Tuesday Two: saves lives, makes lives

Tuesday Two

Sipuleucel-T is new treatment from Dendreon that uses the body’s own immune system to fight prostate cancer.   Each dose is personalized by consisting of the patient’s own immune cells that have been trained to seek and attack prostate cancer cells.

Who knew this was even an issue.  Broken lobster traps sometimes break free from tethers and wash up on beaches and riverfront properties in Maine.  Too expensive and bulky to haul off, Kim Boehm created the Trapzilla as a convenient way to compact the traps to a manageable size.

 

Epoch fail

The Wedding Countdown Bra puts a clock on a bra to let….well, I’m not really sure what the countdown supposed to encourage.  It signifies the countdown to when the wedding ring is placed on the wearer’s finger.  Ironically, press vidoes and images all show the model with an engagement ring instead.  Nothing says “Marry me!” more than a countdown to wedding bells attached to a bra.

New in SolidWorks 2012: Unit of Measure

A common request from users has been to provide a quicker method to change a document’s unit of measure.  Previously, the only out-of-the-box method was through the Document Properties window, which involves a whole series of clicks and mouse movement.  In SolidWorks 2012, units of measure can now be changed via a pop up menu in the status bar (bottom right of the SolidWorks window). 

Of course, more refined control is still available in the Document Properties.  This area is now easy to access as one of the options in the unit of measure pop up menu.

(If your status bar is hidden, you can display it going to View pulldown menu>Status Bar (near the bottom of the list)

Blogroll links (mid-right-most menu)

When you have a chance, I recommend going through the SolidWorks blogroll in the  middle portion of the far right menu bar of SolidWorks Legion. 

I keep the links updated to make sure that it mostly contains relatively active blogs that apply to SolidWorks users in some way or another.   My general guideline for this list is blogs that haven’t been updated in about 18 months are removed.  I’ll leave up some sites longer if there’s good content that can still be useful.  For the most part, the links are actively (often very actively) updated.

Why am I inviting visitors to leave my site by clicking on links to other sites?  The same reason I do this blogging thing.  To provide a useful resource to SolidWorks users.  This applies to Lorono’s SolidWorks Resources site too, which I (and others) still update as well. 

I hope you enjoy the resources found on all these sites!

New in SolidWorks 2012: Equations

Equations is, by far, my favorite update in SolidWorks 2012.  The interface has been totally redesigned (and UI very very is important).   My favorite new function with Equations is that we now have the option to include extremely simple equations directly to driving dimensions.  It makes me happy that I can now type “1 + 1” into a dimension field and have it remain as 1 + 1 instead of collapsing to its evaluated value of 2.

 

To add equations directly to dimension text fields, just add an equal sign at the start the field.  The Equation “E” then shows up next to the dimension text field. 

One current drawback that I did notice is that once you enter equation mode, you can no longer specify units of measure within the dimension text field.  However, you can still use non-persistent equations; just leave off the equal sign.  These will continue to behave as they always have (including the usage of units of measure). 

OK, there’s a lot more going on with Equations.  I cannot do justice to the topic in a a brief overview.  I’ll cover a couple of basic items.  I sincerely suggest that everyone look up the What’s New for Equations to get a real taste for the improvements.  The new Equations capabilities are an important addition to SolidWorks in 2012.

Some other Equations enhancements of note

The updated Equations View supports new functionality.  Equations within this view can be sorted and filtered.  There is a new selection available called “Automatic solve order”.   In previous versions of SolidWorks, if equations broke due to references shifting around or any number of other reasons, you had to move the equations around in a very manual process.  “Automatic solve order” will automatically detect dependencies within all of the equations and reorder them accordingly! 

Equations and global variables can now be suppressed from all views for troubleshooting and other purposes.  Additionally, they can be applied to selected configurations, right from the Equations View dialog window by RMB clicking them and choosing Suppress and the Specify Configurations.

Oh, one more cool thing to squeeze in at the end: Equations dialog box now allows the selection of mutiple rows to perform the same task on all selected equations.  CTRL and SHIFT keys function normally to multi-section rows.

Senseless Sunday: Now that tittle is heavy!

  1. A giraffe heart weighs about 24 pounds.
  2. Plastic sheaths at each end of a shoe lace are called aglets.
  3. The world’s largest baseball bat is 120 feet long. It weighs 68,000 pounds.
  4. Pat Welsh was the voice of E.T. in the movie E.T. the Extra-terrestrial
  5. That dot over the lowercase j and i is called a tittle.

New in SolidWorks 2012: User interface improvements

This is the first in a series of articles that will cover *some* highlights of new functions added in SolidWorks 2012.  Just as a matter of a reminder, I am an employee of Dassault Systemes.  However, what I’m doing here is talking about improvements that interest me.  User Interface isn’t the most exciting topic to start with.  However, these are good improvements (a couple of which are a long time coming).

Recent Documents

In a recent release, Recent Documents window (accessed via File pulldown menu>Browse Recent Documents… or by pressing the letter R on out-of-the-box installs) was drastically improved with a more accessible interface.  There’s been several minor improvements in SolidWorks 2012.  The one that impressed me the most is the addition of a pin that allows you to pin a document onto the Recent Documents window.   No matter how many other documents come and go, your pinned document will remain on the Recent Documents list until you unpin it.  No matter where you originally pin your document in Recent Documents window, pinned documents automatically reposition themselves to the top-most/left-most available position to allow for best discoverability.

Additionally, the pin function is also available on the list of recent documents in the File pulldown menu itself.  Pinned documents here are the same as in the Recent Documents window. 

 

 

Search Commands

Search Commands is a new tool that allows you to nearly instantly type in the name of a command in order to find and run it.  The concept is kind of a throwback to the old days with command line driven CAD.  However, the implementation in SolidWorks provides helpful results that navigate through the CommandManager as choose your command.

Search Commands may be activated in a number of ways, but the quickest out-of-the-box method is the S-Key.  Yup, the S-Key has just been made more powerful with the added function of activating Search Commands tool.  S-Key still brings up the Shortcut bar.  The difference is that now you can just start typing the name of the command for which you are searching.

Additionally, you can assign shortcuts to Search Commands so that tools can now be run with a series of keystrokes instead of being limited to single keystrokes or CTRL/SHIFT/ALT combinations.

Spanning and Fitting to Displays (real multiple monitor support is finally here!)

You can now control how SolidWorks displays itself and individual documents across multiple monitors in a useful manner.   The new span option works with single monitors just as well too.

 

With two monitors, this option knows how to place two documents so that each on fills one of the two screens.  It even knows how to handle two monitors of difference sizes and resolutions where the SolidWorks window may not fill both equally.  Spanning Displays is a big useability improvement for those of us that frequently need more than one document open.