I’m a big fan of portable compute power. These things we carry called “phones” these days do so much other than call people. In fact, that’s one of the least things I do with mine. I get news and email, along with other social updates, can keep track of my blog, and approve or add comments from anywhere with a signal. I can manage files with Dropbox, sending customers data, avoid getting lost, and be pumped when I arrive listening to tunes. There are even some 3D viewers available so you can view CAD data on a phone. You can even sketch stuff, and make to-do lists, and, and, and…

I have to admit, I find myself hanging out on those Android forums with 23 year old punks who are constantly saying with religious verve that the next Nexus is going to be their next phone. Yeah, I still laugh at them, but secretly inside, I’m saying the same thing about every other new phone rumor that floats through the forums. I’m definitely the kind of guy who can appreciate something just because it exists. I don’t feel compelled to own every last gizmo that comes down the pike. That 1978 Porsche 911 looks great in my neighbor’s drive. I don’t have to own it, insure it, wax it, garage it, repair it, etc. to appreciate it. That’s a handy attitude to have when the cell phone market changes sometimes weekly.

I’m not really sold on tablets yet. To make them practical for stuff you can’t do on a phone, you really need a physical keyboard. And when you add a keyboard to a tablet, you’re just back to a laptop. The equation may change slightly, but I don’t see myself needing or wanting a tablet until I replace my current stock of laptops. When I do, it will be something like what has evolved from the Atrix, Padfone, and the Transformer Prime. Cool stuff, and practical enough for play and work.

My favorite new device is a phone with a practical digital projector. It has marginal specs as a phone, but the addition of a sizeable CAD-able display is beginning to evolve into something that is usable for simple impromptu demos, although it needs some additional resolution and brightness to be used for real work. There was another model of this a couple of years ago, but it was sent into limited markets, and was hard to take seriously as anything but a first shot at it.

Mobile World Congress was this week in Barcelona, and lots of cool stuff is coming out, if you’re a phone addict. Quad core phones are the big rage now. Phones are losing the removable media – all the memory is built-in. Of course I don’t like that. I’m very much a “want access to all the components” kind of guy. Some of the new phones are undeniably cool, though. It seems specs for components haven’t changed much in the last 6 months, and new high-end super phones are still being announced with the same or even slightly lower specs than the HTC Rezound/Sensation (a rather underappreciated phone, I thought) was announced with several months ago. The Motorola Razr was by a spec comparison, a far inferior phone, but is much more popular for whatever reason.

There’s the controversial Samsung Galaxy Note, which I think is very cool. A stylus is a great thing to have on a portable computer, and Wacom is the way to go. But you’d better get a cool bluetooth because you might look like a dork holding a pie plate to your ear.

So MWC (Mobile World Congress) has come at a great time for me, because my contract is up in April, and I’m due for a new phone. What am I going to get that is going to last me for the next two years, when the technology seems to completely turn over in less than 8 months? I’ve mentioned three Samsung phones already as being the cool ones. I did that without even realizing. Nexus, Note and Beam. Cool phones, but I need something I can live with as a go-everywhere compute device. The HTC devices are the ones that seem to do it for me because they are constructed so well. Plus, HTC (officially) allows you to unlock your bootloader and customize the phone, which is maybe the most important aspect of a new phone to me. The ability to customize, and the availability of software components to use from developers means that only the hardware matters when making a purchase decision, because you can totally replace all the software. This makes the choice easier. It means no Motorola, and certainly no Apple.

The new HTC One X and S have an aluminum body, which looks great, and makes the phone very sturdy compared to Samsung’s plastic. Spec wise, all the phones are starting to look the same, but the new HTCs have better displays and cameras. Being limited to the phones a single carrier provides is kind of a bummer. It would be best, obviously, to just buy whatever phone you want (at subsidized prices) and use it on whatever carrier you want. But the phone business is even more predatory than the CAD business about lock-in. Not to mention all the incompatible network formats.

I haven’t heard of any of these cool phones coming to Verizon, though. I can’t imagine Verizon going from December (Galaxy Nexus) to April without having any new top-line phones to offer, so I’m still holding out that the One X will be offered in the US with quad core power and 4g speed on Verizon. I’d even settle for the smaller One S (4.3″ instead of 4.7″).

There will be a day when these portable devices are the only computers we have. They are almost there now. The big lack for me is a big display (which a projector of sufficient resolution could answer) and a physical keyboard (for fast and furious typing of those loooong blog posts, but a bluetooth keyboard could work).

 

I have a customer who needs a top notch SolidCAM consultant who is available to travel internationally during the first week or two of April. The consultant will be paid for the time, travel, and accommodations, and will be visiting the customer with me.  Please tell anyone who you know who might be qualified for this sort of job. The customer is a machinery manufacturer, and I believe uses primarily 3 axis mill and turn. Customer needs training and tech support on a wide range of productivity issues. I’ve contacted folks at SolidCAM direct, with no results at this time.

My contact info is on the Contact page, link under the blog header. Call, skype or email.

The modeling challenges are fun and I always learn something from the different techniques. Here is one that might be harder than it looks. A surfboard. In making this model, the things I found the most difficult were:

• getting the front point to be rounded, not dead sharp
• keeping the shape nice around the front point
• creating fins with sharp trailing edges
• rounding off the back end of the board without using fillets.

This model is not perfect, in fact, I didn’t achieve the second goal – the top of the board near the tip is a bit of a mess. I tried several things to get this to work, but in the end, I didn’t want to spend a whole afternoon on this.

So here is the challenge:

Build your own surfboard that looks nice, even close up, especially both ends.

-or-

Fix mine so that the tip looks right. Click here to download my broken surfboard.

Submit parts or images in the comment form, or send them to my email.

At SolidWorks World, people were looking for some clarification about the future of the SolidWorks product, company, and name. Somehow, SolidWorks seemed to deliver different messages to different people. I’m not sure what this is going to do to boost customer’s confidence, but you can make your mind up for yourself. Read these three different takes on the future of SolidWorks:

Evan Yares. Evan has taken a position I held for a short time writing for Design World. I have to say he’s doing a much better job than I did. In his article called “SolidWorks V6 is not SolidWorks”, he calls out the distinction between SolidWorks the company and SolidWorks the software. There is another SolidWorks – SolidWorks the platform. SolidWorks V6 (according to Matt West) is the name of the next generation platform. The software products on that platform will have names that are not yet determined. n!Fuze is the first such product. Live Buildings sounds like it will be another. And there will be a CAD product in there at some point. Read the article. It’s short. I agree with everything Evan says, particularly the part where he says that SolidWorks could have avoided a lot of confusion if they had not used the SolidWorks brand to identify the new product. His point is that it’s not SolidWorks. And he’s right.

Randall Newton. Randall takes a different point of view, looking at largely the same facts. He says that SolidWorks 2013 will launch as legacy software. He also makes a statement that may turn out to be controversial, that “ it will most likely be the last release of SolidWorks using the Parasolid 3D kernel.” He makes another point about O’Malley falling on his sword due to the V6 project not going as planned, which I hadn’t heard put so directly before. Randall goes on to say that SolidWorks branching into V1 and V6 may be similar to Autodesk branching into AutoCAD and Inventor. This is interesting, and I’d like to believe it is true, but if it becomes true, I don’t think it will be because DS planned it that way. The plan seems to be that SolidWorks V1 is at end-of-life. It hasn’t seen significant development since 2007, and that may continue into the future. Microsoft “supported” Windows XP for a long time after Vista and even 7 were released. That doesn’t mean they spent any energy developing it.

Roopinder Tara. Roopinder seems to have gotten stuck on the semantics of “kernel change”. He allows Bassi to get away with delivering a rose-colored doosey – “The user sees no effect with a kernel change”. Then he contradicts what Randall said “There will be a SolidWorks 2013 with Parasolid. And a SolidWorks 2014 with Parasolid. And a SolidWorks 2015.” And finally he gets to the point “But the V6 kernel will be the engine of the future. It will be where the development will be. It is where Dassault’s heart is.”  If that’s not change, I’m not sure what is. The change might be good in the end, but it’s still change.

Rob Rodriguez. Rob wrote a lot about the SWW12 event, and then followed it up with SW2013, and finally V6. He said “ I got the sense it was going to be 2-3 years before we will be able to purchase the SolidWorks V6 product”, but from what I heard at the general sessions, it sounded like the next generation was arriving in 2013.

SolidWorks seems to be making an attempt at corking the genie that Jeff Ray unleashed, but they’re trying to do it without offering any details.

 

I don’t share too much personal stuff here, but here’s a post about how I spend some of my time off.

Kim and I are bluegrass fans. Some people say “I like country music too”. But bluegrass isn’t country, at least not modern country. What’s the difference between bluegrass and country? Bluegrass is all acoustic, and at the pro level requires real virtuosic control over your ax. I mean they’re severely talented. Not that modern country music doesn’t require talent, bluegrass just showcases instrumental talent.

Bluegrass actually didn’t originate until the 1930s or 40s, and grew out of a combination of Appalachian mountain music, old-time country, folk music, Irish fiddle tunes, gospel, and probably some blues influence. I live in Roanoke, Virginia, in the middle of the area where bluegrass originated, eastern Tennessee, western Virginia, western North Carolina, Kentucky, and West Virginia. Enough geography lesson.

This weekend there was a benefit concert for a well known bluegrass veteran (Herschel Sizemore, mandolin player), and a lot of the big names in bluegrass showed up. And some lesser known names showed up too. It just so happened that the concert coincided with an 8 inch snowfall. Here in Virginia, we don’t get that much snow, and this was the first snow we’ve seen all year in Roanoke. So this is a blog post about Bluegrass, Snow, and Zoey the Irish Terrier/Schnauzer.

By the way, there’s a link between all of this and CAD – Anne Yust, the lady always first into the general session at SolidWorks World, is a bluegrass mandolin player.

We got to the show a little late, and came in in the middle of the Bluegrass Brothers. These guys are from Salem, VA, just a few miles away, and regularly play at this joint called The Coffee Pot, which is just a couple miles from the house. These guys are one of my favorite local bands, with a real authentic sound, and a great banjo player.

As an aside, the Coffee Pot is a bit of a destination all its own. It has its own Wikipedia page. Virginia is a no-smoking state, and the Coffee Pot gladly supports that policy with a no-smoking lobby that’s about 6′x8′. If you don’t like that, you can always not smoke outside. If you really want to get the full carcinogenic experience, come over when the Bluegrass Brothers are bringing down the house, get a local Track 1 beer, and relive your memories of what US bars used to be like before people started hating cancer so much.

Anyway. Here are some really bad videos of some really great bands.

The first band I got a recording of was local-ish (Danville, VA) called Bandwagon. They had a great female lead singer, and really sounded great.

By the way, bluegrass bands (aside from Cherryholmes) don’t usually have banjo babes in high heels.

Next was a band called the Travellers, great band, bad video, fun tune. They were also a local-ish band from around Virginia.

Then came a band called Springfield Exit, another Virginia band. These guys were the biggest surprise of the night for me. Here they are singing the classic, I’ll go Steppin’ Too.

The Punch Brothers are apparently a famous band that I’d never heard of. They were by some weird coincidence playing another gig in Roanoke the same night, but agreed to come over and play a couple of tunes for the benefit. Punch Brothers are young for bluegrass musicians (which means less than 80 years old) and are stylistically somewhere in between Old Crow Medicine Show, and The Duhks, with a heavy dose of classic bluegrass thrown in. It’s good to see younger people playing bluegrass, and of course they made it fun. Here they are with a classic Bill Monroe tune.

Del McCoury is a fixture in bluegrass. He’s been playing since the 1960s. The last two times we saw him he couldn’t remember the words to his old songs. This time he had a hard time hitting the high notes. It’s sad to watch, but this guy is a legend, and you have to go see him whenever he’s around. At this benefit concert, they put together most of the 1979 Dixie Pals band. It was rough around the edges, but Del’s a consummate showman, and it’s always a good time when you see him perform.

There were several bands that couldn’t make it because of the weather. John and Jeanette Williams were supposed to be there, but Jeanette had a fever, and the rest of the band was stranded on some lonely interstate somewhere. So, John Williams put together a pickup band and played a few tunes. You might remember the banjo babe from Bandwagon as the bass player in this video. Sans heels.

There were other bands, some of which we missed, some we just didn’t record. Seldom Scene is a great band that’s been around for about 40 years, out of the DC area. Even without John Duffy and Mike Auldridge, these guys still sound great.

And when we came out? Snow. Everywhere. It looks so nice when it first falls. This is the view from the house.

And Then there was Zoey the Wonder Dog. She’s not quite 3 years old, but she loves the snow. Snow is even better than a pile of leaves. The only thing that can make snow better is a ball in the snow. The ball goes into the snow followed by Zoey diving in. She can entertain herself for hours kicking the ball, diving into the snow, digging the ball out, and then repeating the process all afternoon. The snow will only last a couple of days, so we’re giving her extra time to indulge. You can see here how much she’s enjoying it.

All photography that doesn’t suck was done by Kim.

 

 

Seems like a lot of PR departments recently are mistaking me for a real writer or something these days, because this is the second request for a review that I’ve received this week. My email address must have fallen into a new spam pool.  This product has been around for a while, but sometimes it takes me a while to get around to trying things out. The email I got had the subject “News Item: Updated iPad app for Sharing 3D CAD models”. Or thereabouts.

CADFaster sounds like a familiar story. Upload SolidWorks models onto a web server in some viewable format, and allow people with web access to view, measure, and markup your 3D data. It sounds similar to eDrawings, and it sounds exactly like the now defunct 3D Instant Website.

3D Instant Website was introduced a decade ago, and was part of the SolidWorks Professional bundle. You could upload right from SW, and send people a link to a site where they could use an eDrawings like interface to fiddle with and discuss a model. It was a great idea, but it was underused, and was just retired last year. SolidWorks replaced it with a new paid service called !nFuze, which by any account has flopped.

So I guess that’s where CADFaster comes in. SolidWorks has tried twice and failed twice in this same space. Maybe CADFaster can make it happen by spreading it out to more CAD tools, and more platforms. You can export data from the SolidWorks plugin for CADFaster to be viewed on the cloud, or though a standalone file on iPad or PC. And that’s great. That’s just like 3DIW used to do for free.

CADFaster by the way is not free. There’s nothing wrong with paying for software, but let’s see how they sell this one. You can buy rent CADFaster for SolidWorks for periods of 1 month, 6 months or 1 year, at €14.99, €69.00 or €199.00 respectively. There is no option to buy it outright, I suppose because of the server storage component, even though it can be used without the remote data storage. (By exporting to a file instead of exporting to the cloud, you can use CADFaster in the same way that you would use an eDrawing file that includes the viewer). They are trying to sell this like the doomed !nFuze, and it works like the defunct 3DIW.

The interface is nice enough. The performance (fluidity of rotation) is pretty good. It allows sections, measurements, screen shots, and several visibility options. Using it with assemblies is nice, and for very large models (think architecture) you can actually walk into them for nice visualization with hidden or transparent parts.

They have versions for SolidWorks, Revit, and Microstation. In a brief email exchange with CADFaster, I understand that they feel the bulk of the market for them is in the BIM (architectural) world, so SolidWorks support is taking a back seat for now. The SolidWorks plugin has not yet been updated for SW 2012.

But there are some odd things about CADFaster. It allows you to view on a PC or on an iPad. But when signing in for my free trial, it asked me for a Google or Yahoo login. And yet they do not offer an Android app.

Another odd thing is that it crashed both CADFaster and SolidWorks the first time I made a change to the settings and ran it to make a local file. This was probably due to the fact that I’m using SW 2012, and the plugin has not been updated for that use.

Overall, this is a cool visualization app, and assuming that we will eventually see an Android app for it, it would become more attractive. I don’t like the rental scheme. There was nothing on the web about volume discounts or how to handle multiple licenses. I’ll be interested to see if this product stays afloat. I liked 3DIW, and that fizzled. !nFuze never got off the ground. I like the concept here, and it seems to be better executed than either of those previous failed products, with the benefit of a decade’s worth of hind sight.

The model didn’t really take that long, just about 6 hours for the whole thing. Spark plugs and pulleys are from 3D Central, but everything else is home built. The castings don’t have all the draft and fillets and detailed features that real parts have.

I picked an engine for a lot of reasons. First of all, it’s a break from the kind of stuff I’ve been doing. I don’t think I used a single surface feature on this assembly, but I did use some lofts for the intake and exhaust ports. Also used some multibody stuff on the block and shafts. Second, all mechanical people can relate to an engine. We’re just kind of drawn to that stuff like flies to …whatever flies are drawn to. Third, I wanted to know that I remembered how to do some of this stuff. Mechanisms have always been one of the cooler things to design in SW, and I don’t get to do enough of that kind of thing. Finally, I just wanted to work with the software in a way that it worked more than 20% of the time, just to remind myself that it’s not an entirely awful piece of software for all kinds of work.

As I was working through the history features in the block (one of the few parts with any feature complexity), I was thinking of what it would be like to be doing this in direct edit software. I’m going to have some time or get a pay job one of these days to do some work in some direct edit software. That kind of work is going to be a total change of direction for history users. It’s a completely different skill set, but it’s much more intuitive than history. Still, I think you need history for some things, or for best efficiency at some things.

Anyway, back to the assembly. The biggest challenge with this assembly came in the mates department. There is something about the mate workflow that always finds me making a lot of extra and I think unnecessary keystrokes. Sometimes it seems to take 3 bangs on the Enter key to get a mate to preview, and I’ve never understood why the Mate PropertyManager always works like you have a pushpin pushed, even when you don’t. I use smartmates (alt-drag) when I can, with right click accept. I like that workflow. When I have to use the Mate PropMgr, I’m forever banging the keyboard.

Working with a spaceball is something I’ve grown to love again. I like to use the option to move parts in assemblies with it, but with the Mate propmgr open, using the spaceball to rotate a part causes the entire part to be selected instead of a single face. So I had to turn that option off. Rotate parts with RMB drag instead. Not as nice, but at least mates work better.

I sometimes recommend that people make separate assemblies for different tasks. Sometimes people give me surprised looks, because it sounds like a hack method. This assembly reaffirmed to me that different assembly files for different tasks can definitely be the right choice. In this case, if you build an assembly to reflect a good BOM with subassemblies, you can’t get the motion to work correctly. But modeling it with all the moving parts at the top level to get motion is a bit of a boondoggle, with too much detail to manage a the top. For this reason, I wound up with one assembly saved that used subassemblies to group parts into logical groups that helped me put it together faster, and helped by solving fewer mates at the top level, and one assembly with all the moving parts at the top level, with only one layer deep of flexible subassemblies.

When initially putting it together, I saw the opportunity to save some time by using subassemblies. So I had a piston sub, a valve train sub, and then I had to break it down to make rocker arm subs within the valve train sub. And then to get everything positioned correctly, I had to make the rocker arm subs flexible, because they were all positioned differently along the camshaft.

In the end, with 2 levels of subassemblies, and all of the subassemblies using the Flexible setting, I could see that motion was simply not going to work. I also noticed a funny quirk. If you use the mate to Origin and Align Axes option (which is one of my favorite unsung newish tools), you can’t get flexible subassemblies to work. You get an error about the part being fully defined. You have to remove the Origin mate and fix the base part. The mate to Origin is still newish, but this is something that should be ironed out by now. Not that I’m bashing, I kind of like stuff that doesn’t work. ;o)

Anyway, to get the motion to work, I dissolved the two valve train assemblies. When I did that, the rocker arm subs in one assembly came in flexible, and the rocker arm subs from the other assembly came in rigid. Of course that blew up the tree, but setting all the rocker arm subs to flexible cured the problems. As you can see in the Assembly Xpert, I’ve got 202 resolved top level mates. I’ve got some Cam mates and some Gear mates. And yes, the whole thing will work by just dragging a shaft or a pulley. Not bad for a day’s work.

Watching the video closely, you can see 2 of the rocker arms flipping on the left side and one on the right. This is the cam mate getting confused, and the follower is flipping through the part to the other side. You just can’t escape flipping, even if you don’t use surface trims or planes. Probably slowing down the motor used for the animation or increasing the frame rate / key frames might take care of that.

An article on Graphic Speak blog by Randall Newton contains an interview with Gian Paolo Bassi, the new VP of R&D at SolidWorks. One item of interest in the article comes when Mr. Bassi is asked about his vision for SolidWorks:

GfxS: What is your vision for SolidWorks the product?

GPB: We will focus on performance, and not just the pure architecture of the product. The future of SolidWorks is about providing more power, more ability, more tools for collaboration, and the opportunity for exploiting smart phones and tablets. We are excited about the opportunities to improve performance.

One key to improving performance is to rid ourselves of the history-based design paradigm. There has been a rediscovery in the industry of a need for direct manipulation of shape, to give designers more freedom. We will work to give SolidWorks better design freedom performance, better computational performance, and greater flexibility…

The answer or the question is possibly not as defined as it might be. Before you can consider the content of the answer, I think you have to clarify that even though the question clearly is talking about “SolidWorks”, the answer is about a product that does not as yet have a name, and has been called variously “SolidWorks V6″, or “Catia Lite” for lack of a real name. So this is not really about what we think of as SolidWorks, it’s a brand new product from Dassault.

What I’ve read in other places is that the Catia V6 platform is said to be based on what they are calling “declarative modeling” . At this point, any distinguishing marks between “declarative” and “direct” are opaque, but I don’t see any mention of combining direct modeling with history based modeling, in the way that Synch Tech does.

What, if anything, does this mean?

First, it means that transitioning from SolidWorks 2013 to Catia Lite 2013 won’t be the utter feature failure nightmare that you imagine when changing kernels. That’s because there won’t be features in the way you’re used to thinking about them. Direct edit (and I suppose declarative modeling) works with what history users would call “dumb solids”. They may arrange for some sort of “features” like the features in Synch Tech, where … wait.

It looks like the next generation SolidWorks is going to work much like how Synchronous Technology has worked for the past 4-5 years, but possibly without the flexibility of using history modeling where it makes sense.

So. If you plan on following the SolidWorks directed path and moving beyond the current SolidWorks product, which becomes obsolete as soon as Catia Lite starts shipping in 2013, it will be pretty much just like buying a new CAD package and starting over. New interface. New paradigm. New pricing. New product names. Everything is new. So what should you do, move to a brand new product which might take 3 years to work the bugs out, or move to an established product? Siemens (Synch Tech), PTC (Creo), and even Autodesk (Inventor Fusion)  already have software in the marketplace that have different methods of combining direct and history modeling. SolidWorks (or shall we just call it Dassault, because the SolidWorks product remember will be phased out at some point after Catia Lite hits, and the SolidWorks name is not even on the new headquarters building) Dassault, for all their chest thumping about doing this so that they are first with new technology, will wind up being dead last of the four major players. Their silence on the issue has been meant to buy them time so that customers aren’t thinking too much about direct edit, or that history modeling has some limitations.

So does Bassi’s description sound good? Yeah, it sounds like there are some useful ideas in there. A lot depends on specific implementation, and anything can happen, but it’s potentially a big improvement. My question is, how are they going to induce you to move to Catia Lite without causing you to consider Synch Tech, Creo, or Fusion?

Notice the only mention of “cloud” in Randall’s article is in the author’s caption on an n!Fuze screen capture. Does that mean they have backed off full blown CAD in the cloud, or they are just being coy? Why would he not ask Bassi about cloud, since cloud is one of Bassi’s “things”? Bassi was previously at a company called Riwebb, which had this on their site:

The site has since been taken down, but Bassi did CAD and “web enabled solutions”.

The General Session for Day 3 is about to start in another hour or so. Day 3 is when they talk about what is going to happen in the next version of the software. So far, the general sessions have been light on info about the software.

If you can listen live, Lou Gallo has been live blogging at this address: http://solidworksheard.com/live-coverage/, and Bruce Buck is giving a live a/v feed from here: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/solidbox-live

Other wise, I’ll have my mouth to the firehose, trying to pick out things that interest me. If you watch the Twitter feed on #sww12, it’s pretty much the same thing coming from 10 different people spaced out over 10 minutes. Hopefully there are more nuggets to pick out today than previous days…

Keep pecking F5 to refresh…

If you’re interested in seeing videos of SWW from the SW Youtube site, go here: http://www.youtube.com/solidworks

Pawel Keska and Neil Custard were #2 and #1 respectively for Model Mania

Mike Spens from GoEngineer was #1 for resellers

1.25 million educational licenses

top ten list

#10 thread creation wizard

#9 no rotation on mates

#8 Esc returns control of interface

#7 dimensions stay where you place them

#6 control orientation of planes

#5 reduce boundary box of drawing views

#4 shaded with edges bleed through

#3 dangle children, don’t delete

#2 place a point at the CG

#1 use more cpu cores

 

Fielder: “What the future holds in 3d social experience”

 

Back to the Feature spoof.

…looks like all SolidWorks users will ride skateboards… and look like Ferris Beuler

Prius is the new Back To The Future car.

John Hirschtick steals the SolidWorks name after overhearing it after Marty travels back in time…

 

New 2013 features:

• identify which parts draining the graphics card most
• section expert
• revision cloud, bubble notes and comments
• show hidden bodies in parts
• edrawing markup import to SW drawing
• snapshots in any doc
• simulation submodeling
• bounding box cut list properties
• 3dvia composer cameras
• Biff-pad (etch a sketch) uses Biff-CAD (it’s just a joke)
• more envelope functionality
• inserting components one after another
• multiple exploded views in a single configuration
• rotated exploded views
• feature favorites in feature manager
• cosmetic thread display improvements
• dowel holes in hole wizard
• plastic boss mount control
• surface intersect (sounds like replace face)
• multiple contour thin feature
• enter equations in any propertymanager
• vary pattern dimensions
•  sp5 of previous version will open next version files
• epdm and draftsight improvements

Bertrand Sicot

where are they going for SWW13?

Swan and Dolphin, Disney, Orlando.

 

I’m also hearing, semi-officially I guess that the new platform will be called SolidWorks V6, but the individual software products (CAD, FEA, PDM…) on the platform will have their own names.

 

What’s my take on this?  Some of these are so overdue in the software that people must yawn hearing the same things over and over. But notice that most of the user requests are aimed at CAD functions. Users want CAD. CAD vendors will one day figure out that PLM is aimed at a different set of customers, and you can’t just replace CAD with PLM. It’s like using a bandsaw to paint your house.

2013 features? Some stuff that sounds usable. Open later version files is cool. Now that SW is at end of life, and there is nothing to lose, they finally open it up. Since it’s starting with 2012, I don’t think it will wind up having a lot of  value in the end. The envelopes and surface intersect sound like existing functionality that few people use. 3dvia??? Really? Leave it off the list. They’re still trying to sell that overpriced niche product.

Plastic boss mount? Did they figure out that they could have made a screw boss feature, but didn’t?  Equations in propmgrs is long overdue. Dowel holes are long overdue. Cosmetic threads is a bug fix. Exploded views is long overdue. Inserting components – the assembly workflow has been broken for years. Lets see if this just breaks it a different way or if it fixes the current mess. Show hidden bodies in parts? Existing functionality. Learn to use the software.

The good ideas are all long overdue.

Again, I’ll have a finger on the live blogs and twitter feeds, trying to pick out what I think is important from the stream . This post will update several times over the next two hours, so keep your finger on that F5.

Next year’s CSWP party will be scaled back to CSWE’s

Charles Culp gets the Community award (go Charles!)

Quirky – crowdsource everything, but don’t call it crowdsource, (ok, it’s design by committee)

And that’s it.

Wow. Empty.

Thanks to SolidBox for the a/v feed and Lou Gallo for commentary.