If you haven’t heard by now (and if you haven’t, where have you been?), earlier this week Josh Mings posted an article about an announcement SolidWorks made to VAR’s: as of SolidWorks 2010 Service Pack 4, that they would begin aggressively enforcing their policy of not allowing users access to service packs if they are not on subscription maintenance.
To get more clarification on this issue, Devon Sowell has scheduled an interview with Rich Welch, SolidWorks Vice President of Customer Services, next Tuesday, April 13, 2010 covering “SolidWorks Subscription Maintenance, Service …

A recent comment on my post on my favorite improvements in SolidWorks 2010 reminded me of an issue I have with what was one of my most favorite improvements: Drawing Center Mark Improvements.
When this feature improvement was first announced and I saw it demoed, I was very excited. My workflow has always been to add center marks, and then dimension to them, as dimensioning to the holes would not allow the dimension witness lines to display correctly with the center marks in place. And I occasionally had issues when …

Jon Hirschtick shows off his yo-yo skills at the Tuesday night special event:

The yo-yo belongs to Joshua Updyke, an Associate Engineer for Xpresso.  (Ricky Jordan also had a try, and it turns out that he is quite adept with a yo-yo, too!)

James Cameron answers questions from the press corps after the SolidWorks World 2010 General Session on Tuesday, February 2, 2010.

DISCLOSURE:  DS SolidWorks Corp paid for my conference fee, lodging, and some meals.

At the start of the SolidWorks World 2010 General Session this morning, there were several computers on a table.  A netbook, a regular monitor, what looked to be a Wacom tablet, and some big monitor with a cloth draped around the back.  I thought to myself, “That looks like a Mac…”.
One of the cries from some of the users here lately has been about porting SolidWorks to the Mac (and also Linux).  Could it be that SolidWorks was going to announce ports to other operating systems?
As it turns out, …

SolidWorks 2010 has many improvements and new features that can help engineers and designers create and documents their designs more efficiently.  As is often the case in life, it’s the small things that matter, and small, simple improvements can make a big difference when designing or detailing a design.
SolidWorks seemed to have spent more time this go-around on polishing rough edges and speeding things up.  The themes for this release were user experience, reliability, and performance.
Below I have listed just a few of my favorite improvements in SolidWorks 2010 …

If you haven’t already heard, SolidWorks graciously hosted some of the bloggers at SolidWorks Headquarters in Concord a couple of weeks ago.  The main purpose of the event was to give us, as SolidWorks users in our day jobs, a guided hands-on tour through the new upcoming 2010 release.  And after the morass that was the SolidWorks 2009 Hands-On press event in Barcelona last year, they thought it more prudent to do a hands-on event just for the bloggers.
Now there has been a lot of flak thrown around because …

If you are interested in participating in SolidWorks usability testing, check out the post on the SolidWorks Blog for details.  They are looking for folks from all skill levels to do exploratory, free-form usability test on development builds of SolidWorks.
Most of the time, the tests are done online, and you will get to see possible new functionality and have input on the direction of the software!  Sign-up is free and all you have to do to sign up is fill out a short survey.
Image courtesy chabster.
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