There were a lot of exciting announcements at day 1 of SolidWorks World 2013. Two product announcements included My.SolidWorks.com (now in Beta) and the impending Mechanical Conceptual. These are already be very well covered by many other sources, so I’m not going into detail about them yet. If you would like more detail about these, the general session is viewable on SolidWorks Blog right now.
The surprize guests were Art Thompson & Jon Wells, engineers that worked on the Red Bull Srtatos jump. Every time I see that video of Felix Baumgartner jumping out of the capsule, I cringe. Thompson talked about project planning was several years to prepare.
My breakout session, Create “Super” Drawing Templates, didn’t go as planned. The power went out twice at the podium, (once at the start, and once while I was presenting). It is really hard to perform a software demonstration without power to your computer, projectors and microphone. I quickly recovered by turning the format into a question and answer advice and information session while the technicians worked to fix the problem. Eventually, I did get power back and continued the presentation. I was happy to have several attendees tell me later I did a great job adjusting to the abrupt interruption of my presentation. Even though I didn’t get to finish my presentation, I hope everyone left with enough information to find some benefit in what was shown.