Review of SolidWorks and SolidWorks related products.
mPhase’s superhydrophobic porous silicon membrane nanotechnology based battery is much smaller and lasts longer traditional batteries.
Let’s replace off-shore oil rigs with off-shore wind farms! Many Siemens AG wind turbines are found the Lillgrund Wind Farm, located about 10 km off the coast of southern Sweden.
3DVia Composer demonstrations have been all the rage at official SolidWorks and VAR events over the past year or so. I’m getting quite familiar with 3DVia Composer just from the demos (I’ve never used it). The more I see it, the more I realize just how much SolidWorks lacks in how it handles assemblies.
At one time, there was a function in SolidWorks that would allow the user to auto-explode their assembly. The problem with this function is that it never worked well enough to be of much use. As a result, the auto-explode function is not longer included in SolidWorks.
In demo after demo of 3DVia Composer, I see a milieu were assemblies are exploded and rearranged with superb ease. This same ease should be available in SolidWorks assemblies!
Examples of 3DVia functions that should be added to SolidWorks assembly mode.
One new function in 3DVia Composer that should be added to SolidWorks drawing mode is the Magnet Line. This allows the user to place one line (Magnet Line) on the drawing, then automatically attach to it a whole series of balloons so that they all are centered on that line. The Magnet Line can then be moved around at any angle. Regardless to the angle, all of the balloons remained aligned to each other by their common connection to the Magnet Line.
In fact, maybe Magnet Line shouldn’t be limited to just aligning balloons. Maybe it can be used to align any type of annotations. Maybe the Magnet Line can be made to affect annotations by their start, end or centers. If sophisticated enough, maybe the Magnet Line can completely replace the outdated MS-Office style alignment tools now available in SolidWorks drawing mode.
I don’t normally post articles on holidays. This one is just a short notice that I’ve added a synopsis of all my articles about the 3DConnexion SpacePilot PRO as a single review on epinions.com, which is a bit more detailed than my review on Amazon.com. (The standards are a lot higher for reviews on epinions.) The epinions review doesn’t cover every detail from my long list of articles about this product, though hopefully it covers enough.
Not that long ago, a new free .dwg 2D editor was public beta released by Dassault Systemes called Draftsight (download it for free here). The fact that this application is free signals a shift in the 2D CAD industry.
According to Fielder Hiss of SolidWorks Corp (a Dassault Systemes subsidiarity), many customers still have the need for 2D. He stated that the free Draftsight application will allow these customers to free up investments for 3D. He also commented that 70% of Draftsight downloaders told others about it and “90% loved it.” With 45,000 installs to-date (mostly during the traditionally slow month of August), the adoption rate is impressive.
Adjoined to Draftsight is a growing online community that will participate in the application’s use, development and support. The users are given direct input via another technology announced by Dassault Systemes also announced in June 2010, called SwYm (See What You Mean). SwYm allows Dassault Systemes to establish a strong online community backbone for Draftsight users.
Though it is free, DraftSight is not offered as open source. Nor is it offered under a true freemium marketing model. Dassault Systemes is taking a different path.
Funding for the development of DraftSight will come in the form of paid add-ons and services. A yearly maintenance fee covers the following:
Even though Draftsight is still in public beta release, Dassault Systemes reports that some customers have already purchased the additional services.
According to Arron Kelly of Dassault Systems, hundreds of “AutoLISP” functions are already available in Draftsight’s own supported LISP. “It’s not a 1 for 1”, he states. He makes clear that the list of LISP functions will grow based on community input.
I personally would like to see some fundamental LISP functions supported without a service fee. Even some standard functions in AutoCAD started out as customer generated LISP routines. Not providing some portion of Draftsight’s LISP for free may hinder development of Draftsight itself.
Draftsight seems to hit the 2D CAD industry hard. Offering a free alternative to over-priced 2D CAD competitors might be one of the smartest things that Dassualt Systemes does in 2010. Hopefully this time next year, Dassault Systemes will be able to brag about a massive rate of users who convert to Draftsight.
The user interface in SolidWorks Enterprise PDM 2011 is getting some much needed, though incremental, improvement.
All Enterprise PDM commands are now grouped into four menus that appear just above the file view pane in SolidWorks and Windows Explorer. The advantage of this change is that the shortcut menu (RMB click) is now somewhat shorter. The most frequently used commands are still available in the shortcut menu. Hopefully, this menu reorganization will help clean up the notoriously lengthy shortcut menu of previous Enterprise PDM versions.
For example, Check in and Check out functions are now available within the Actions pulldown menu, yet are still also available in the shortcut menu. Take your pick!
The new pulldown menus and the shortcut menus are still context sensitive, in that the commands which are available still depend on user selection.
SolidWorks 2011 promises to have better performance and reliability in a few areas. This is a topic that sometimes is not well represented in the What’s New file that are included with SolidWorks products. However, the improvements are still very important.
One area of improvement is better memory management. Previous versions tend to eat up more memory as a SolidWorks session remains open and active in Windows. Though this tendency is not completely gone, SolidWorks 2011 is reported to be better at releasing memory when closing or suppressing parts and files. According to Jeremy Regnerus of SolidWorks Corp, users should be able to keep SolidWorks 2011 open longer and with more stability than previous versions. Generally speaking, SolidWorks seems to have taken major strides in stability over the past couple of years.
To to a better job of tracking issues when they do arise (such as crashes), performance logs will now be more comprehensive to give SolidWorks support better information to determine the cause of the problem.
Regnerus also brags about improvements to SolidWorks Simulation performance. He stated that users should see a 20% faster solve time with 15 to 20% fewer number of equations. Additionally, multicore CPU use will allow Simulation to run single simulations much faster.
