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 not much can be said of the upcoming version, since it is still under Beta wraps.  We didn’t have to sign NDA’s; but as far as I know, all of the bloggers that attended are signed up for Beta, and as such, bound by the accompanying NDA.

Besides the hands-on, there was also a lunch meeting with CEO Jeff Ray, a meeting with SolidWorks founder Jon Hirschtick, a presentation on SolidWorks Sustainability by Rick Chin and Jeremy Regenerus, and Director of Worldwide Education Markets Marie Planchard.  The visit was also a chance to allow us to ask questions of various members of the design team.  And SolidWorks also treated us to dinner and a few laps at F1 Boston (those were the fastest track carts I’ve ever drove!).

Since not much of SolidWorks 2010 can be talked about, except what has already been revealed, I though that I would post about the notes I took about some interesting stuff that wasn’t under NDA.

SOLIDWORKS SUSTAINABILITY

Rick joined us on the phone for a quick run-down of SolidWorks Sustainability.  I have already posted an interview with Rick on this, so I’ll just mention again that even if you do not care about sustainable design, this tool can still come in handy if only because of the Find Similar Material tool included.

SOLIDWORKS LABS

Bob Miner stood in for William Doll and talked to us about SolidWorks Labs.  (I also have an interview with Bill posted, if you haven’t seen it.)  This was mostly a Q&A session.  The question I had was if Treehouse was ever going to be able to open existing files (alluding to information I received from Bill at SolidWorks World 2009), and the response we got was “No comment…”, albeit with a grin…

EDUCATION

Marie Planchard met with us and talked about the education initiatives at SolidWorks.  To see someone as passionate as her about reaching out to young people of all ages is invigorating!  The goal is to get them involved early on in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM).

SolidWorks has lots of resources available to both educators and students.  Information on SolidWorks education and curriculum, as well as how to buy software can be found here.  There are also several resources available to educators, as well as the SolidWorks Teacher Blog, that can help one in teaching SolidWorks.  (If you are a parent, you should definitely check out the Teacher Blog!  There are lot’s of neat things to do with your kids and SolidWorks!)

LUNCH WITH JEFF RAY

We broke for lunch and met with SolidWorks CEO Jeff Ray.  Jeff fielded questions covering a wide variety of subjects from everyone.

One topic was what effect the current economic downturn was having on the company.  Jeff said that SolidWorks was taking the chance to evaluate their processes and make changes if needed, and that they were continuing to plan and innovate for the future.

When I broached the question of subscription; if SolidWorks was looking at making any changes based on the discussion that has occurred in the recent past in various places online; Jeff replied that they had no plans to change the way subscriptions work and no tiered pricing, but instead were focusing on adding more value for subscription customers.  I asked about breaking support out of the subscription, and was told that SolidWorks has implemented a new scoring system for VAR support.  He mentioned that several VAR’s were unhappy about this (natch), but that it was something that needed to be done to address customer satisfaction.

TALKING WITH JON HIRSCHTICK

After lunch, we had a short meeting with Jon Hirschtick and he talked about some of the things that had piqued his interest since he spoke at SolidWorks World.  His top 5 interests were:

• Hosted Computing (SaaS)
• Hardware Devices
• Video Game Technology
• Open Source Technology
• 3D Printing

He has since been looking into green technology, online backup, and solidstate drives.  He has also been researching collaboration and some things to look at in rearchitecting SolidWorks.  He spoke of a “middle ground” in collaboration using generic tools that are not incorporated into SolidWorks (such as Vuuch and SolidJott).  He also surmised that GoToMeeting will be used much more due to the economy and travel costs.

Jon also mentioned that he has been looking into projector technology and display sizes and suggested a book, The Visual Display of Qualitative Information by Edward R. Tufte.  And lastly, he has been looking into digital security and digital rights management (DRM).

USER EXPERIENCE

Several members of the User Experience Group met with us and explained the purpose of this important group and some of the changes that had recently taken place.  This seems to be a growing group, as they have rolled in the documentation and language groups.  The User Experience Group handles all user-facing interfaces from R&D.  Having one group for oversight on these multiple interfaces will hopefully streamline the development of SolidWorks.

Jim “Wilkie” Wilkinson, User Group Experience Director, talked about their design process consisting of discovery and research, conceptual design, and then final design.

3D CONTENTCENTRAL

Lastly, we had a quick overview of the new 3D ContentCentral. There are many new features, including working with suppliers to enable publishing to their own site and supplier services enabling self-servicing of the content software.

We were told that through their research, they discovered:

• users want more supplier content
• suppliers want engineers to use their models
• suppliers want to publish their own content

SUMMARY

I think that there was some interesting and useful information shared in this meeting, and hopefully I was able to convey some of it to you.  It is difficult being able to hear and see things, yet unable to write about them.  But if you haven’t been able to participate in the Beta and are just Jones’ing for a SolidWorks 2010 fix, I suspect you haven’t long to wait until information starts flowing in the next week or so…

Images courtesy Gabi and Jason.

In the interest of full disclosure, SolidWorks provided me with airfare, lodging, food, entertainment, and some swag.

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.

Mike Puckett has posted that the upcoming SolidWorks 2010 Beta test will be starting up within the next two weeks.  To participate, simply go to the SolidWorks Beta Program page and follow the directions.

Please note that you will need to have access to the SolidWorks Customer Portal in order to participate.  This is your chance to see what’s new in the upcoming version, get a jump start on any migration issues, and to help SolidWorks by reporting any issues that you may have.

Are you going to be participating in the Beta Program?  Let us know!

Now thru 5:00PM EST Friday, June 5, 2009, TechSmith is offering a free license of their screen capturing and image editing program SnagIt.  Now this offer is for an older version (7.2.5) that will not work under Windows Vista, but by taking advantage of this offering and becoming a registered user, you can secure upgrade pricing to the current version, 9.1.  After installation, you can upgrade to version 9.1 for $24.95 USD, half-off the regular price of $49.95 USD.

To take advantage of this offer, please visit this page.  For information on the latest version of SnagIt 9.1, visit their What’s New page.

Via mCADForums.

Publicly unveiled in late March, OnLive bills itself as “the world’s highest performance Games on Demand service.”  They purportedly have the technology to stream games, including the latest high-end game titles (such as Crysis Warhead and BioShock) to broadband users.  (For a full list of supported games, click here.)

The service will run through the OnLive Microconsole and play on a user’s TV, or can be run directly on a Mac or PC.  The founder, Steve Perlman (of WebTV and Apple’s QuickTime), says, “The first patents expire in 2022, so we have at least 11 years to establish our business before there is a clone.“  Understandably, there has been much skepticism about the claims OnLive is making, but with the support of major game powerhouses such as Electronic Arts, Ubisoft, and Atari, and even NVIDIA, it’s clear that this is a serious venture.

So What Does This Have To Do With SolidWorks?

Well, it stands to reason that if OnLive can get games running in such a way that users will no longer have to purchase the software (or specialty hardware to run them), then who’s to say that the same can’t be done for SolidWorks, or any other app for that matter? Jon Hirschtick even talked about this application as one of his future technology trends in the Tuesday General Session of SolidWorks World 2009 in Orlando, FL, this past February.

If OnLive can get a hardware-intensive game, such as Crysis, up and running online, how hard could it be to get a 3D CAD app, such as SolidWorks, “in the cloud”?  I think this is a very exciting time and this will bring “cloud computing” to a whole new level!  What do you think?

OnLive is currently taking applications for Beta testers (I’ve already signed up!) and is scheduled to go live in Winter 2009.

Have you moved to SolidWorks 2009 yet?  If you haven’t, and need a good reason to do so, then continue reading!

SolidWorks touts the maximum time savings of moving from SolidWorks 2008 to SolidWorks 2009 as 65%.  Is it true?

Well, I have not done any quantitative testing, but I can say that it definitely feels much faster to me; especially in larger assemblies and more complicated parts.  However, a user from our user group did a not-so-scientific test with a representative set of production files, and the results were amazing!

THE TEST

The test was simple:  create a 3-view drawing of a large assembly consisting of 4942 parts.  The results?  It took 3 minutes, 30 seconds in SolidWorks 2008 and - get ready – 45 seconds in SolidWorks 2009!

That is a 4.67X speed increase, or 78.6% faster!

Now, I don’t know how controlled this little experiment was, but that is a very measureable increase in speed!  Have you noticed SolidWorks 2009 is speedier?

If you’re still on SolidWorks 2008 (or earlier), is this enough of an impetus to upgrade?  There is definitely a time savings to be had!

Image credit:  SolidWorks

The proceedings from the SolidWorks World 2009 International User Conference and Exposition in Orlando, Florida, are now live! And things are a little different this year… Based on feedback from previous World’s, SolidWorks has opened up access to a broader audience and captured more media data to share.

CUSTOMER PORTAL USERS REJOICE!

In year’s past, attendees used a unique log-in to access the presentations and files from the conference. This year, SolidWorks is making the proceedings site available to all users with a Customer Portal account. If you do not already have a Customer Portal account, you can create one by visiting the SolidWorks Customer Portal and clicking the link under the “Not a member?” section.

MORE SWW CONTENT & FEATURES!

In addition to the standard presentations and supporting files of previous years, SolidWorks captured video of many of the sessions. These videos are available for streaming from the site. There are also pictures of all the exhibitor booths from the Partner Pavilion. (And remember, all my pictures from the conference, including most of the displays in the Product Design Showcase, are available on my Flickr photostream!)

So, be sure to go to SWW09 proceedings site to access all the SWW goodness. If you have any issues accessing the conference proceedings or have further questions, you can get help by emailing swworldinfo@solidworks.com.

***EDIT***

Some clarification from SolidWorks on the SolidWorks World 2009 proceedings site: 

Login access to content:   Essentially the site is open to anyone who has a customer portal login.    Anyone who went to World will see all of the presentation videos that we recorded.   If you did not attend World we are going to add new video content each week.

We check the e-mail you use to login against a database that we have of e-mails from conference attendees.  (So if your customer portal login uses a different e-mail than the e-mail you used to register for world you won’t get full access (but we’ll fix this case by case)).

Last edited on 03/11/2009 @ 5:10PM CDT.

Daniel Ha, co-founder and CEO of Disqus, and Pete Cashmore, founder of social media guide Mashable, announced today a partnership between Disqus, Mashable, and comment aggregation service uberVU to enable Social Media Comments on the popular Disqus commenting system. Disqus will use uberVU’s technology to scrape the Internet and pull in comments relating to posts.

According to Mashable, the services that will be accessed include Blogger, Digg, Flickr, FriendFeed, Moveable Type, Picasa, Twitter, TypePad, Vimeo, WordPress, and YouTube, with more added over time.  If a post is discussed on any of the above services, those discussions will show up in the Disqus comments of said post.

Additionally, users can choose to send their comments to Twitter by simply checking a box when commenting on a Disqus-enabled blog post.

The new Disqus service can be previewed exclusively at Mashable for the next two weeks, and the general release will follow soon after.

I can’t wait to see this new functionality in action.  It will certainly help consolidate, and possibly further stimulate, the conversation across the web that blog posts sometimes initiate.

Via Disqus Blog and Mashable.

Back in early December, I reported that SolidWorks Labs had unveiled Treehouse, an app that lets you set up a file hierarchy for new assemblies using your templates.  But based on the comments to my article and the responses I saw on Twitter and the app page itself, users were hoping for more functionality, such as opening and modifying existing assembly structures or inserting existing parts or assemblies.

While at SolidWorks World 2009 in Orlando earlier this month, I was able to meet William Doll, Director of SolidWorks Labs.  I mentioned the responses I had heard on my article and also from several coworkers and colleagues.  He told me that the Labs crew has seen the feedback, and are in the process of updating the Treehouse app.

According to Doll, they are hoping to implement the following improvements in the new version:

• Allow opening an existing assembly structure
• Tree icons to contain actual previews of components
• Allow adding existing components to new assembly structures
• Allow adding new and existing components to existing assembly structures

However, Doll said that the next version of Treehouse will not allow modification to existing assembly structure via deleting or moving components.

Doll said the update should be released in the next two months or so.

If you are reading this from the site, you can tell that there have been some major changes around here!  Like several of the other SolidWorks bloggers, I have made the jump and moved my TypePad blog to a WordPress-hosted site.

I want to thank SolidWorks for graciously providing the platform to freely air my missives over the past two years or so and Richard Doyle for getting me involved.  I would also like to thank Patrick Cook and Matthew West for their help and expertise in setting things up and tweaking things here and there.  And thanks to Ricky, Josh, and Matt for their help and suggestions in getting switched over.

Based upon my testing, the RSS feed should remain the same, and all URI’s out there pointing to the old TypePad permalinks should now be redirected to the new WordPress permalinks.  There are still a few issues to work out, such as some images in old posts not showing up all the time, but I will slowly get those links updated.  Also, I have a few issues with the Disqus comments on all previous posts, but hopefully those will be corrected in the coming days.

This is a work in progress, so you will be seeing a few changes from time to time.  I am working on a logo/header, and will probably tweak the CSS colors and whatnot some, if not change to an entirely new theme altogether.

If you notice anything out of whack other than the issues I mentioned above, or have any suggestions, please let me know.

Also, please note that due to the upcoming holidays and getting the new site up and running, CADFanatic’s Tips & Tricks Tuesdays will return after the first of the year, on Tuesday, January 6, 2009.

I’m looking forward to the new site and the new year!  And thanks for reading!