SolidWorks Santa: pick your Top 10 wish list items
What do you wish for from SolidWorks Santa? You might not get it if you never ask for it. Instead, you’re gonna get some wacky set of zero radius fillets or command line enhancements if you don’t ask for what you really want.
So many great ideas came in comments to the last post that I had to accumulate a bunch of what I see as valid general requests, and set this up as a vote. There are still a few folks with highly niche ideas. I don’t doubt that people really need those things, but what I’m looking to do here is prove that we can come up with realistic mainstream enhancement requests that a lot of people agree on rather than letting special interests take over. I love the surfacing and spline stuff, but it doesn’t really fit with the general interest theme. Lets see how many of these make it onto the SolidWorks World 2010 voting.
Anyway, you can vote for 10 different items. I’d like to see a lot of participation on this vote, let’s try to get over 200 people to take the poll. Get all your coworkers and user group members to vote too.
Vote for your top 10 enhancement requests
- More stability (60%, 120 Votes)
- When deleting a parent feature, give option to dangle all children (56%, 111 Votes)
- ESC IMMEDIATELY returns control of the interface (41%, 82 Votes)
- Full version compatibility (38%, 76 Votes)
- Place a rebuild freeze marker in the tree to prevent rebuilds (37%, 74 Votes)
- Less system overhead (better memory and dll load management) (36%, 71 Votes)
- Faster rebuilds (34%, 67 Votes)
- All service packs delivered for free (34%, 67 Votes)
- Dump OpenGL - use DirectX for cheaper and more stable video performance (30%, 60 Votes)
- Equations, including in the Modify box, Modify remembers expressions, and can use variable names (29%, 57 Votes)
- Enable details, breaks, broken out views, sections, crops, etc. for ALL types of views (27%, 53 Votes)
- Display relationships between parts in assemblies graphically (25%, 50 Votes)
- Complete and illustrated documentation (24%, 48 Votes)
- Read Catia files directly (24%, 47 Votes)
- Make training books available without taking the class from VAR (23%, 46 Votes)
- Fix the bugs volunteers report in Beta before releasing sp0 (23%, 46 Votes)
- Flexible subassemblies to work more reliably (23%, 46 Votes)
- Fix Toolbox (static files and McMaster part numbers) (22%, 43 Votes)
- Give more detailed options for support/subscription, including options that don't require VARs (20%, 40 Votes)
- Flatten single and double curvature surfaces (19%, 38 Votes)
- More descriptive error messages (18%, 36 Votes)
- Make everything configurable, and all values should be accessible by double click (18%, 35 Votes)
- Text/annotation formatting that works everywhere the same way (17%, 33 Votes)
- Create an option for flexible parts (16%, 31 Votes)
- Stop changing the interface just to do it - reserve that for really good ideas that you get a high level of agreement on (15%, 30 Votes)
- Conic sketch entities and fillet section options (14%, 28 Votes)
- More assembly feature options (cut with loft/sweep/body/etc.) (14%, 27 Votes)
- Parametric CG as reference geometry feature type for parts and assemblies (14%, 27 Votes)
- Animation SUCKS worse than ever. Please fix it and allow some simple cases to work properly. (13%, 26 Votes)
- FeatureManager to allow linear display of features (12%, 24 Votes)
- Allow breaks in drawing views at user definable angles (11%, 21 Votes)
- Photoworks, Photoworks2, Photoview, RealView... geez, enough already. people have to use this software while you keep tinkering with it. I'll just use Inventor until you finish. (11%, 21 Votes)
- Native Macintosh support (10%, 19 Votes)
- Save files in compressed format (8%, 15 Votes)
- Offer a basic stripped down parts-assemblies-drawings version (7%, 14 Votes)
- With any new interface element, ALWAYS include the option to turn it off (7%, 14 Votes)
- Reorder groups of features not in folders (7%, 14 Votes)
- Automatically contrasting background/text (-737%, 5 Votes)
Total Voters: 200
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lol u can only vote for 1 thing at a time. and then that’s your vote. may need to look into that…
Um, yeah. 7 voters, and 7 votes cast, total. Do over, eh?
Ok, fixed the 1 vote thing, you should be able to vote for 10 now. and 7 votes within an hour of the post going up is not an utter failure.
I’d have thought documentation would be coming out higher. Guess people have gotten used to figuring out things on their own.
Unfortunately, nobody (including me) asked for the interface to have a maximum lag of 500 ms, regardless of document complexity. Dunno why I didn’t think of that, it’s one of my biggest peeves.
Interesting trends so far.
With these polls, is it possible to prevent viewing the results before voting?
Being able to view the results before submitting, could influence a voters selections.
DOH! I’m with you on that, Dale–and forgot to mention it previously. The text/dimension input lag is unacceptable! Why have any lag at all? It’s text entry! How about a maximum lag of 10ms? I guarantee my system can handle it. Do it all the time while typing in other applications.
A feature I would like to see in SoildWorks is the equivalent of Pro-E’s “Evaluate Feature” to calculate the length of a curve. It is discussed on this link: https://forum.solidworks.com/message/132323#132323
Another feature I would like to see an equivalent in SW is Pro-E’s Variable Section Sweep (VSS) w/ Trajpar equations as discussed in this link: https://forum.solidworks.com/message/96730#96730 It could be done by enhancing the existing sweep or loft function in SW.
I suspect Matt really could have asked us to list 25 wishes each and it still wouldn’t be enough to reward our good behaviour during the year.
Still the SW elves ought to be happy. They will have guaranteed employment until next Xmas but won’t be so desperately overworked they need to beat the zombie bloggers who do the gift wrapping.
Unfortunately some of the stuff I asked for is going to fall off the doable presents list again.
Either the reindeer are going to refuse to carry dangerous goods or Santa’s going to make a substitution with a bulk purchase.
Still Santa will do the best he can in difficult times…
Actually I’m going to be optomistic and hang out a bigger stocking than usual.
I hear Tiger Woods has had all his Xmases come at once and I wouldnt want Santa to have to take unused stuff home
My biggest pet peeve (besides SP0 always being such crap) is you can’t do fillets/chamfers in an assembly. That’s totally an artificial limitation. You can’t even do a boolean combine in an assembly to fake it…
yes, we do a lot of M/C and grind operations on assemblies here…
Is this possible though: “Flatten single and double curvature surfaces”?
It’s like a world map, won’t it always be distorted?
Either way, my number 1 vote go to the conics.
How about a “Replace Entity” option in sketcher? Nothing beats having a line change to an arc (or vice versa) and having to redefine all of the features that referenced it later in the model!
This kind of flat vote does not reveal the top two or three items for users. The top two for me are: stability and backward compatibility.
@Rick McWilliams
Yeah, I kind of debated a weighted system, but what I really wanted to see was what a large number of people were interested in, not what people were fanatically interested in. There were about 40 good ideas on the list, so to get 10, you had to eliminate a lot of good ideas. The fact that people picked the best of the best I think helps us see what ideas the largest number of us thought should be in the top 10, not what we felt most passionately about. I have a feeling that the SolidWorks polls tend to allow very strong feelings to override numbers.
I don’t know, I’m not a statistician or a pollster (or a web programmer either), so even though this poll is probably imperfect, and some of my choices are not showing up where I think they should, I think its still useful, just to say that most people think these items are important enough to be in the top 10.
still, your items show on the list as #2 and #4, which as far as this kind of severely non-scientific poll goes, is pretty dang close to #1 and #2.
Question: does the API allow you to do things to the existing UI layout or extend functionality?
For instance if I wanted to create an add-in to replace the boundary feature UI or to enhance curve driven patterns is that feasible? allowed? need to be licensed?
If SW was open source you could modify stuff as you wanted without having to wait and people could share the code around…
I guess add-ins could be open source??
BTW anyone like to comment on the pace of development? for some time I have been thinking that considering their resources SW dev is kind of slow…
@Neil
Dude, you’re on the wrong blog for API questions.
check the blog roll for LennyWorks, extensible cad, Angels Six.
@matt
having a good day are we?
Great blog, the first SW blog I’ve ever joined! Love the top 10 list, go get ‘em!
I am not too sure if I should post it here or in the other blog post, but I have been putting together a list of features that I see as some basic things, as well as some niche things that would be very nice to have in SolidWorks. I caveate this with the fact that I have to do a lot of top down designing working with complex curvature.
-Have a Sketch and plane Folder similar to the solids and surfaces folder. I cannot tell you how many times I have had to go through searching for a sketch to reuse for another feature and spend a few minutes looking for it. Also similar with the planes, there are times that I have many planes and have to turn a few off while leaving others on. I then forget about some of the ones that I have turned off, and now and again I duplicate my planes because I forgot that one was hidden.
-Scale sketches in differing percentages in x and y (stretch function does not work well for many situations). Perhaps this is a niche thing, but if you have an airfoil that needs to be 15% thick and was 10%, the only ways of getting the desired result are either reimporting the points (my next request) modifying the text file outside of SolidWorks, or lofting the solid, then scaling the solid in y. I do not understand how the program has the ability to do this with a solid (Direct editing which SolidWorks usually does not seem to be a big fan of) and not a sketch (the basis of parametric modeling).
-Add a feature that allows for points to be imported in to SolidWorks. It would be easy, all you have to do is in the Insert-Curve-Through x,y,z points is add an option to not spline the curve through the points. Once again may be a bit niche, but seems to be a very simple add-in.
-Speaking of points, ever try to project a point other than normal to the surface? Why can I not project a point along a vector? Seems that would be much simpler than having to calculate a normal projection of the point.
-Getting a little less niche, but related to the last requested feature is for the hole wizard. If I want to place a hole for a fastener (think countersunk) on a curves surface that is not normal to the surface (it may not seem that common, but I tend to have to do this at least once a week) I need to go through a convoluted method that not even my VAR could help me on. Why not just have a method to put in a hole along a vector as an option. Also please make some method for it to actually cut out the entire surface above the countersunk hole (it usually leaves little slivers of a surface when placed other than normal to the face surface). Also allow for counterbores to be defined by vectors and minimum distances from either face. (This one probably is a bit more difficult than the others to implement).
-Also this goes to customization; I love how I can right click on an icon in windows and there is an option to make a shortcut, and then I can drag that to any other menu I want. This would be much easier than having to search through all the icons in the customization box, and then not being able to find it.
-Allow for some shortcut letters to be reused depending on the operation being done. Example pressing F would allow me to do a fillet in sketching, surfacing, and solids. This seems simple to do as objects such as 3D Connexion’s space mice can have buttons automatically reassign depending on the operation environment.
-Patterning planes/sketches. There are times that this would be very handy, especially when the objects being patterned are very similar, but each one is unique, not allowing for the final part to be patterned.
-Revolve a 3d sketch. I would even be fine if there were limitations to this such as the lines had to be planar, or noncomplex splines, but without this, it makes doing cutouts for control surfaces pretty hard (I usually have to go into Keycreator to get this accomplished).
-Reorrienting the master coord system without having to add in another coord system. Most of the models that I work with have the XY plane as the proper top plane, but Solidworks has it as the front plane.
-The day that in context modeling becomes as easy as multibody modeling I will start to do it, until then I avoid it like the plague. In context assembly modeling is a resource hog, and causes frequent crashes.
-Last but not least Boolean operations with assemblies. Designing sometimes can be such a pain without this. Yes there are work arounds, but they are pain.
-Oops one more (my work mate was just cursing at the computer and reminded me). Allow me to adjust the faceting with more control. There are times that you are far from hardware limited, yet the piece looks so far from actual contour that you cannot get any meaningful information from what you are looking at.
Adam
@Kyle
Couldn’t you save the assembly as a part, then fillet the part?