My 1st (very brief) SWW

After 10 years of using SolidWorks, I attended SWW10 in Anaheim for the first time. But, I can only get as far as the Partner Pavilion. For the tenth year, my employer could not pay for me to attend. http://www.solidworks.com/swworld/2580_ENU_HTML.htm

Luckily I live here in Orange County and could attend for a few hours.

A lot of the companies I have seen or used before, but a few were new to me. None really caught my attention except for Solido. http://www.solido3d.com/

My hope for the past several years was to someday see the price of 3D printing drop. It seems Solido has broken the mold. They are also eco friendly by using a rolled mylar –looking material into the machine and creating parts based on the sheet thickness. The parts were comparable to other 3D printers, at a lower cost! I past their info to my boss…

Another company that caught my, not because of the new touch screen fad, but because of the hardware that was used. SolidWorks, Microsoft (Surface), and Identity Mine teamed up to create a UI ‘sketcher’ to work with SolidWorks models by the touch of the hand on a flat table.

Some of the technology was interesting, although it has been around for a couple years, but the templates that were used to create ‘buttons’ were cheesy and the touch screen not very clear to me. http://www.identitymine.com/Products/SurfaceSkins.aspx

The biggest downfall for me was the large screen sitting horizontal, or flat. I would be sitting on my local chiropractor’s table getting my neck straightened every week after sitting on a uncomfortable stool all day looking down onto a flat table. IMO, poor design. It should rise similar to the old drafting tables (some of us remember those, right?) so that the screen was more eye level.

Thanks to Matt for a fun time and helping me meet up with some other online friends. It was great finally putting a face to a screen name.

Author: ctopher

Home town: Cypress, California, USA Married since Jan '87, 3 kids (teens) View all posts by ctopher