Build your own Top 10 enhancement list
Since SolidWorks World is coming, and they always have their Top 10 Enhancement list, and I always seem to think that they have somehow missed the point, I’m going to make my own pre-emptive Top 10 that I think doesn’t miss the point. Here is the SWW09 Top 10 as copied from CADFanatic (Brian McElyea):
- Increase program stability
- Clear memory when a file is closed
- SolidWorks backward compatibility
- Ability to rename configurations while referenced
- Faster rebuilds on complex models
- On-the-fly equation creation and editing
- Dual Monitor support
- Add Lock Point for model rebuilds
- Abort any running command by pressing ESC
- Excel behavior in tables
This list is actually pretty good, but I thought 10, 7 and 6 were a bit out of place, and there are plenty of things I thought were more important than things that did show up in the list. Interestingly, #3 and #8 also show up in my list as #1 and #3. Not a bad list, actually, but where did Dual Monitor Support come from?
Here’s my list.
- SolidWorks complete version self-compatibility
- display the tree in a completely linear list
- place a Freeze marker in the tree to freeze rebuilds at a certain point
- display an assembly tree that graphically shows all external relationships
- when deleting a parent feature, enable all children to remain dangling
- parametric CG point for parts and assemblies
- parametric conic sketch entity that works better than the current Parabola
- Direct read of Catia data (features not necessary)
- parts go onto layers named for part on drawing (use shaded color for edge color)
- return to the days when you had an interface philosophy, like “any sketch tool should work click-click or click-drag” and stick to it
So, do you think I missed the point? Tell me what you think the point is. Write your own Top 10 in a comment. And when you get to Anaheim remember these lists… let’s see if SW uses any of our ideas this year.
Matt you are right. I will not stop using SW because it doesn’t run on a mac. Although I do believe it could prevent people from buying SW if there were a viable alternative on a mac, be it Inventor, Pro-E, or Solid Edge.
I also noticed that it’s sitting at 10% and if SW decides not to port it to mac because of this than so be it. But the heading of this post is “Build your own top 10 enhancement list” and that’s exactly what it is, it’s in my personal top ten.
One of the things that would greatly benefit the type of modeling I do is to have “cut with surface” available at the assembly level. That too is sitting pretty far down the list. Here’s something that would greatly benefit me as a user, but the public has spoken, there are a lot of other users out there that have no need for this type of functionality.
Great post, really puts things in perspective, whether scientifically justified or not, I love it.
Right, but that situation doesn’t exist yet. I think when it does, the story will change immediately. Solidworks is not a customer driven company, they are a competition driven company, which in some sense makes them followers rather than leaders. This mac issue may well define if they are leaders or followers for the future.
Yeah, you’re right. And it’s ok to want stuff that other people don’t want. Not all of the stuff I wanted turned out to be popular.
SolidWorks is gonna do more than 10 enhancements in 2011, or I suppose they will anyway. They can’t just do the popular stuff. I’d bet they could fit in some stuff like that too. Just because it doesn’t make the top 10 on my blog doesn’t spell defeat. More assembly feature type functionality could well be in the cards. But there are ways that Solidworks could be thinking about this that would prevent it from being added. They have invested a lot recently in multi-body functionality, and they may be thinking that this is something you could do in multi-body rather than assemblies. I do believe that sometimes Solidworks approaches things like this a bit too academically (which to me means that they think too much about it without using any intuition or common sense), so the result doesn’t wind up making sense. “Luuuuke, use your feeelings!” as Obi-wan once said.
My final rant on mac vs pc.
My mum had an acer desktop for 6 years. Never had to reinstall the OS and performance barely degraded (and only occasionally needed to defrag)
However, I can cripple any computer within a matter of seconds (pc, mac, linux) because I am a power user.
The problem is when you talk apple vs pc, people often compare power users to novices who only use office type applications, email and internet.
Really think about it. Apple power users still have problems with stability and performance. But novices do not; because they don’t notice it.
Apple is a little bit more stable and reliable than windows. It’s not A LOT more.
And If Solidworks was ported; do you really believe it would be a dream run to use? It’s powerful, detailed and convoluted. Most mac apps aren’t and the ones that are; probably have a tougher time getting out of beta stage than PC software.
It’s true, with PC’s a lot of software companies send out software that isn’t ready. They have a habit (maybe the best word is “culture”) of trying to be the first; rather than the best.
When Apple finally does get a higher market share and more powerful software is ported over, then you will start to see the stability of Apples product degrade due to buggy and dodgy software…. OR… all these PC companies will have to change the whole way they do business and take more time to put out software and greatly reduce the feature set so that the software is more stable.
Isn’t that exactly what apple does? dumb it down? That is what design is about. Getting rid of the extra fluff, but PC’s were built on fluff. So expecting that it will all translate over easily and without problems… without understanding the differences between the 2 cultures of PC’s vs Mac’s is missing the most critical component of the problem.
PC’s are dodgy but “feature packed”, Macs are more refined, but dumbed down. And it’s the same deal with their hardware too.
and that’s the last i’m gonna rant about it.
and sorry for hijacking the topic. Back to solidworks.
“Macs are more refined, but dumbed down. And it’s the same deal with their hardware too”.
Is that really a fair statement? I work a lot with graphic designers that have massively complex pieces of software running on their macs often working with files that are magnitudes the file sizes of cad models.
Based on your comment these users are novices and not power users?
One of my friends is a graphics designer. We talk a lot about computers and software. Funny enough, I never hear him gripe about the mac not being stable.
Some good and valuable suggestions, but I don’t see some of my wish-list items:
1. VSS-like functionality (so versatile in ProE I rarely use anything else!)
2. some kind of GUI performance configuration options to cut down on the flashy (and unnescessary IMO) animations, glow-stick effects, fade-in what-have-yous.
3. Simplified options menu. Items move, or change name. WTF? I’ve been using SWX since 98 came out and I still hunt to find the check box I want.
4. Parametric sheet metal form tools. Currently it’s worse than useless.
5. Consistent “feature ID”. Especially in complex surfacing, references get all jacked. ProE does a much better job here.
6. File “versioning”, again like ProE (Ack, I’m starting to sound like a broken record here)
7. A manager for face/feature/part coloring. Our ID’ers get into trouble with this frequently.
8. Support for multiple release installs. We use what the client uses. I’ve got 2007, 2008 and 2009 installed currently. Seems to destablize each install.
9. More options for top-down design. Publish geometry would be nice. Skeleton functionality would be nice.
10. Configuration management. We don’t recommend it because it’s way too difficult to track.
One note on Apple: They don’t compete on price!
If I had a dollar for every unrepentant Pro/E user…
Why is it Pro/E users can never really articulate what they are talking about in terms that don’t refer back to Pro/E? Could you please identify exactly what it is about the variable section sweep that you want to see?
I think these were in the list in one form or another
Yeah. Big time.
definitely.
ok I can see the use of something like that, but I think your biggest problem is you just cant let go of the old girlfriend. get some counseling.
This exists. Its called the Display Pane. But it has one flaw. It tracks parts, features, bodies, but not faces. ugh.
I think this is mainly a system maintenance issue. I maintain several machines with multiple versions, and it works.
Dude, get over pro/e already. SW has tools to accomplish this stuff. It may be slightly different from what you are used to, but it works.
You gotta be more specific than that. Are you talking about general document management type configuration management or SolidWorks specific Configurations? what’s difficult about it? What are you doing now?
I’ve never had to use ProE, but lots of what AdamRE said—even though I only use SolidWorks—seems valid to me.
The sheetmetal forming tool thing bit me once—once. I’ll never again use it unless it becomes both parametric and easy to edit. It’s currently impossible to edit, so your only option is to delete the feature (and all the “children” of the feature) and start over. Crazy. Worse than a dumb solid, because at least dumb solids don’t delete the rest of the work you’ve done when deleting something like a surface.
I’d like a “Don’t” option for any form of interface bling that takes any amount of time to represent on my screen. Animating rotation of model views—slowly—for instance. Wouldn’t it be nice to have veto power over this sort of thing? Users who know their way around the software tire of waiting—even if just in milliseconds—to input dimension text, or wait for that model view to finally finish it’s little animated rotation.
I’m running the same three versions of SolidWorks on my system, and there are some problems. The first is the installer, which by default wants to install over the currently-installed version of SolidWorks. How can that possibly be useful? By default, it will hose all my data files (templates, materials, etc.)—and it never even mentions this during installation! This pretty much guarantees every user with multiple installs will be burned at least once before they figure out what really happened. Stupid. This is so easy to control. Simply put all the data files of a given version—by default—into a directory noted with the version of SolidWorks (such as “SolidWorks_2009″). Also, why can’t I specify a single directory into which goes ALL my SolidWorks data files (anything I can customize or create relating to the program)? One directory (for each version of SolidWorks, obviously), as opposed to nine, scattered through a maze of incomprehensible nonsense. If I need to install onto a new system, I simply pluck that directory off the old system and plunk it into the new system (over-writing the defaults added during the “fresh” install). Easy. Fast. Nobody gets burned with non-backward-compatible-but-overwritten-templates. Do we not have information architects at SolidWorks? May I volunteer for the job? I use similar techniques to manage my client data files and it’s simple and effective, but not difficult.
By the way—and this might be a bit too crude in multi-user environments—file version control is as simple as appending a number to your file name during development. Each time you crank on a significant revision of a file (plenty of edits), do a Save-As and add an increment to the file name before doing so. The largest number is always the most current revision. Before moving to production you can use the same method to get rid of the version number if you like (in a new directory for “production”). This stuff can be controlled easily by the conscientious application by the user. In fact, I apply this principle to whole projects as well as the parts within the project by naming the most current project revision by the date (such as 091211 plus a descriptive name like “prototype2″). The current revision directory lists itself automatically at the bottom of the pile—plus I’ve got a history of the product’s development. Since hard drive space costs between “free” and “cheap”, this seems to work quite well.
Mine goes to 11…
1. Improve the auto-formatting of drawings so that dimensions don’t turn into a convoluted mess. You spend as much time making the drawing look nice as you do creating the original model. I may as well go back to paper and pencil.
2. More control over line weights. Some can be easily changed, some are impossible to change. Why the thick lines for basic sketches??
3. Faster better Photoworks rendering. It’s so slow it’s a joke. should have a choice of file outputs. Colors and shading are inconsistent. Photoshop is a joy to use in comparison.
4. Rewrite the Help section. It’s mostly useless. Some features aren’t even mentioned.
5. Better crash recovery and fixing of corrupt files. Often have to start over.
6. Drawing properties (for prints) are in too many different places. Takes time to hunt things down when you need to modify a print.
7. SW lets you create beautiful parts that are impossible to manufacture, but that’s OK for design studies or concepts. How about a real-world mode where you create a part and play by the rules based on the intended method of manufacture, i.e. machined part, casting, basic sheetmetal, drawn sheetmetal, plastic molding, tubing, wire, etc.
8. More powerful sketching tools. Popular desktop publishing and drawing programs have more powerful sketching tools than SW. (for example, allow merge options for shapes) Allow more copy and paste of design elements.
9. The crippled student version of SW is a real turnoff and causes maximum frustration. Some features don’t work, but no way know what they are til you try them. At least publicize which features don’t work instead of lying on the SW website that it is “full-featured”.
10. Cut the price. For something so convoluted and buggy, it’s overpriced. I guess it has to be because the required technical support system is expensive to maintain.
11. Advanced mates could use a huge improvement. Angle limits are tedious to do, there should be more mtypes of mechanical mates.
These are just my opinions as a fairly new user. Sorry if I upset any SW lovers.