate is trying to artificially construct something that should happen organically. Like arabs trying to build an island.

Ok, bad analogy, the islands are kinda cool. The analogy should have compared something that is natural (a beach) to something that is forced by a commercial concern (maximized water frontage for maximized $$). Ok, still bad analogy, I don’t think the SW Community is necessarily trying to make money from this, but it is a PR thing to make restive customers happy.

Come think of it, people aren’t really clammoring for changes to the Customer Portal, but they keep coming anyway. What is the force driving this change? Coming from customers? Do you really think so?

Anyway, SW is asking what shaped island they should build. I’m saying, why are we limited to an island? Maybe what we really need is something else. Let us decide what we need.

So how do you avoid the mistake of asking what customers want and coming up with conclusions like SW reached for the 2008 software? Regardless if you like the new interface or not, 2008 is a CAD admin nightmare because of all of the default changes and re-education that has to take place. Certainly they asked customers before doing that, but which ones? and how did they interpret the results?

Take SWWorld Top 10 Enhancement Requests, this image taken from Mick Puckett’s site:

Frankly, I don’t consider any of those options to be incredibly important. My top 10 list would look like this:

1. Software is reliable and predictable at SP0
2. Mates and sketch relations need to be reliable and predictable
3. PropertyManager should not cover over FeatureManager exactly when FM is needed
4. SW should provide a utility to check your computer and verify that the SW and OS installations are correct (to eliminate finger pointing about crashes, and give some real diagnostic tools)
5. Complete Documentation, electronic or printed
6. “Performance Mode” interface settings to strip out the eye candy
7. Every feature that has a number in a ProperyManager needs to allow access to that number through Design Tables and configurations, double-click changes, and so on.
8. Consistent application of the Esc and Enter keys to exit and repeat commands
9. Apply the RMB OK to all features and functions throughout the software
10. Stop adding new useless functions just for AutoCAD users

My guess is that people got to vote on the things that SW has already decided to implement for the next version of the software. This would help SW with their claim to implement some very impressive percentage of users top 10 requests.

When you ask a question, one of the risks is that the way you ask the question pre-determines the answer. Why doesn’t SW step out of the way and just moderate a discussion between users? SW has shown that they aren’t much good at this kind of stuff, so I think its time to stop being so secretive about things and if you’re going to say that you’re a customer driven company, let the customers drive for once.

The whole thing about “community”, it’s just about people informally interacting and sharing stuff in a way that isn’t forced, and it isn’t commercial, it isn’t formal press-release type stuff, it’s just on the user information level. This should be driven by users, not by the big corporation. I think all of the stuff that SolidWorks Corporation does for “the community” should be transparent. There is no reason to hide the results of polls or surveys. If you want to build a “community”, then treat the residents like you’re one of them.

I feel like SolidWorks is in the mood for granting some wishes, like they have been listening, but it has only taken them 13 years to respond. I think it is time to become more transparent in the process. Somehow the process for deciding on new features in SolidWorks 2008 went badly askew. SolidWorks badly misinterpreted what users want, or at least badly executed that interpretation, with some of the new interface changes. I frankly don’t trust their decision making ability, even if they do claim to be listening.

Make a Wish List, where the users submit the topics, and then users vote and comment on them. In general, I’m talking about SolidWorks software functionality. The survey is talking about SolidWorks customer site functionality, but I believe the same concept should go for both. Get in on the discussion on the SW Forums.